The Foreign Service Journal, March 2014

38 MARCH 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL claims to be the cradle of the Macedonian language. Statues of St. Clement, the local monk and patron saint who developed and propagated the Cyrillic alphabet among the Slavs, stand overlooking Lake Ohrid. Cyrillic is based on the Greek alphabet, inserting new characters for complicated diphthongs and other sounds in Old Slavonic that are not present in Greek. It may not matter that Parlichev was born in Ohrid under the Ottoman Empire and considered himself Bulgarian. Macedonia alone has enough history, language and culture to fuel a dozen arguments about the claim to an old poet. Hellenic influence is manifest, and the Turks dominated the Balkans for centuries. The French fought through here during World War I, and German Navy tugs are still sunk at the bottom of Lake Ohrid. The Bulgar- ians predominated for a time and share the Cyrillic alphabet. Macedonia’s large Albanian minority speaks a language that has nothing in common with any other language in Europe. Turks live here too, as do the Roma Gypsies, and both have their own languages that influence the others. None of that deterred Biljana and the brigadier, who argued all afternoon. But by the end of the day, the general was trying to fix Biljana up with his son, a recently commissioned air force officer, on her next trip to Greece. If politics is like playing three-dimensional chess, then Balkan politics is like playing three concurrent games of three- dimensional chess where all the pieces are interchangeable. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the complexity of the region, to take the differences as inherent and unchanging, and conflict as an inevitable outcome of those dissimilarities. But all human conflict is political, and all politics is choice; and with choice, we have control. Playing Three-Dimensional Chess This is captured in a scene in Skopje 70 years ago that West describes in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. She watches as Albanians, Macedonians, Turks and Gypsies all go about their afternoon rituals—walks, dances, prayer, festivals—together but separate in their own customs. Her reverie is interrupted by Gerda, the shrewish wife of her guide Constantine, and the senti- ments expressed are the difference between the hedgehog and the fox, between the cosmopolitan and the pure, between fascism and democracy, between the past and the future: “‘I do not understand you [Gerda said]; you go on saying what a beautiful country this is, and you must know perfectly well that there is no order here, no culture, but only a mishmash of differ- ent peoples who are all quite primitive and low. Why do you do that?’ “[West] said wearily, ‘But it’s precisely because there are so many different peoples that Yugoslavia is so interesting. So many of these peoples have remarkable qualities, and it is fascinating to see whether they can be organized into an orderly state.’ History, like life, cannot be expunged from the landscape. But it can be overcome. The city of Ohrid, on the eastern shore of Lake Ohrid, is a cultural-historical center and summer tourist destination. James Thomas Snyder