The fracture zone: a return to the Balkans by Simon Winchester

Author:Simon Winchester
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Europe, Kosovo (Republic), Eastern, General, Former Yugoslav republics, Political Science, Kosovo (Serbia), Balkan Peninsula, History
Publisher: Viking
Published: 1999-12-15T07:30:26.945000+00:00

The frontier with Montenegro is half an hour’s drive from the outskirts of Dubrovnik. From the main road it is possible to see—impossible to avoid, in fact—the zigzag track that was cut up the Dinaric hillside to where the American secretary of commerce, Ron Brown, was killed in a plane crash in the spring of 1996. He had been in a U.S. Air Force Hercules, and according to reports at the time, had flown into the most terrible sudden storm and the pilot, not having the benefit of any navigation aids at the primitive Dubrovnik airfield, had flown his aircraft straight into the mountainside. Brown, along with thirty-four other members of an American trade mission, was killed.

The incident has been mired in argument ever since. Ron Brown was a black man, the highest-ranking of his race in the Clinton administration. He had been under investigation for supposed financial irregularities. And ever since his death there have been suggestions, or claims, that he might have been murdered. (Acting on a report from an air force pathologist that a wound at the top of Brown’s head could have been caused by a gunshot, the NAACP launched an investigation into the circumstances of his death.) A rash of theories, suggesting various kinds of conspiracy, flared up about a year after his death, coincident with the more florid suggestions about President Clinton and his various political problems. But, as with the White House scandals, the suggestions about improprieties surrounding Brown’s sad death quickly faded away. No one talks about the event much anymore, except in Croatia, where they have put up a memorial, and the shepherd who found the wreckage occasionally talks about the crash, and surprises listeners by saying that no, there was no storm, terrible or otherwise, on the March afternoon in question.

The most visible consequence of the tragedy, so far as Croatia itself was concerned, can be seen in the makeup of the fleet of the nation’s small airline. Mr. Brown had hoped that the directors of Croatia Airlines would order Boeing aircraft, and the dispatch of his trade mission was in part to help them make up their minds to do so. But after the accident the line decided not to buy American at all, and if you fly these days from Dubrovnik to Zagreb, or to Rome, you will do so now in a smart new A-340 Airbus, built by a consortium of European manufacturers, in France.

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