THE ROAD TO BABYLON 207ican and I left Belgrade early and arrived midmorning at Pristina’s Grand
Hotel, where we met with Rugova to review the day’s schedule. Like many
post–Berlin Wall leaders, Rugova was an interesting character, an intellec-
tual, a journalist, and the former chairman of the Kosovo Writers Union.
He wore almost stylish glasses and unkempt, longish brown hair. Rugova
always donned his trademark neck scarf, even in the summer. He looked as
if he could have been a Latin professor from Harvard.
While we were going over the day’s agenda with Rugova in the hotel’s
ground-floor car rental office, overlooking Pristina’s cozy town square, our
Serb driver took the official limo out to be washed, since he would use
it later in the day to ferry Dole to the hotel for the meetings. Mistakenly
believing Dole must have been in the oversized dark American sedan, a
crowd of around ten thousand ethnic Albanians immediately converged
on the square, chanting, “USA! USA!” I asked Rugova if he had organized
this “spontaneous” demonstration. He just shrugged. After we agreed on
the game plan for the day, Rugova promised to return later that afternoon
to meet Senator Dole. Rugova’s driver then transported him back to his
office across town.
The Serbs were not pleased by this grassroots outpouring of pro-
American sentiment by the freedom-craving ethnic Albanian Kosovars,
and they soon surrounded the growing crowd (and our hotel) with armored
personnel carriers and big, well-trained, and well-armed Serb special police
known as specialci. Outside of town, the Serbs also tried to prevent Dole’s
plane from landing, in order to keep him from meeting with Rugova. Pre-
dictably, they did not succeed in keeping this decorated World War II hero
out of Kosovo. By the time Senator Dole arrived later that day under police
escort at the Grand Hotel, demonstrations had broken out across Pristina
and the feared specialci had teargassed, beaten with clubs, and arrested
many of the ethnic Albanian demonstrators.
Understandably fearing he might be arrested and possibly killed at
one of the many specialci checkpoints set up across the city by the now
very angry Serbs, Rugova sent a messenger to say he could not make the
meeting with Dole.
Dole and his Senate colleagues had not traveled all this way to a very
uncomfortable corner of the earth to be stood up, and so they dispatched
me to personally escort Rugova back to the Grand Hotel. The assump-