Rock And Hard Places Part 14

By the time Feed the Children offer us a lift on a convoy they're running into Bihac, I have heard, and dutifully noted, more batty and preposterous opinions than Lyndon LaRouche's secretary. I have met Croats who claim that the Bosnian government is a clique of Koran-waving fundamentalist fanatics intent on establishing a European branch of Iran, which is probably to be expected. I have met Bosnian Muslims who think the same, which isn't. I have met Croats who say their fat thug of a President, Dr. Franjo Tudjman, is a Balkan Churchill, which isn't surprising. I have met Croats who call Tudjman a bully and a war criminal, which, while it has the virtue of accuracy, is surprising. I've met aid workers who think NATO should bomb the Bosnian Serb Army, and aid workers who think the UN should pack up and go home. And I've met UN troops who think the whole thing is a total waste of everybody's time, and UN troops who don't want to leave.

I thought I knew my stuff. I'd been here before, hauling a backpack around the then-Yugoslavia in 1990, when the place was like a bad party at midnight, the six republics eyeing each other testily to see who'd be bold enough to be first to leave, though the whole thing still seemed a bit unlikely ("Where are you going to hold this war?" I remember asking a drunk barman in a hotel near Plitvice. "Your whole country is the size of the second-smallest state of mine. You haven't got room, you fool." He'd smiled at me, said, "Aha, but . . ." and fallen over). I'd tried to follow the story since. I even knew the history. Battle of Kosovo Field? 1389. Death of t.i.to? 1980. Red Star Belgrade's European Cup win? 1991. Didn't even have to look them up. I could even spell "Izetbegovic" nine times out of ten.

But by the time we get to the convoy's a.s.sembly point in Karlovac, after an overnight drive via Senj, I can feel myself turning into Lisa Simpson: "Why? Why must people fight? Why can't everyone live together? In peace, and stuff?"

I'D LIKE TO meet some Serbs, as well, to see what they make of it all, but they haven't stuck around to be met. Croatian television carries pictures from the Krajina offensive, accompanied by reports whose gloating tone transcends any linguistic barrier, of an entire population on the march, trudging back across Bosnia towards Serbia with whatever of their possessions they can carry.

In Karlovac, we wait. Nicholls and I have ridden here up the coast in a Feed the Children Landcruiser with two Feed the Children employees, whom I'll call Bill and Ted. Bill is a long-haired, softly-spoken young Englishman with an admirable facility for spotting the worst pun in any given situation ("Is that a school?" I'd asked on the way, pointing at a building on top of a hill. "Yes," Bill had replied. "It's what they call higher education.") Ted is a robust New Zealander whose speech is a bizarre mixture of obscure kiwi colloquialisms, convoluted acronyms of his own invention and swearing. Bill and Ted both seem to have a fair bit of time for the vanquished Republic of Krajina-Ted shows me the pages in his pa.s.sport where he's encouraged Krajina checkpoint guards to put their stamps on top of his Croatian visas ("Really p.i.s.ses the f.u.c.kin' cabbages off," he chuckles, deploying the standard aid worker euphemism for Croats).

There are forty or fifty vehicles in the convoy: trucks, vans and 4WDS from dozens of different organisations, and one white armoured car full of German journalists ("Silly b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," snorts Ted. "If some f.u.c.kin' cabbage-eating d.i.c.khead does open up on us, you know which vehicle he's going to go for.") Nonetheless, Ted rearranges the luggage in our truck so the helmets and flak jackets are where we can reach them.

When we're finally given permission to move, a lone Croatian police motorcycle escort leads us on an unnecessarily circuitous route through the northern part of the newly former Krajina. "This isn't the usual way," explains Bill. "There must be something on the other road they don't want anyone to see." What we do see is unpleasant enough. The towns we pa.s.s through were, until seventy-two hours ago, bustling villages. They're ghost towns now, though it can be imagined that most ghosts would find them too spooky for habitation. In Plaski, the domestic details bear mute testament to the terrified speed of the Serbian exodus: livestock wandering the streets, washing billowing on lines behind deserted houses, a half-full bottle and two full gla.s.ses on a table outside an empty cafe.

President Tudjman had been promising to any reporter who would listen that property would not be gratutiously damaged, and the human rights of all Krajina Serbs who stayed put would be respected. It doesn't look like anyone was too keen on testing his word, and it does look like that might have been a good call. The houses that have got off lightly look like mine did the morning after my twenty-first birthday party. Others tilt at some point between that and smouldering ruin. Outside one two-storey villa, a television set lies smashed on the drive, as if the place has been captured and looted by Led Zeppelin.

On the outskirts of Plitvice National Park, the convoy slows and stops before we head for the border, to make sure we've still got as many vehicles as we started with. Up and down the long line of trucks, people p.i.s.s against the wheels of their vehicles-they've obviously seen the same mine awareness map I have, in which the whole region is shaded yellow (medium risk) or red (high risk).

Along the road from the opposite direction come several commandeered trucks and hijacked tractor trailers carrying Croat soldiers back from the fighting. All adrenalised, mostly drunk, they greet us by waving, singing, and firing burst after burst of automatic fire into the air. It looks like something out of a b-movie matinee, and sounds like it-Kalashnikovs emit a dull, relatively quiet bark. The trouble is that those bullets, having gone up a couple of miles, are going to come down, and at lethal speed. Most of us retreat behind or into our vehicles. A bolder spirit emerges from one of the trucks belonging to the Catholic aid agency, Caritas: a nun gets out of the cab, accosts the shambling, unshaven, sodden Croatian officer ostensibly in charge of these camouflaged clowns, and gives him a b.o.l.l.o.c.king that drowns out the last discharges of gunfire. The embarra.s.sed soldiers apologise, and start trying to shake everyone's hand. One of them speaks English. I ask him about the burnt houses in Plaski.

"Muslims," he says, with the straightest face he can manage. "We opened the road into Bihac, and they came out and attacked the Serbs. Or perhaps the Serbs burnt their own houses when the attack started."

When we reach the border crossing, thick grey smoke is billowing from behind a small wood a few hundred metres away to the right, just inside Krajina.

"It was a village," shrugs a Bosnian Army soldier at the checkpoint.

THE BIHAC POCKET is the modern equivalent of the torturous diplomatic conundrums of bygone eras, the Alsace-Lorraines and Schleswig-Holsteins that still strike terror in the hearts of fifth-form history students.

The Bihac Pocket, the northwestern corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has a history as impressive and b.l.o.o.d.y as its impressively b.l.o.o.d.y present. During World War II, Bihac was the base for the partisans of Josip Broz t.i.to, the man whose political skill, populist cunning and monstrous violence (in the first year of his reign alone, 250,000 people died in ma.s.sacres, forced marches and concentration camps) is widely, if dubiously, credited with keeping Yugoslavia intact. In the spring of 1954, the Pocket town of Cazin, where I stay for a few days, was the scene of the only peasant rebellion in the history of Cold War Eastern Europe: Bosnian Muslims, Serbian Orthodox Christians and Croatian Catholics all fought on the same side.

When Yugoslavia was still Yugoslavia, it was the most beautiful country in Europe, and the Bihac Pocket one of its most under-rated treasures. The region could have been created to adorn the lids of chocolate boxes: lush green hills trundle gently to every horizon, horse-drawn carts stacked high with hay and picturesquely ragged farmworkers compete for road s.p.a.ce with backfiring cars. The Una River is a rich, sparkling blue that would embarra.s.s sapphires. The place looks an agrarian utopia. The hospital in Bihac has recorded cases of malnutrition. The majority of the cargo of the convoy I come in with is food.

Bihac and Cazin have elegant elderly buildings that wear sh.e.l.l damage with the dignity of parading veterans, and footpaths teeming with people enjoying the sun and idle chatter. Electricity is supplied to every house for one day out of every ten, and the siege that the Croatian army has just lifted has inflated prices to the absurd levels of the Weimar Republic. A 12-kilogram sack of flour doesn't leave much change from 500. When I go to the market in Cazin with some people from Feed the Children to buy some plastic bags to bundle food supplies in, we're charged the Deutschmark equivalent of 23 for fifty. And most people in the area haven't seen a paycheck for the better part of a year.

The Bihac Pocket has spent four years being strangled half to death. Before Croatia's a.s.sault on Krajina had, with the help of the 5th Corps of the Bosnian army, reopened the roads into the Pocket, the region had been besieged by Bosnian Serbs to the south, and by a renegade Bosnian militia to the north. The latter was essentially the private army of a local businessman (Agrokomerc chairman Fikret Abdic) who had a grievance with the Croatian government, and had thrown in his lot with the Serbs after the Bosnian army had tried to bring him into line.

In Cazin, people tell me that things have improved dramatically even in the last few days. The Bosnian army now controls the entire Pocket-a fact they celebrate all night, every night, periodically interrupting the drone of cicadas with more skyward volleys of automatic fire. Abdic has gone, various rumours placing him in gaol in Zagreb, in exile in Serbia or doubtless, given the Balkan mania for conspiracy theories, running a haberdashery in Toledo with Elvis Presley. Everyone in the pocket is terribly pleased about all this, except those who'd lived in the region Abdic had controlled. In accordance with the Balkan custom of petty retribution, they are now paying for their loyalties-in Pecigrad, north of Cazin, I see groups of people bussed in from Velika Kladusa, the capital of Abdic's self-proclaimed Republic of West Bosnia, being made to sweep the streets.

The Krajina Serbs have gone, and the retreating Bosnian Serbs are contenting themselves with half-heartedly sh.e.l.ling Bihac, attracting no more attention from the locals than the intermittent summer drizzle. There is a pervading sense of smoke lifting and dust settling. Certainly, it's all smiles at Cazin's radio and television station, which operates out of a shrapnel-pocked and sandbagged building that used to be a bank when people around here had money to put in one.

Cazin is a small town, with a news beat that probably once consisted, as it properly should, of school fetes, cats up trees and the fortunes of a useless local football team. In 1991, the staff of the station found themselves training on the job as war correspondents. Indira Topcagic and Nihada Seferagic, two of the station's seven journalists, have worked eighteen-to twenty-four-hour days since following the local brigade, the 503rd. Their resources total one tape recorder, three typewriters and an a.s.semblage of antique broadcasting equipment that looks like Heath Robinson drew it. In the field, they travel by foot. They're paid fifty Deutschmarks a month, when they're paid at all, which isn't often. "It's our way of showing that we're with our army," they say.

We chat for a bit through an interpreter. They show me the remains of the rocket that came through one of their windows last year. I tell them I think they're very brave and clever, because they are, and they ask me what everyone in the Pocket asks eventually: what do people out there think about what's going on in here?

It's a tough question, doubly so through an interpreter, but I have a go. I tell them that when people I know think of the war in Bosnia, they think it's terribly sad, but that's it. n.o.body has really kept track of how it started. There was no moustachioed dictator with a big army whacking a little country with no army but a lot of oil wells, no jackboots goosestepping across Poland, and while there are many dead in the streets of Sarajevo, none of them are Austrian Archdukes. I mean, everyone's vaguely grasped that Slobodan Milosevic is never going to make a convincing Santa Claus, and nor have the revolting Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and his attack dog, General Ratko Mladic, won many fans, but western politicians too cowardly, too stupid, or with too many vested interests to involve themselves in the conflict have done all too effective a job of persuading the media and public that what's going on in Bosnia and Herzegovina is unfathomably complicated, locally contained and Not Our Problem.

"But we're dying."

I know that. But if you believe most of what you read in the papers, tribalism and violence are just what you ex-Yugoslavs do, they've become two more of those universally accepted, wacky, inexplicable European character traits. The general feeling, however misinformed, is that the west can no more intervene to enforce peace among the Yugoslavs than it can to make the Italians organised, the English friendly or the Germans funny.

Indira and Nihada have heard all this before, but they listen to it again, and then say what every Bosnian says at this point.

"You could give us guns."

THIS IS GENERALLY the point at which the west stops giving and sharing and starts washing its hands. We'll give people in trouble food, clothes, medicines and other things that make us feel good about ourselves, and while those people are usually happy enough to have them, the people of Bosnia would, on the whole, prefer the means to defend themselves. As Indira and Nihada, among many others, point out, if they were properly armed, they wouldn't be besieged, and if they weren't besieged, they wouldn't need anyone's help in the first place. It's a fair point, but it's hard to imagine anyone organising a benefit alb.u.m to raise money to buy artillery.

If there's one thing that spending time in Bosnia will clarify, it's the arrant stupidity of the international arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia, which has only hindered the friendless, landlocked Bosnians. It never troubled the Serbs, who had access to the formidable resources of the Yugoslav Army. As for the Croats, ask a Croat.

Back in Pula, I speak to Major Oriano Bulic, thirty-three, a doctor serving with the Istrian-based 119th brigade of the Croatian army. When he isn't curing or killing people, he writes poetry, and claims to have successfully treated himself for bone marrow cancer as a young man. He comes to the flat I'm staying in clad in battle fatigues with red and yellow ribbons hanging from the tunic (the Croat and Serb armies use identical ex-Yugoslav kit, so they festoon themselves with these colours so they know who's who, making the war look like paintball played for keeps).

Major Bulic blinks an awful lot less than the rest of us. He is proud of the fact that his unit were the first into Plitvice-it's a national park set around sixteen lakes connected by waterfalls, and one of the most gorgeous places on earth. I tell him that I've been there, not just last week, but in the middle of the winter of 1990, when the lakes had frozen and the falls turned to stalact.i.ties, and it looked like Eden on ice. I remark that he must be terribly pleased to have it back.

"He is," translates Lara, our endlessly helpful host.

Then I say something about the amount of suspiciously shopfloorshiny military hardware I'd seen driving and flying up and down the coast road between Split and Karlovac.

"It's German," he says, without hesitating. "I think they ship it via Ukraine. Or American. Or Israeli."

Germany and America would certainly deny this, and I can't prove it either way, though the alleged Israeli connection is one for the true conspiracy connoisseur. Germany has a historic (and, for neighbouring republics, frequently unfortunate) alliance with Croatia. America may have an interest in seeing the Bosnian Serbs shut down. What Israel would be doing, arming a state with a n.a.z.i-blackened past, governed by a belligerent buffoon who has said that the Holocaust was "overstated," and which is currently fighting alongside a nominally Muslim army, is anyone's guess. I've heard this story elsewhere, though. There again, I've also heard, and more than once, the one about how Britain started another of the ex-Yugoslav wars by dressing MI6 agents up as Croatian paramilitaries and sh.e.l.ling Bosnian villages (though when you ask why Britain would do such a thing, you tend to get fairly imprecise answers).

"Oh, the stuff's all German," another Croat soldier tells me. Nenad Vrbanic, twenty-seven, is known to all as Charlie, thanks to a childhood bout of meningitis that left him with one leg shorter than the other and a stilted, Chaplinesque walk. Charlie is also of the Istrian 119th, but a little less ebullient than Major Bulic about their triumphal march into Plitvice. "We got lost," he says, "and that's where we ended up."

I tell Charlie I went through some of the same towns he did, and mention the throngs of wandering livestock. He tells me that these hapless animals came in handy, as Croat soldiers herded them across paddocks to clear mines. Unforgiveably, but unavoidably, this Pythonesque visual image provokes giggles in both of us. Charlie also tells me that one house he "captured" himself had been fled in such a hurry that there was a meal cooking on the stove.

Charlie has extraordinary silver-blue eyes, wispy sideburns and looks like he should be playing ba.s.s in Supergra.s.s. When he's not fighting for Croatia, he spends his time "at home, listening to rock'n'roll-Lynyrd Skynyrd, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and The Allman Brothers." He volunteered in 1990, "because I love Croatia." Charlie also says he's a pacifist, and solemnly informs me that "one human life is more important than politics or nation."

Yet he keeps risking his own.

"It's under my skin," he shrugs. "It's a drug."

He says something else to the interpreter.

"He wants to know," she says, "if you do not love your country as well. Would you not fight if you were attacked?"

It's not a question I'd presume to answer. The lack of plausible military threats to most western nations at this end of this century allows most of us to love our homelands like we love distant relatives-glad they're there, and all that, but we don't give them a lot of thought, except during World Cups. I suppose if Australia was invaded by New Zealand or menaced by militant Tasmanian secessionists, then I'd do what I usefully could-even if this would most likely amount to keeping out of the way-but the possibility doesn't keep me awake nights.

Charlie takes the point, and I ask him whether or not he thinks that when the war ends, ex-Yugoslavs will be able to live together again.

"No," he says. "People have suffered, and they can't forget."

But none of them are going to go anywhere. The people of Western Europe get on with each other, more or less, despite two terrible wars this century. What's so special about this place?

"This," says Charlie, with exasperation and, I think, a certain defiant pride, "is the Balkans."

IT'S PROBABLY AS good an answer as any. But there's a bottom line beneath the rhetoric and chauvinism, and I find it in a chicken shed near the Bihac Pocket village of Bajrici, not far from Cazin. This flimsy tin structure has been home for four years to thirteen gypsy families, all refugees from Bosanska Krupa. Among them is Sudic Hasib, a twenty-one-year-old with a firm handshake, a wintry, unshaven smile and a horrible, horrible mess where he should have a left leg.

Sudic's story, by Bosnian standards, is no big deal. Sudic wasn't killed in a headline-stealing ma.s.sacre and shovelled into a satellite-detected ma.s.s grave. He wasn't interned behind wire, or tortured and starved in a sickeningly evocative detention camp. He wasn't a civilian evicted from his home for having the wrong surname, wrong accent or wrong ideas about G.o.d, and he wasn't forced to walk hundreds of miles to refuge.

Sudic was a soldier, and he fought, as soldiers do, and he got hurt, as soldiers will. On June 22, 1995, he was serving with the 511th brigade of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina near Vrnograc, when he was injured by shrapnel. He doesn't know who fired the sh.e.l.l-the 511th were in the thick of Bihac's multi-player fighting, and it could have been the Bosnian Serbs, or it could have been Abdic's militia. "It doesn't really matter," he says, and lights another cigarette.

The lower half of his left leg caught the worst of it, and is now held together by an unwieldy metal contraption, screwed into both ends of his shin and strapped in place by a bandage. Beneath the bandage, as Sudic cheerfully insists on showing me, is a yawning wound that exposes the bone pretty much from knee to ankle, as wide as it is deep. A nurse from a nearby hospital dabs at it with antiseptic pads, and trades banter with Sudic, but it's the kind of joking people do to keep each other going when they've been a.s.signed to a task they know is futile. Gangrene has already claimed three of the toes on Sudic's left foot. He lives in a room built from wooden crates in a tin chicken shed, and winter is approaching.

And he's no big deal. Jasmina, also twenty-one, an interpreter from Cazin, can't understand why I want to know so much about him. "This is nothing," she says, and Sudic's resolutely unperturbed expression suggests that he agrees with her. People get used to the strangest things-I suppose I'd feel the same about a visitor to London taking an appalled interest in someone sleeping in a shop doorway. Jasmina's own brother suffered a head wound in the fighting for Bihac. "But he'll be okay," she'd said, earlier, rapping herself on the forehead. "He has a Bosnian head-very hard."

But it's this very ba.n.a.lity of Sudic's story, his little tragedy lost in the enormous one around him, that's bothering me. While the alleged leaders of western civilisation continue to regard the war in Bosnia with the baffled distaste of Etonian prefects who have been asked to sort out the brawl happening in the playground of the borstal down the road, Sudic's story will be retold countless times, adding further ugly grist to the Balkan mill of guilt and revenge.

Two days later, as our train out of Zagreb rolls out through the deep lime valleys of the Sava River and heads towards Llubljana, the song playing on my Walkman is Neil Young's electrified, outraged version of Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind."

You know the words.

18.

BORNE TEHRAN.

By IranAir to Caracas MARCH 2007.

THIS ONE WAS spotted by Andrew Tuck, editor of Monocle Monocle, who has a rare and treasurable knack for finding a way into a story that few others would even begin to think of. We had talked vaguely about doing something by way of ill.u.s.trating the alliance that appeared to be flourishing between Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chavez. A lesser publication would have contented itself with getting some hack to cobble together something from the news cuttings; Andrew, reading around the subject, noticed that IranAir was opening a route to Caracas, and called to ask if I fancied trying it out. At the risk of giving away the ending, I answered in the affirmative.

I'd never been to Iran before, and at time of writing I haven't returned, and though the couple of days I spent in Tehran on this trip scarcely qualify me as an authority on the Islamic Republic, it is one of the joys of travelling as a journalist that you can learn a lot quite quickly, especially if it registers with people that you might serve as a conduit for their feelings. In Iran especially, it is not easy to be un.o.bstrusive and independent as a visiting journalist: the Department of Foreign Affairs issues you with (and charges you for, and wastes half a day of your life wrangling) an escort, who translates for you, possibly even reliably, and brandishes the appropriate pieces of rubber-stamped official stationery every time some interfering yahoo in uniform tries to arrest you for behaving like a foreign journalist. Annoying though this is, it does mean that people talk to you, and I thought some of what they said was interesting, especially given that they appeared to have no compunction about saying it in front of our government minder. One afternoon, as we photographed the totalitarian concrete origami of the Azadi monument, a besuited commuter paused to ask, in English, "Why do you photograph this? This country is turning to s.h.i.t." Several other people were insistent that I record their dissatisfactions, which were largely to do with lack of economic opportunity and surfeit of Koranic strictures upon everyday existence.

As became clear a couple of years later, when Iran was convulsed by violent protest about the results of its presidential election-or, to employ the correct technical term, "election"-these people were not alone in their frustrations. Nor, I'm sure, were the Iranian women on the flights I took, whose reaction to the lights and beeps that denote imminent landing or the achievement of cruising alt.i.tude also struck me as significant (and hopeful) straws in the wind. On being informed that the first IranAir flight I caught, from London's Heathrow, would shortly, Insh'allah, be landing in Tehran, they rummaged resignedly in their carry-on luggage for the scarves and shawls that would shroud them in accordance with the dress code that Iran enforces upon its female population under threat of violence (writing or reading it as clearly as that helps, I find, in reaching the appropriate pitch of anger at this idiocy). On the outbound journey, upon hearing that we'd cleared Iranian airs.p.a.ce, the drab, observant garb was immediately stashed. I remember thinking that IranAir should add a second light next to the seatbelt indicator, perhaps in the shape of a ranting cleric, and/or alter their takeoff and landing announcements ("We will shortly be landing in Tehran. Please raise your seats to the upright positions, stow your tray tables, switch off all electronic equipment-and, if you're female, enact acquiescence to the inst.i.tutional misogyny of our homeland, a country where grown men, paid by the government, in the twenty-first century, are licensed to threaten, arrest or hit women for flashing an untoward quant.i.ty of hair").

For reasons surpa.s.sing my understanding, we remain, as a species, bewilderingly content to excuse all manner of nonsense so long as someone a.s.serts divine sanction for it. I don't claim to know all that-much one of the benefits of doing a job that involves finding stuff out is that you are constantly reminded of the unfathomable expanses of your ignorance. But I've been around a bit, by now, and I hold at least a couple of truths to be self-evident. Any government that rules by fear is illegitimate. And anybody who claims to speak or act on G.o.d's behalf is insane.

TEHRAN AND CARACAS appear, to understate matters recklessly, curious candidates for an air link. Tehran is the capital of a Central Asian Islamic republic. Caracas is the capital of a South American "Bolivarian"-in honour of Simon Bolivar, serial vanquisher of South America's Spanish imperial overlords-republic. Tehran is a drab, joyless, religiously straitened hovel whose people make what merry they dare behind the closed doors of private homes, and where alcohol is illegal (although available, we've been pleased to discover, if you fall in with the wrong crowd). Caracas, or so I've been reading, is a colourful, lively, unb.u.t.toned sort of place whose people are cheerful even when they're not out drinking until sunrise. Tehran's women use more material restraining their hair than many Caraqueno females apparently do covering their entire bodies. Iran is probably the only country in the world not plagued by Venezuelan buskers.

The reason for the establishment of this route-the flight I'm sitting on, alongside Monocle Monocle photographer Christopher Sturman, is only the third of what is intended to be a weekly service-is the one thing that does unite Iran and Venezuela: brash, populist, ambitious presidents radiating a disdain of the United States, an erratic respect for human rights and a streak of what might be charitably described as eccentricity. Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens the destruction of a fellow member of the UN and convenes covens of Holocaust-deniers. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, more amiably if no less oddly, has, for much of his eight-year reign, hosted a weekly four-hour television programme, photographer Christopher Sturman, is only the third of what is intended to be a weekly service-is the one thing that does unite Iran and Venezuela: brash, populist, ambitious presidents radiating a disdain of the United States, an erratic respect for human rights and a streak of what might be charitably described as eccentricity. Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens the destruction of a fellow member of the UN and convenes covens of Holocaust-deniers. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, more amiably if no less oddly, has, for much of his eight-year reign, hosted a weekly four-hour television programme, Alo Presidente Alo Presidente, a good deal of which is devoted to the spirited abuse of his opponents.

Ahmadinejad and Chavez have become friends of the enemy-of-my-enemy variety. They have visited each other's countries, embraced each other as revolutionaries, supported each other diplomatically, and IranAir's ludicrous Caracas route is an emblem of this alliance. During my brief stay in Tehran, I have been soliciting the opinions of the people I've encountered: every response has included some, if not all, of the words "crazy," "political" and "bulls.h.i.t." In fairness to the two leaders, while their relationship may have begun as instinctive solidarity against a common, larger foe, this odd couple do have some other overlapping concerns. Iran has the third largest oil reserves on Earth, Venezuela the seventh. Iran owns the world's second-biggest natural gas stores, Venezuela the ninth.

From the perspective of a window seat in economy cla.s.s, it's clear that little of this wealth has flowed to IranAir. Before the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution in 1979, the state-owned airline possessed a prestigious cachet similar to that enjoyed by Emirates today. However, IranAir's American routes were an inevitable early casualty of Khomeini's seizure of power, and the sanctions imposed upon Iran since have restricted the purchase of new aircraft. For the pa.s.senger, this isn't all bad. IranAir's small fleet of ageing planes have an air of charming retro gentility, their cabins decorated with silver and blue geometric shapes only otherwise seen on the shower curtains of midwestern American motels. And despite the strictures under which it operates, the airline has a superb safety record-it cannot be blamed for its worst disaster of modern times, the 1988 downing of an Airbus A300 over the Persian Gulf by the USS Vincennes, with the loss of all 290 aboard.

It's just as well that there is so much consideration that can be made of the political context of our journey, and the state of repair of our transport, as it turns out that we've some time to kill. Indeed, in the interregnum between boarding the elderly 747 and liftoff, Christopher and I would have had time to read, memorise and recite to each other the entire umpty-thousand-verse Iranian national epic The Shahnameh The Shahnameh in the original Persian, a language neither of us speak. At 8:00 AM, our 5:00 AM departure still looks no closer to occurring. These hours pa.s.s without a word of explanation from the crew, nor the merest murmur of complaint from any of the pa.s.sengers. Not for the first time in my travels in the Islamic world, I'm torn between admiration for the general stoic disdain for the insistent ticking of any nearby clock, and wanting to command a mutiny. in the original Persian, a language neither of us speak. At 8:00 AM, our 5:00 AM departure still looks no closer to occurring. These hours pa.s.s without a word of explanation from the crew, nor the merest murmur of complaint from any of the pa.s.sengers. Not for the first time in my travels in the Islamic world, I'm torn between admiration for the general stoic disdain for the insistent ticking of any nearby clock, and wanting to command a mutiny.

Another thought that occurs, as we wonder at what point our technical designation will change from "pa.s.sengers" to "hostages," is that, despite the scoffing we'd heard in Tehran, it does look like the Caracas route has made some purchase on the local imagination. The plane is nearly full, though few aboard look dressed for the South American sun: most of the pa.s.sengers are elderly women in religiously observant costumes and men in traditional Arab garb, a noticeable proportion of them blind and otherwise disabled. It does not take us long to discern that few, if any, of these people have sombreros in their checked-in luggage: they're Syrian pilgrims, who've been visiting Shi'a shrines in Iran, and they're only going as far as Damascus. As the 747's engines come alive, and the cabin loudspeakers quote sonorously from the Koran, and the cabin screens fill with pictures of Mecca, Caracas seems even further away than it is.

We reach our first stop still having spent less time in the air than we have on the ground, even allowing for a circuitous route around the somewhat unpredictable airs.p.a.ce of Iraq. The couple of hours we wait in the transit lounge of Damascus International Airport are enlivened by the lesson in prevailing political realities offered by the souvenir stalls: alongside the t-shirts and keyrings emblazoned with the image of Syrian president Bashar-al-a.s.sad are trinkets bearing the green and gold, clenched-fist-and-Kalashnikov logo of Hezbollah. Tempting though these are, the purchase is made resistible by the thought of the number of airport security procedures (Caracas, Frankfurt, Heathrow) still separating me from my home in London.

Our mood, as we brace ourselves to return to a much less populated aircraft, could not be characterised as optimistic. The interminable and unexplained delay in departing Tehran, though annoying, had hardly been surprising. Even prior to that, absolutely every stage of our booking, confirmation and check-in had been handled with truly fabulous incompetence-IranAir could only have got things more profoundly wrong if they'd checked me and Christopher in as cargo and issued boarding pa.s.ses to our bags. By now, I am of the opinion that if Iran's nuclear programme is run like Iran's state airline, the day that Ahmadinejad fulfils his threat to wipe Israel off the map could be a bad one for Poland. However, upon reaching the aircraft's door, something finally goes right-and wondrously so. A uniformed vision at the top of the stairs, perhaps recognising myself and Christopher as men whose will to live is ebbing perilously, ushers us into business cla.s.s in the nose of the plane. Our saviour is the Senior Flight Purser, Aryana Malekpour, and agreeably s.p.a.cious though it is up forward, there's plenty of room in the back, as well-Ms. Malekpour explains that there are only sixty pa.s.sengers aboard, and that at any rate this flight, given the fuel load necessary for the fourteen-hour haul to Caracas, could carry no more than a hundred. There is only one other pa.s.senger in business cla.s.s, a silver-haired cove of distinguished mien who turns out, when introductions are effected, to be Lebanon's Consul to Venezuela.

After we reach cruising alt.i.tude, Ms. Malekpour dispenses a potted history of the aircraft along with our coffee. This 747 is called A4 Delta, and at thirty-two years it's the oldest aircraft in IranAir's fleet, though a recent overhaul is evident in the new pale blue, purple and pink paisley upholstery embracing the seats. Doubtless figuring that we'll be spending a bunch of time together, she also introduces us to the crew-several of whom, the saintly Ms. Malekpour included, have been with IranAir as long as the plane, and can remember when New York and Los Angeles were all in a week's work. In polar contrast to the ground-based contingent of IranAir, their in-flight staff are courteous, efficient, friendly, touchingly proud of their airline and their country and cheerfully talkative. All, that is, except one-he wears a brown suit, black sungla.s.ses at all times, and reacts to my attempts at friendliness like he'd much rather be regarding me from the other end of a pair of toenail pliers. Like most undercover Middle Eastern intelligence operatives, he could scarcely be more obvious if he was wearing a t-shirt spangled with his agency's logo, and this is perfectly deliberate-a police state must ensure that its subjects know they're being policed (and they do know-a few crew members whisper requests not to report anything "political" they may have said, though not one of them utters a word that could be interpreted as disloyal to their airline, or their country).

When, to my considerable surprise, I'm led upstairs and onto the flight deck, I sit next to Flight Engineer Mohammed Reza Rafat. I ask him to outline difference between the pre-revolutionary IranAir of the Shah's Iran, and the IranAir of the post-1979 Islamic Republic.

"Well, we don't serve alcohol anymore," he grins. "And, of course, the female crew had to cover up."

While IranAir's male staff sport generic, vaguely military, black and white uniforms, IranAir's women are shrouded in an elaborate, but not ungraceful, dark blue and gold headdress.

"Also," says Rafat, "the men had to stop wearing ties."

I'd read that Khomeini objected to these on the grounds that they were offensively western.

"I don't know if that's true," says Rafat, adjusting the folded newspaper blocking the sunlight beaming into the c.o.c.kpit's port window. "That's just what we were told."

At any rate, all the male aircrew maintain dutifully naked necks aside from the captain, James Farrahi-who is, as we swiftly learn, a man of firmly held beliefs. He initially refuses to be photographed for Monocle Monocle on the grounds that "I don't like the English." My efforts to make common cause with him on the grounds that I'm Australian fall upon stony ground. "There is no difference," he harumphs. When I ask him to elaborate, he accuses England of "s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the world up with their conspiracies." (The UK ranks second to the US in Iran's official menagerie of betes noir-sort of the Great Satan's Little Helper; specifically, Iranians blame Britain, quite rightly, for its role in the 1953 coup d'etat which, with CIA connivance, removed secular nationalist prime minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and paved the way for the succession of dictatorial thuggery and theocratic foolishness which has misruled Iran ever since.) After a few cups of coffee, Christopher and I are able to persuade him a) that neither of us bear much, if any, personal responsibility for overthrowing Iran's last vaguely sane government, and b) more importantly, for our purposes, to pose for a picture. on the grounds that "I don't like the English." My efforts to make common cause with him on the grounds that I'm Australian fall upon stony ground. "There is no difference," he harumphs. When I ask him to elaborate, he accuses England of "s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the world up with their conspiracies." (The UK ranks second to the US in Iran's official menagerie of betes noir-sort of the Great Satan's Little Helper; specifically, Iranians blame Britain, quite rightly, for its role in the 1953 coup d'etat which, with CIA connivance, removed secular nationalist prime minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and paved the way for the succession of dictatorial thuggery and theocratic foolishness which has misruled Iran ever since.) After a few cups of coffee, Christopher and I are able to persuade him a) that neither of us bear much, if any, personal responsibility for overthrowing Iran's last vaguely sane government, and b) more importantly, for our purposes, to pose for a picture.

Back in economy cla.s.s, I meet a few Syrian contract labourers emigrating for building jobs in South America, but most of the pa.s.sengers are middle-cla.s.s Iranian professionals, hoping to take advantage of the tax concessions offered by Ahmadinejad to encourage business links with Venezuela. They ask me what I thought of Tehran, which is a potentially tricky moment, as what I think is that Tehran is about the least pleasant big city I can recall visiting, containing as it does everything that is bad about urban living (crowds, noise, traffic, filth) and redeemed by absolutely nothing that is good about it (freedom, opportunity, diversity, tolerance). However, I rarely lie, for the reason that I'm no good at it-I'm terrible at making things up, and even worse at delivering the falsehood convincingly-and so I tell them a version of the truth, which is that I hadn't much cared for it, but was sure it had hidden charms that take a while to flower, and so forth.

"No," says someone. "It is a terrible place. Next time you come to Iran, you must visit Shiraz."

"And Esfahan," says another. "My family are from Esfahan. You can stay with them."

"And Qom," offers another, suggesting the Iranian holy city and spiritual heart of Khomeini's revolution. "The religious guys are a bit weird, but it's very interesting."

I mention that during my brief stay in Tehran, our compulsory minder had taken us to visit Khomeini's vast and still unfinished mausoleum. This elicits the sort of patronising chuckles that a Londoner might make at hearing some rube's wide-eyed tales of visiting Madame Tussaud's. I ask one of my new friends-a grave, sharply suited management type-why he thinks IranAir have launched this new route.

"You ask," he retorts, in perfect English and a stentorian baritone, "why this flight is happening?"

Yes, I reiterate.

"This flight is happening," he declares, "because of something very important that our two great countries have in common."

Sensing a punchline in need of a set-up, I ask him what, exactly.

"Crazy presidents," he replies.

I ink this quote gratefully into my notebook with a promise that I won't attach his name.

"I didn't," he reminds me, returning to his newspaper, "say anything at all."

The return fare for the Tehran-Caracas route, another pa.s.senger tells me, is US$1500. He adds that there is a Lufthansa option via Frankfurt, which is only a little bit more expensive, so I ask whether his choice is informed at all by patriotic ardour.

"No," he says. "I like the s.p.a.ce on board this one. And there's a really nice atmosphere."

And he's right. With so few aboard, and so much s.p.a.ce, people-pa.s.sengers and underemployed crew alike-meander and chat. Some visit the onboard prayer room, in which a screen displays a computerised graphic indicating the direction of Mecca. There is little else available in the way of distraction. IranAir offers none of the fripperies of modern air travel-no in-flight games, no seat-back movies, and only a couple of (entirely ignored) Iranian family comedies on the big screens, alternating with the SkyMap chronicling our progress across the Atlantic. There is an inflight magazine, Homa Homa-named for the griffin-like creature of Persian mythology that also serves as IranAir's tailfin motif-but it's a drab melange of travel guide hackery unriveting even by the standards of inflight magazines. The halal food is pretty good, though-b.u.t.tery rice with meat and vegetables.

Surprisingly, but rather delightfully, this lack of the usual amus.e.m.e.nts proves an unalloyed blessing as our unlikely journey around half the globe unfurls. The absence of the usual vacuous distractions-and the lack of any mood-altering agent stronger than Iran's Coca-Cola subst.i.tute Zam Zam-promotes an unusual focus on what a glorious thing air travel really is. We live in a world in which any middle-cla.s.s wage earner can skip across the planet in less than a day, and we contrive to take this miracle for granted. Worse still, we actually complain about it (I mean, I did myself, only a few paragraphs ago). We whine about the food, moan about the queues, b.i.t.c.h about the legroom, sulk about being compelled to perform the dance of seven veils-or, rather, the dance of jacket, belt and shoes-at security. We've become so settled into a default position of reacting to flying like it's detention that we've forgotten that roaring across the sky at 1,000 kilometres an hour is about the coolest thing we ever get to do, the moment at which we are in closest contact with the possibilities of human imagination. It is astonishing, really, that we as a breed have reached a point where, given a choice, we'd rather watch Friends Friends than the tops of clouds, or take Richard Curtis movies over the sun dipping behind the Cordillera de la Costa mountains that shield Caracas from the sea. The relationship between Iran and Venezuela may strike many as worrisome, but it has produced one of the great romantic, quixotic, travel-for-the-silly-sake-of-it experiences presently available. than the tops of clouds, or take Richard Curtis movies over the sun dipping behind the Cordillera de la Costa mountains that shield Caracas from the sea. The relationship between Iran and Venezuela may strike many as worrisome, but it has produced one of the great romantic, quixotic, travel-for-the-silly-sake-of-it experiences presently available.

Caracas's airport, like Venezuela's currency and any number of Venezuelan locations, is named after Simon Bolivar. It is, in every respect, a long way from Tehran: new, clean, s.p.a.cious, as much like a mall with a runway attached as any major airport in Europe, and the large numbers of armed, uniformed men are at least friendly. For flight IR744's pair of infidel pa.s.sengers, Caracas also offers the welcome prospect of a restorative beer or several. Mighty forces appear determined to torment us further, however. The bars and bright lights of Caracas, in theory just thirteen miles over the hills, are in fact two and a half hours away, at the end of a traffic jam of such hilarious length that it could almost have been imported from Tehran.