War makes human flotsam

A poignant story in the Washington Post tells of young Afghans who, as part of the chaotic collapse of the U.S. military adventure in their country, find themselves in an Adriatic Sea beach resort on the coast of Albania. It's a beautiful and friendly haven ... but what next?

SHËNGJIN, Albania — The 21-year-old university student did not realize it at the time, but he got on the wrong plane out of Afghanistan. 

... For the student, his siblings and hundreds like them who were taken to Albania, a country they had never heard of — and to a beach resort, no less — it has become the strangest of limbos. 

For nearly a year, they have lived in a sprawling beach hotel in Shëngjin, a resort town with a long, wide swath of sand on Albania’s north coast, a little over an hour’s drive from the capital, Tirana. 

“The food is good, and the room is good,” said the student, whose brother had worked for the Americans, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relatives in Afghanistan from possible retaliation by the Taliban. “But we are in a psychological prison because we don’t know what will happen.”

They are more likely to be able to migrate to Canada than to the United States which is being inexplicably stingy with visas for Afghans whose lives we tore to shreds.

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The Adriatic coastline is rugged and beautiful.

This story of exiled Afghans puts me in mind of my uncle's remarkable trajectory out of a Serbian farming village located within the Hapsburg Empire, by way of a desperate season as a child soldier in the Serbian Army during the Great War (World War I, 1914-1918) to England, then the U.S., finally landing in Buffalo, New York. The Austrians shot his father, simply for being a Serb, on the outbreak of war. He swam a river under fire and joined up with other Serbs. The ragtag Serbian army, beset by typhus and outgunned by invading Bulgarians, trekked over rugged passes in winter to the Adriatic Coast.

And suddenly, Stevan Idjidovic's life took another wild turn. The Brits hadn't been particularly useful allies to Serbia, but they offered to take a small number of young Serbian men to Oxford to be trained up as proper English gentlemen. My uncle was one of the lucky ones, suddenly transported from an Adriatic beach to imperial luxury. From photos of that time, you get the sense that the Balkan transplants may have been looked upon as belonging to a category not-unlike Indian subjects receiving their finishing in the imperial center.

Stevan thrived and hustled his way to America, to meeting my aunt, and to landing in Buffalo in the 1930s. He wrote a little book about his war, The Snows of Serbia. 

I wrote a lengthy summary which you might enjoy if Stevan's tale piques your interest.