| Prizren,
Kosovo: A Day in September
 Author:
Luke Brown - 2002
Posted: 6 September 2002
Late one September morning
in 1997, I locked my room, handed in my keys at the motel reception
and turned right onto a road leading up to the centre of the town
of Prizren, Kosovo, surrounded by rich green hills, some houses
dotted up its slopes. An overcast sky hung menacingly over my head,
the cool air around me seemingly conspiring to finish off the job
on my sore throat that colder air up in Belgrade had started a day
earlier.
For a couple of hours
I wandered slowly around the cobbled streets, nodding at passers-by,
peering into mosques and monasteries, averting my gaze from curious
residents in ramshackle houses with red roofs, hanging up their
clothes to dry. Soon fatigue set in, a result of my cold, as well
as a sleepless bus ride through the night from the capital, Belgrade,
in the north. I had sat up front behind the sturdy driver, managing
occasionally to read and then nod off as the night wore on. As we
edged closer to Kosovo, the driver began to jabber at me to hand
something over to him. I shrugged as if to say I don't understand;
he continued on for a while and then gave up. Hours later, we stopped
momentarily in the city of Pristina, with its apartment blocks and
shabby facade, and then stopped in the darkness of a Prizren bus
station. Everyone got out and dispersed, leaving the driver and
me. I asked him in phrase-book Serbian where the nearest motel was;
he dropped me off at one and after checking in, I fell asleep not
too much longer in a tidy, but small, room.
As it was lunch time
I bought some food to eat and sat down on a ledge next to some steps
leading up to an official looking building; it could have been a
library or the town hall, I can't exactly recall. Nearby, old Albanian
men identifiable by their white skullcaps, sat around talking, drinking
coffee, smoking and playing cards. Groups of young boys and girls
congregated on steps and the pavement, chatting and catching up
on gossip as young people are inclined to, eying other groups out
shyly, as young people are inclined to. Middle-aged men in leather
jackets gathered outside shops and made small talk. All seemed calm,
relatively peaceful and harmonious.
In the town square across
from me a temporary stage was being assembled, a public address
system set up next to the stage with amplified music wafting through
the vicinity. I edged closer to the swelling crowd, presuming that
some kind of concert was in the offer. Soon enough, a television
crew arrived, with their cameras, sound equipment and well-dressed
reporter. A televised concert, perhaps. Vans then appeared and posters
were lifted out and handed down to waiting kids to be distributed
to the expectant crowds, some of the posters displaying the visage
of Slobodan Milosevic, then President of Yugoslavia. With the stage
set up, various dignitaries made their way up on it, standing in
a semi-circle under a banner reading "Reform '97". They
were introduced to the crowd and received roars in return. The main
speaker, who had a striking resemblance to the American talk-show
host Geraldo Rivera, then made his way up onto the podium and launched
into a speech in Serbian for over ten minutes. With the increasing
calls by the allegedly persecuted and repressed majority Kosovo
Albanians for secession, and the memories of a bloody civil war
where other regions had broken away from Yugoslavia, this was clearly
a rallying cry from the Serbs in power; evidenced by the few phrases
I could make out, of "One Serbia for all", "Montenegro,
Bosnia, Croatia, all Serbia" and "Serbia, great Serbia."
The on-lookers roared their approval as he warmed into his rhetoric.
A few other speakers followed in turn, similarly exhorting the crowd,
similarly receiving rapturous applause. Albeit based on my general,
but limited, knowledge of the region, a simple conclusion could
be clearly drawn from the rally. The Serbs weren't going to let
Kosovo slip from their grasp anytime soon.
Soon after, with the
speeches over, the stage and podium were quickly disassembled. The
dignitaries and speakers left, the crowd dispersed and Simon and
Garfunkel's "Bridge over Troubled Waters" played out over
the emptying square. I ate some hot dogs, drank some coffee and
then made my way back to the motel, passing by a river that ran
through the town. I turned in for the rest of the day, to rest for
my excursion the next day to the nearby town of Pec, which, according
to what I had read, was home to some wonderful monasteries.
Five years later and
it is hard to imagine what exactly the state Kosovo is now in. In
1999, in response to reports of ethnic cleansing, NATO undertook
its bombing campaign. Monasteries, homes and factories were brutally
bombed, and many people killed as a result. Neighbour turned against
neighbour, violently; houses were targeted, looted and burned; people
fled the region; many kidnapped and murdered, young and old.
Until recently, I thought
that what happened, while sad, was not surprising. In fact, as I
observed that political rally back in 1997, the events of 1999 were
fated. Except that it didn't really happen the way I thought it
would and many think it actually did. The feted freedom fighters
backed by the United States that were the Kosovo Liberation Army
(KLA) were revealed to really be a bunch of brutal terrorists (along
with drug-runners, amongst other things). The massive amount of
killings reported to have been committed by Serb forces were massively
exaggerated. It was the Kosovo Serbs, the Roma, Jews and Kosovo
Albanians who opposed the KLA, who were in fact the predominant
victims of atrocities and the targets of an organised campaign of
ethnic cleansing out of Kosovo by the KLA (a campaign that had been
under way in various guises, by precedent fascist groups, for decades),
prior to the bombings. Thousands of Kosovars of all stripes fled
because of NATO bombing, many Kosovo Serbs who had previously lived
in peace with their Kosovo Albanian neighbours too frightened to
later return to the UN-supervised region, with many of those who
orchestrated the terror unpunished and rising in the power structure.
It is indeed hard to
imagine what exactly the state Kosovo is now in. If I was to today
lock my room, hand in my keys at the motel reception and turn right
onto a road leading up to the centre of the town of Prizren, Kosovo,
surrounded by rich green hills, some houses dotted up its slopes,
I would imagine wandering around cobbled streets, this time peering
into scarred mosques and destroyed monasteries. But would I see
old Albanian men identifiable by their white skullcaps, sitting
around talking, drinking coffee, smoking and playing cards; groups
of young boys and girls congregated on steps and the pavement, chatting
and catching up on gossip as young people are inclined to; eying
other groups out shyly, as young people are inclined to; middle-aged
men in leather jackets gathered outside shops and making small talk;
all calmly, relatively peacefully and harmoniously?
Author: Luke Brown
Email: editor@polosbastards.com
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