A Drive to Globare
Brunner, Kira
IN THE SUMMER Of 2000, I met Scott Slaten, an America soldier who had come to Pristina, Kosovo, two-and-a-half months earlier as part of a NATO-led peace keeping force (KFOR) providing security...
...I wanted to find out how the process of building a durable peace was going in a country in which ethnic cleansing had taken such a toll...
...I never get to do this, I never get to meet civilians...
...As we drove through the countryside, we could still see destruction everywhere...
...The actors in this theater of reconstruction are the no-nonsense NATO soldiers, the war-weary human rights workers who fly from one world catastrophe to another, and a generation of young Kosovo Albanians who, reared under Milosevic's rule, came of age during the war...
...Oh my god, they might start living together, and what would happen then...
...For the moment, Kosovo has been declared a UN protectorate, thus deferring the tricky problem of independence...
...police officers come to make money and see Europe...
...One of the women invited us into her house for coffee...
...For Slaten, ethnic hatreds were just obstacles in the way of building a multi-ethnic state—the American ideal of democracy that can be "placed anywhere in the world...
...Teachers who had lost their jobs began to meet with students in private homes and garages...
...Starting in 1989, Belgrade passed measures that eroded the rights of Albanians in almost every sector of public and private life...
...IN THE SUMMER Of 2000, I met Scott Slaten, an America soldier who had come to Pristina, Kosovo, two-and-a-half months earlier as part of a NATO-led peace keeping force (KFOR) providing security for the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK...
...Although the war was won, independence was not...
...Even the turbo folk music pumping out of car radios and barrooms reveals the intertwining of Kosovo's own nationalism and an imported American patriotism...
...What was not destroyed had been carted away by scavengers...
...The enormous difficulties that Albanian students faced in getting an education forced the establishment of a parallel education system...
...We don't trust the Serbs, but do you...
...The police force was purged, Albanians were replaced by Serbs...
...NATO has been able to keep a lid on violent retaliation against Serbs still living in the region, and it has also provided a buffer between Kosovo Albanians and Belgrade...
...And, will you leave us here to die if we refuse...
...Although life is manageable, and economic subsistence is feasible for most Kosovars, it comes with a price...
...They and their children had fled to the nearby hills when the Serb paramilitary forces raided the village...
...NATO troops patrolled Serbian neighborhoods on foot...
...Yet, at times, the imposition of American rules and regulations on a Balkan culture seems so removed from reality that it can only be laughed at...
...From here they can go to Turkey or Greece or Italy" True enough, but what also cannot be denied is that the intervening military force has brought stability to a region nearly destroyed by ethnic war...
...How does such a country rebuild its civil society and political structures...
...Do you expect us to live with Serbs again...
...That won't ever happen...
...These legal mandates created an apartheid-like system, in which the Albanian majority—which had held public power until 1989 suddenly found itself subordinated to the Serb minority...
...As we sat down to cups of strong Turkish coffee, a middle-aged man, clearly the head of the family, joined us...
...He was very nervous about the possibility of the international troops leaving or of some deal being struck with Belgrade that might allow the return of Serbian control...
...Gacaferi worked as a journalist for Koha Ditore, the preeminent Albanian newspaper, and the only paper that kept its presses running throughout the war...
...Slaten was eager to accept her invitation...
...The flags were a clear sign of the loyalty people in the countryside still had to the KLA...
...For those who had lived through the war, it was clear why the wounds had not healed...
...Like most Albanians, he saw the bombing campaign as the only way to prevent a mass slaughter...
...But the very fact that the parallel system existed attests to the ingenuity of a people who, during their darkest times, were able to exercise some control over their own political destiny...
...I never heard a single complaint against NATO, not once," he said...
...The trouble is that the rules have no real weight in a country where the average monthly salary is lessthen fifty dollars...
...They guarded monasteries from vandalism, stationing tanks in front of them around the clock...
...Belgrade—no longer mired in a war in Bosnia—now decided to fix its "Kosovo problem" once and for all and launched a counteroffensive...
...The power a protectorate gives NATO and the United States is open to abuse that can only be avoided if Kosovo and its people are helped to succeed in the much more complex task of achieving self-government...
...In Pristina I had seen a portrait of Madeleine Albright taped to the window of a cigarette kiosk...
...The women followed my eyes, waved their hands toward the graves, shrugged their shoulders in resignation, and said, "Our men...
...That is why Kosovo will remain in Serbia...
...KIRA BRUNNER is a freelance writer living in New York and co-editor of Radical Society...
...But right now Kosovo exists in a limbo between self-determination and dependence on foreign aid and oversight...
...As Slaten and I entered the woman's home, she described what she found when she returned from hiding...
...One day they will seek the return of their property...
...Does NATO...
...This question, asked by a victim and answered by a representative of the intervening power, captures the complexities of the post56 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 YUGOSLAVIA war dilemma that Kosovo presents...
...Slaten struck both his hands firmly on the table...
...As children they were torn from their classrooms by Serbian law, and as young adults they were tossed into the confusion of war...
...By 2001, the parallel schools, hospitals, and government created as a counter to the stifling laws of Milosevic's Serbia had collapsed...
...Gacaferi politely said nothing...
...It's an idea in our hearts and our heads that can be placed anywhere in the world...
...If the old system came back, I would take my family away," he announced...
...Although tensions were high in the late 1980s, Serbs and Albanians would not come to blows over Kosovo for another ten years...
...Does the United States...
...By July, the KLA had one-third of the country under its control, but in late July, after over-extending itself in a campaign against the town of Orahovac, its soldiers were on the defensive...
...And in a final blow, the government revamped the education system, replacing all Albanian language, geography, and history with a Serbian curriculum...
...Without NATO's presence, Kosovo could easily slip back into war...
...THE STORY OF this new generation of Albanians is a parable for the trials of Kosovo itself...
...Today Pristina, the capital city, is swarming with human rights workers, KFOR soldiers, and United Nations officials...
...He clearly enjoyed acting like a World War Two liberation hero...
...As far as the Serbs were concerned, their hold on Kosovo was historic, their ties to the land reaching back to 1389, when in a heroic struggle they were defeated by the Turks...
...Today, they are struggling to find a place in the contemporary landscape of Kosovo...
...New mandatory seat belt rules and radar speed checks result in a hundred dollar fine for any violator...
...As they spoke, my eyes drifted over their shoulders to the field behind them where a large, freshly dug grave of seventeen or so plots had been heavily strewn with flowers...
...Everything changed in 1998 when the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) transformed itself from a hit-and-run military offshoot of the Peoples Movement for the Liberation of Kosovo (LPK) into a viable army, committed to secession and independence and willing to battle Serbia as well as engage in terrorist campaigns of its own against Serb citizens...
...And what role should an intervening power like NATO play in the rebuilding process, especially if there is every reason to believe that new violence will begin if it pulls out...
...Excited by the presence of a KFOR soldier in his home, he began to seek reassurance from Slaten...
...The U.S...
...Today, they wish to rebuild those parallel structures, but this time with absolute control over them...
...Slaten was already fed up with what he described as the simple-minded, nineteenth-century nationalism of Yugoslavia's ethnic wars...
...Serbian managers took over radio stations, newspapers, and cultural institutions...
...He responded patiently, not so much with a justification, but with a description of what daily life in Kosovo is like: "When an Albanian meets a Serb person for the first time, he thinks about 1912, then about World War I, then World War II, and then finally he thinks about the person standing in front of him...
...When I caught up with the three women on the road, I asked them where they had been during the war...
...What if they started riding together...
...In her living room, she pointed to the stucco wall on which Serb soldiers had engraved, with a knife, an image of a skull and crossbones, the Grim Reaper, and the words "Death Action," "Death Units," "Welcome to Hell...
...Children ran up to us, and three women walking up the road stopped to wave...
...The result is that it has become less profitable for an Albanian farmer DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 57 YUGOSLAVIA to open a dairy than to negotiate import fees with the NGO...
...Yet, leaving Kosovo indeterminately as a protectorate too easily allows NATO and the United States to slip into the role of an imperiallike occupier—a role that in the end undermines the values of humanitarian intervention...
...Could he put his trust in this man or not...
...He agreed to find a jeep and take me the following morning to the village of Globare in central Kosovo...
...He was exaggerating only slightly...
...Before the war, America rejected Kosovo's call for independence, fearing that it would lead to even greater turbulence in the Balkans...
...Pristina is not America...
...This is the best part...
...By the "old system" he not only meant Serbian rule and political repression, but also the return of death squads, killing, looting, and destruction...
...Although in the early nineties thirtysix thousand Albanian students finished primary school, the new law allowed only six thousand seats for non-Serbs in secondary school...
...58 n DISSENT / Spring 2002...
...Retired U.S...
...It is impossible to have any conversation about the political situation in Kosovo without getting a history lesson, but to understand the oppression that until recently shaped the daily lives of Kosovo Albanians, one doesn't have to go far back...
...And Kosovo is a country striving to rebuild its civil society and political structures...
...Human rights organizations, the military, and a collection of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) now have a hand in every aspect of governing the country...
...Mom, oh Mother, Drenica black and red, Mitrovica so beautiful and Pristina like our own little America...
...Because he is working for an NGO...
...With the air war over, the main duty of the KFOR troops was to find a way to prevent retaliation by Albanians against the Serbs...
...troops would never become mired in nation-building, nation-building had, in fact, become a daily part of their duties...
...Whitewash barely covered the graffiti...
...It was a little more than a year since the end of the seventy-eight-day air war that NATO launched on March 24, 1999, to stop Serbian ethnic cleansing...
...Soon its paramilitaries poured into Kosovo, overrunning the countryside, slaughtering civilians, burning villages, and forcing Albanians to flee on foot into neighboring Macedonia...
...Every moment in the present carries with it 54 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 YUGOSLAVIA the weight of repeated betrayals and grievances...
...Were you truly fighting for the cause of the Albanian people and the KLA...
...For Serbia it is Kosovo...
...Reflecting on the hundreds of Westerners filling the streets of Pristina, he gripes, "Many of these guys who come under the pretext of humanitarianism are really just businessmen...
...He can't fit through the door...
...THERE IS A JOKE in KOSOVO that goes, "Why can't an elephant go to primary school...
...The next morning, my translator, Virtyt Gacaferi, and I met Slaten by his Jeep, a large white SUV with KFOR stamped on the side...
...air strikes, designed to avoid American casualties, had made it impossible for ground troops to play a significant role during the war...
...Slaten jumped out of the jeep, greeted the children, pulled lollipops out of his pockets, and tossed them to the kids as they laughed and shouted, "America, America, thank you America...
...In addition, a handful of entrepreneurs have arrived, their presence announced by the sudden appearance of American-style gas stations just outside Pristina...
...Under the UN protectorate, NATO has taken over the job of creating virtual institutions, laws, and structures that may with time become real...
...he said, "is not a geographical location...
...Beyond keeping a lid on the daily violence, the troops helped coordinate the rebuilding of decaying power plants, and repair sewer systems...
...Milk, for example, is priced as low as fifty cents a carton, because an NGO is selling it below cost...
...Her house, although still standing, had been stripped of every piece of furniture...
...But the Serbs who fled Kosovo during the American bombing left behind belongings and property...
...At this Slaten smiled approvingly...
...Slaten was sipping coffee in one of the many outdoor cafés where shopkeepers make a good living selling sodas and grilled cheese sandwiches to homesick internationals...
...Her farm equipment was destroyed...
...It was unclear whether or not he agreed with Slaten...
...To men like Slaten, the answers were simple...
...We talked for a while in the shade of a Philip Morris umbrella...
...In the 1990s, laws passed by the Serb Parliament forced most Albanians to leave school...
...A wiry and quick-witted twenty-year-old, he had a sophisticated understanding of the region, in comparison with what I was soon to hear from Slaten, who was full of gung-ho ideals and easy answers to the complexities of war and intervention...
...In the university even stronger measures were taken...
...The joke points up how complex the end game in Kosovo has become with NATO, the UN, and NGOs in effect running the country...
...He didn't go to primary school...
...They help administer the gas works, electric power, garbage collection, and food distribution, and they conduct the sticky negotiations involved in returning property to Serbian refugees...
...Yet he is skeptical of the instant success that Western attention and money bring...
...Both sides are against it," he said with undisguised sarcasm...
...And Serbia, preoccupied with its war in Croatia and Bosnia, could not afford to spread its resources too thin...
...Why can't an elephant go to secondary school...
...In the late 1980s, the Serbian Parliament initiated a series of laws that steadily chipped away at Albanian rights in Kosovo...
...There was proof of this vulnerability last summer when many KLA soldiers, frustrated by the constraints in Kosovo, crossed the mountains into Macedonia and threatened the capital city of Skopje...
...The nonviolent tactics of Ibrahim Rugova, the man who dominated what amounted to a Kosovo Albanian parallel government, helped prevent the outbreak of violence...
...During the bad times, Gacaferi continued working as a journalist and remembers the exhilaration he felt when the American-led bombing campaign began in 1999...
...He was having fun...
...BUT I WAS growing increasingly skeptical...
...Then what...
...in 1993, the Albanian rector was fired and replaced by a Serb...
...He had a job to do, and he was in Kosovo to get it done...
...He wanted to know if NATO planned to remain in Kosovo...
...Eight hundred thousand more fled to neighboring Macedonia...
...Despite then-president Bill Clinton's declaration that U.S...
...The role NATO has undertaken in the name of human rights is not only necessary, it is invaluable...
...Entire villages had been reduced to tangled scrap heaps of rubble...
...If they could kill a seventyyear-old man," he said, referring to his father, who had been beaten to death in a nearby field, "how can we trust them anymore...
...More than three thousand Albanian medical workers and journalists lost their jobs...
...We won't allow the old system ever to come back...
...Gacaferi and Slaten began debating the country's future...
...During the war, as many as ten thousand Kosovo Albanians, who account for more than 80 percent of Kosovo's two million inhabitants, were massacred...
...They can make a hundred thousand dollars a year tax free...
...Slaten is not alone in his hope of building an America in the Balkans...
...Gacaferi pauses and looks at an American officer sitting nearby and remembers that he prefers the new order to the old...
...He profits from the influx of Western journalists, at times taking in as much as a hundred dollars a day as a translator...
...Aselina Ismaili, a popular turbo singer and Miss Kosovo 1997, wails to her mother on the radio of the beauties of Kosovo, from the patriotic battle in Drenica to the glory of the Albanian flag...
...It is a city struggling to co-exist with an occupying military power...
...And the Albanians like this idea," he declared...
...Now we have, 'Please can you get out of the car.' Before we had, 'Get the fuck out of the car.' It is a difference worth preserving, as Gacaferi knows...
...I wondered what might lie beneath the surface of such undaunted enthusiasm for all things American...
...AlDISSENT / Spring 2002 • 55 YUGOSLAVIA though they had agreed to disarm under the U.S.-negotiated terms, the daily retaliatory violence against Serbs still living in Kosovo attested to the fact that the KLA had not completely disbanded and was perhaps reluctant to grant NATO sole military power...
...As a result, few Albanians could remain in school...
...Slobodan Milosevic, always the political mastermind, manipulated this sentiment for his own political gain...
...He flashed the man an open smile...
...Now, as we passed through villages where markets were once again bustling, I saw more KLA black eagles flying than stars and stripes...
...Now that this fear has dwindled, American foreign policy still objects to independence out of concern that it would look like a reward for the violent terrorist tactics undertaken by the KLA...
...How do victims and perpetrators live side by side in a country shattered by "ethnic cleansing...
...Not surprisingly, the KLA credited its troops, not the Americans, with winning Kosovo's freedom from Serbia...
...AS WE PULLED into Globare, we attracted a great deal of attention...
...Then, catching my eye, he turned and winked...
...He looked pleadingly at Slaten, sizing him up...
...Even the plumbing was pulled out of the walls...
...Each day NATO troops become more entangled in the job of rebuilding the country, which, as a result of UN Resolution 1244, is officially a UN, not a NATO, protectorate...
...As an example, he pointed to the new Kosovo passenger train line that was under construction...
...The first day the bombs fell, he stood on a rooftop in Pristina and cheered...
...The Kosovars are dependent on foreign aid, limited in the practical initiatives they can take on their own...
...Gacaferi, normally jovial and lighthearted, was offended...
...Even a train ride in Kosovo is never a simple matter...
...He hated the way the ethnic hatreds that he encountered daily hampered the work of reconstruction...
...Slaten cut a sympathetic but slightly ludicrous figure...
...Young men like Gacaferi are prime examples of the entrepreneurial spirit that both takes advantage of and runs up against the new international forces in Kosovo...
...In 1998, the parallel system accommodated 266,413 primary school students, 58,700 secondary students, and 16,000 university students...
...Slaten smiled and posed for photos with his arms wrapped around a group of kids...
...At a 1988 rally in Belgrade, he told an enthusiastic audience, "Every nation has a love which eternally warms its heart...
...Why can't an elephant go to university...
...Kosovo is still officially a part of Yugoslavia and is unable to create political institutions without Belgrade's approval...
...Trained for battle, he was now reduced to handing out lollipops and posing for photos...
...We drove out of town, past checkpoints and NATO tanks, and entered the open farmland of central Kosovo...
...Nobody likes police, but we can't live without them...
Vol. 49 • April 2002 • No. 2
