A Message from Kosovo
HUSARSKA, ANNA
BEYOND BALKAN APARTHEID A Message from Kosovo By Anna Husarska Pristina It was in Kosovo Polje, site of a famous Serb defeat over 600 years ago, that Serbian President Slobodan...
...with subjects treated as specified in the Serbian manuals...
...he will probably become its chairman and oppose Rugova in the presidential elections scheduled for later this year...
...Demaci's Human Rights Committee documented 43 cases of Serbian police intervention in Albanian schools in the first nine months of 1996, and 174 cases of ill-treatment of teachers...
...might put on Milosevic on behalf of the Serbian opposition: The weapon of sanctions has already been deployed on the southern front...
...The agreement was never implemented—not surprisingly, given that the signatories had such widely opposing views of its import...
...THE STRUGGLE IN KOSOVO IS of the noblest kind...
...Information Center in Pristina last summer...
...The Serbian Zajedno coalition never reached out to the Kosovars, while the main political party in the south, Ibrahim Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo, has always maintained that it has no Serbian friends...
...Paradoxically, though, American concern for Kosovo takes the edge off any pressure the U.S...
...They have to live in the laboratories, among the flasks and skeletons...
...Financed by an obligatory 3 per cent tax on the earnings of diaspora Kosovars, the schools are something to admire...
...Rugova took the pact to mean that Serbia would open all school premises so that Albanian students could move out of their garages, cellars and foxholes and into proper buildings...
...The issue came into sharp focus last September when Albanian Kosovar leader Rugova signed an agreement with Milosevic on education in Kosovo...
...Sometimes known as "Kosovo's Mandela," he is the dean of the region's Albanian dissidents, and knows his adversary...
...It was also from Kosovo, the cradle of Serbian mythology where nine out of every 10 persons is Albanian, that seven years later there came an unexpected message of support for last winter's anti-Milosevic protesters, one that hailed "the spirit of freedom coming alive in Serbia's cities...
...Rexhep Qosja, chairman of the Forum of Albanian Intellectuals, denounced the signing as a "dubious and arbitrary act," and asked why "six generations of children and students had been sacrificed for the sake of such capitulation...
...Protests were widespread, as was the ensuing repression, mostly in the form of firings, evictions and expulsions from school...
...He was outraged that the agreement was signed without any consultation, and he has also assailed Rugova for advocating passive resistance, which he believes has led Kosovars to "a mentality of cowardice and waiting...
...There are now schools at all levels, from primary and secondary (300,000 students) to university (12,000 students), operating entirely outside the Yugoslav educational system and relying only on Albanian teachers...
...Nonetheless, it immediately drew sharp criticism in Kosovo...
...The United States recognizes the importance of Kosovo...
...Some 15,000 of these refugees have been sent to Kosovo...
...Until now there has been almost no contact between the Kosovo Albanian and Serbian opposition movements...
...BEYOND BALKAN APARTHEID A Message from Kosovo By Anna Husarska Pristina It was in Kosovo Polje, site of a famous Serb defeat over 600 years ago, that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic launched a nationalist mania in 1989 that grew into the deadliest European project since Hitler's Final Solution...
...Then in October Congress voted for trade sanctions against Yugoslavia to remain in place for another year unless the situation in Kosovo is resolved positively— meaning self-rule, improved human rights as certified by international monitors, and the normal functioning of Kosovo's elected government...
...One of the fiercest critics has been Bajram Kosumi, head of the Parliamentary Party of Kosovo...
...The trend, moreover, is obvious: The rate of growth of Kosovo's population is the highest in Europe (33 new citizens per 1000 each year), while the rate for the rest of Serbia is negative (i.e...
...I was there on a mission for the International Crisis Group, investigating the fate of Kraj ina Serbs who had fled the Croat offensive in August 1995...
...Like all other aspects of political life in Kosovo, these elections will be "underground," whatever that means...
...No, she had no preferences, she giggled, showing an impressive collection of gold teeth...
...Demaci joined Kosumi's Parliamentary Party last December...
...But as Demaci's letter shows, the more intransigent Milosevic becomes, the more ground he clears for dissidents of both nationalities to come together...
...This "clandestine" system is not, in fact, hidden: Books are printed, students have graduation ceremonies, and some countries recognize the diplomas—unwittingly inviting a brain drain...
...The author, Adem Demaci, is no naive Serbophile...
...I know of just one exception: The woman teaching solo singing in the performing arts school is a Serb educated in Rome...
...At 36, with almost 10 years served in prison for separatism (a general amnesty cut short his 15-year sentence), he possesses the special credibility that comes in Eastern Europe from a sojourn behind bars...
...It is totally nonviolent, and consists of a sustained refusal to collaborate with the occupier—to attend Serbian schools, use Serbian doctors, or even walk on the same street as Serbs during the traditional evening promenade through town...
...As all my sources agree, the apartheid in Kosovo is total...
...Some stay in a hotel, he said, but most are lodged in totally inappropriate premises such as a Marxist center (80 persons), the National Library ( 14 persons), or the hydrometeorological institute ( 107 persons...
...Look at these," he said, pointing to his list...
...Over the past six years, as other parts of the country have broken away in more or less bloody conflicts, Kosovo has gained relative weight...
...Did I understand the tragedy...
...The rest I grasped the next day, in Belgrade...
...He pointed out that this year's graduates in medicine are the first to have been educated entirely in cellars and garages and asked if I could imagine how he would feel if his girls (aged two and a half and four) had to consult an orthopedist who had not, even once in his training, seen a skeleton or used a real laboratory...
...If they do, it will be a novelty indeed...
...Many oppose the relocation, declaring that they refuse to be "turned into a bastion of Serbism or the subject of a political deal...
...Still, it operates in the face of harsh repression...
...more people die each year than are born...
...The president of the Kosovo Committee for the Protection of Human Rights, he has spent 28 years—half his life—in Serbian prisons...
...But in fact I understood only part of it...
...It assured the Serbian demonstrators that "although shackled by heavy police chains," Kosovo's Albanians "do not blame you, the Serbian people, for our sufferings...
...I said I did...
...185 at the medical school...
...This has led some of the crasser Kosovars to brag about exactly where they are winning the battle against the Serbs...
...Parallel teaching started six years ago...
...He dismisses the education agreement as international image-building on Milosevic's part and capitulation on Rugova's...
...It rests on the ideal of a civil society, on building strong parallel institutions in a kind of underground state...
...To mark its intéressement, it opened a U.S...
...Anna Husarska, a longtime NL contributor, is a political analyst for the London-based International Crisis Group...
...For Milosevic, though, it signified that the Kosovars had finally accepted the Yugoslav curriculum, in Serbian (Cyrillic at that...
...According to a charming oxidized-blonde Bulgarian Gastarbeiter in a Pristina brothel, who spoke while hanging the sheets outside, her institution is the only place in town with a mixed Albanian and Serbian clientele...
...I had soft knees when I was protesting, but I had to do it," Kosumi says...
...Kosovo Albanians are especially proud of their health services and educational system...
...The latest round of problems between Serbs and Albanians started in 1989, when Milosevic withdrew the autonomy that Kosovo had enjoyed within Yugoslavia...
...Ninko Miric, a Serb lawyer from Krajina who works in the Helsinki Committee, described the terrible conditions they must endure...
...The tension has not subsided since, though it is now less palpable than on my last visit three years ago...
...His open letter, entitled "Serbian People, Don't Give Up," was published in the Yugoslav daily Nasa Borba last December...
...Though much older, Demaci is equally impatient...
...Kosumi showed me how the status quo is working against Kosovo's Albanians...
...Today its 1.7 million Albanians constitute one-fifth of the entire population of the rump Yugoslavia, which now consists of only Serbia and Montenegro...
...Do you understand what that means...
...He likes to remind visitors that there are 192 ways to conduct civil disobedience, and that massive protests are the most effective way for Kosovo Albanians to demonstrate their disapproval of the Belgrade regime...
Vol. 80 • June 1997 • No. 11
