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Journalism of Courage
At first glance, it seemed that whoever looted my Pristina apartment had taken everything but the kitchen sink. On closer inspection, it appeared they had stolen that, too. Picking my way over the papers and books strewn over the floors, I found a hole and a pile of broken plaster where the basin once was. It disappeared together with the kitchen table, our rickety chairs and the disintegrating sofa.
Our landlord escaped to Macedonia and there will be little for him if he returns. His three-storey house has been ransacked like thousands of other places in this city. Gone, too, are the TV and video, not to mention my snowboard. My insurance company will pay out if I can get a police report. That would be great, had it not been for the fact that (a) it was probably the police who took the stuff and (b) the police station, after a visit from NATO, is now a big hole in the ground.
It is not the destruction that surprises you, graphic as it is, but the emptiness. In this once bustling little town, every day is Sunday afternoon. Yet this is the Pristina that the hardline Serb nationalists made their dream of ethnic purity. Most of the cafes and restaurants and shops have been looted, burned and covered in graffitti proclaiming the realisation of that Serbs-only fantasy. The few shops owned by Serbs are mostly empty. The cinema is closed, the handsome modern sports stadium deserted, the central square where teenagers once paraded is visited only by black crows looking for food among the cracks in the paving stones. At night, the only people on the streets are the paramilitaries, shooting in the air to frighten the few Albanians who have clung on. Some dream. And some price paid to get it.But reality changes quickly here. Walking to the apartment with a Dutch colleague, we wandered, scared, through the back streets, fearful of theparamilitaries. Typically they are portly, dressed in a mix of jeans and uniforms, well-armed and driving cars with no licence plates. By the time we left, the armoured personnel carriers of the Irish Guards were thundering down the main street and the mood changed. Albanian women and children ran from their apartments to wave at the British, and the fear vanished, at least until the tanks raced away around a corner. “How long will they stay?” asked one teenaged boy. “We are happy, very happy.”
In the town centre, one scene seemed surreal. The entire glass wall of a bank had been destroyed by the blast of a nearby bomb, leaving only a concrete platform. Yet the door frame has been dusted off and re-erected at one end. Just inside, in a space cleared of the glass and debris, sits a man on a chair behind his desk. He is the caretaker. “I work as normal, of course,” he said as we took his picture.
The next task, after visiting the apartment, was to find the parents of my former translator, Afirdite.She escaped early in the war, but her family was unable to follow, spending 11 terrified weeks closed into their apartment. “We spent seven days on the border, they would not let us go, so we came back,” said her father. When they got back, the Serbs gave them a new identity card, telling him: “You can take this, but we will still shoot you.” Nevertheless, bureaucracies being what they are, the identity card is helpfully written in both Serbian and Albanian.
They kept as low a profile as possible, with only Afirdite’s mother going out to buy what food there was. From their kitchen windows they watched in the streets as some Serbian neighbours paraded in their new paramilitary uniforms. Then, the night the British arrived, they watched the same neighbours go to a skip at the car park, drop the uniforms in and set fire to them. “For the Serbs, it will be difficult to stay,” said her mother. “And for anyone who was in uniform…”, she fell silent and shook her head.There were 28 Albanian families intheir block. Only two were unable to flee. There were also three Serb families, and a police unit living part-time in the basement for protection from bombs. Two of the families have already fled, and nobody knows, or dares to see, if the police are still downstairs. Another family arrives to ask if we are really British, and to rent us their battered car for a few days, and to ask how long the tanks will be here. Three kilometers outside town, Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas materialised, capturing three Serb police before letting them go. Fighting raged to the west around the town of Suva Reka between the KLA and Serb units, and in the late afternoon, everyone got a jolt when news came through that the Paratroopers, now on foot patrol in the town, had come under fire, returned fire, and killed a Serb. More reports of near-clashes came in, and by early evening the paramilitaries were back on the streets driving too fast and shooting in the air. The Albanians, officially liberated, went back inside andlocked their doors.
— The Observer News Service
