One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  These were palpable longings in old and young alike, two nations in one land; one nation longing for the past, one longing for the future, the present a neglected Dumpster, a barbed wire fence, a burning building. No one wanted the present, the here and now. The children’s sense of who they are belonged to imaginary times, the distant past, the hoped for future.

  When I asked the children in the Albanian village of Zahaq what independence meant, why they craved it so strongly, twelve-year-old Mark’s answer summed up how the war still worked on their desires.

  “Independence means no one can tell you what to do.” The others agreed.

  “When the Serbs were here they would not let us go to school,” Nora explained. “They wanted to keep us undereducated so we would be easy to rule. With independence, they could not do that to us.”

  All the Albanian children believed they had a future if they could achieve independence, except for Karl, whose father survived the first forced evacuation of Zahaq only to be gunned down a few weeks later by a man in a yellow Mercedes. He said, “I probably won’t live to be a grown-up.”

  Karl had trouble in school, had trouble sleeping and sitting still, I was told. He had problems beyond memories of the war and the loss of his father. His family was very poor. They struggled to survive in a devastated economy. Kosovo had always been the poorest province of Yugoslavia, but since the war and the post-war interim government, the poverty, everyone told me, had gotten worse. Unemployment was high. Alcoholism was high. Drug use was high. Depression was high.

  Karl still struggled with the past and the present, reminding me that not all wounds heal with time, that even resourceful, intelligent children break under the strain of all the stress this world can heap onto them, that not everyone is as resilient as Valerie, the little Zahaq girl who told me that she survived because she must, because “life continues.”

  Nora gave Karl her advice. “You must live,” she said.

  She said she would like to tell this to all the children of war that I met in my travels, all the ones who were losing hope. “You must live,” she said, and I thought of Keto in Lugufu Camp and of Nicholas on the Thai-Burma border, and of Charity from the Sudan and Paul in the Congo. All of these children were eloquent testimony to the idea that in a society at war, the smallest citizens carry a heavy burden, that of living, of continuing because one day peace will come, as it had, in its own way, to Kosovo. Because they were the future; because they would be the next ones to wage war or to make peace and maybe they could do things better than their parents had, if only they could take her advice and live.

  As I mused on these grand thoughts, bigger than the room we were in, bigger than the girl who spoke them, thoughts that moved continents, thoughts that could end wars, that united the children of the world—in my mind—into one grand celebration of life and innocence and the resilience of man, Nora kept speaking. Her next words brought me back to reality, away from the dangerous, ridiculous, greeting-card idealizations I was drifting into.

  “Except the Serbs,” she said. “I would not give them that advice. To them I would say, go straight to Hell.”

  The others laughed, bright smiles nearly knocking me over. Karl’s sad face broke into a smile. Even my translator, a bit of a nationalist himself, laughed.

  Later in the day, Karl told me that he would be a soccer player when he grew up, a professional, and he would live in a free Kosovo. It felt good to hear him talking about dreams, expressing some vision of himself living to see adulthood. I had scrawled “Depressed? Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?” in my notes next to Karl’s name when we had first spoken, but these sorts of labels are perhaps too easily applied. As the psychiatrist Lynne Jones notes of children who survived the war in Bosnia, “these children might experience intrusive recollections of events, might have nightmares and difficulty concentrating in school,” but when one takes into consideration where they live, what they’ve been through, and what their current conditions are, could these reactions be understandable responses to horrific events rather than symptoms of a psychiatric disorder?

  In a depressed economy like Kosovo, in a society where everyone was the victim, how could one define what an abnormal reaction would be? In a time when the local high schools were turned into rape camps, when men were pulled from their families and shot then dumped in mass graves, who was sick in the head? Who was well? These were questions I was not qualified to answer, questions I think no one really is qualified to answer when it comes to the unique madness that is war. Karl’s sadness was justified. Things around him were not improving.

  “We still have many shkja here, you know,” he said to me later, knowing that the subject of ethnicity interested me, knowing that I intended to talk to Serb children as well. A mischievous smirk spread across his face. “You could take some with you when you go. Take as many as you like.”

  If young people act as a mirror to society, these youngsters in Zahaq were an excellent mirror to Kosovo. They were full of hopes and humor, resilience and grit, and an unrelenting grip on history, so strong that it might keep them mired in their past hatreds forever.

  In Babin Most, an isolated Serb enclave halfway between Mitroviča and Pristina, the children were preparing to celebrate Vidov Dan, which Bujana, an eleven-year-old girl who was originally from Pristina, explained to me.

  “We celebrate every year so we do not forget the Serbs who fought,” she said.

  “Fought where?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

  “The Battle of Kosovo,” she said. “In 1389.” She then proceeded to tell me the story in much the same way the children in Lapjo Selo told it, though with perhaps a bit less emotion. She was a quieter girl, blond and engaged in the details of her drawing. She told the story as if she had told it a dozen times before, which no doubt, she had. It had the ring of a schoolroom report, which no doubt, it had once been for her. Her story lacked the spontaneity that the kids on the soccer field had when they told it, but the details were all there, just as they had been, the traitors, the martyrs, the names of the dead. Despite her dry telling, this story was her story.

  To quote Slobodan Milošević’s famous speech on the six hundreth anniversary of the battle, the speech that propelled him into leadership in the waning days of Yugoslavia: “Today, it is difficult to say what is the historical truth about the Battle of Kosovo and what is legend. Today this is no longer important. Oppressed by pain and filled with hope, the people used to remember and to forget, as, after all, all people in the world do, and it was ashamed of treachery and glorified heroism. Therefore it is difficult to say today whether the Battle of Kosovo was a defeat or a victory for the Serbian people, whether thanks to it we fell into slavery or we survived in this slavery.”

  This was indeed how Bujana experienced the story of the battle, not as a collection of facts, which could be true or false but as a piece of herself and her people, how they suffer and they survive.

  Oorus, her cousin who was two years older than Bujana, had more pressing concerns than the old stories. “Five years ago,” he said, “we could walk around without being afraid. But during the war, Albanians kidnapped my grandmother and grandfather in Pristina. We fled to Montenegro for a year and then came back here. In this village we don’t have Serbian television or movies like other kids. We don’t have any freedom to go anywhere. And no money either. I want it to go back to how it was five years ago. People should go back to their old apartments and jobs.”

  “Freedom to move would make me happy,” Bujana said.

  Two young children were visiting from Belgrade. They sat in silence while she spoke, doodling with the crayons I gave out. They did not have the problems of their cousins in Kosovo. Their cousins were country bumpkins; somewhat backwards, isolated hicks, but family nonetheless. And better than the shiptar, they made clear. My translator spoke their words faithfully, though he himself was shiptar, part of a multi-ethnic human rights group in Pristina. He had known the families in this S
erb enclave for years and many trusted him despite his ethnic background. The atmosphere in the room cooled a bit as the two kids from Belgrade spoke. Perhaps they did not realize an Albanian was in their midst. How could they have known? Everyone’s accent in this part of the country sounded funny to them, and they were far less attuned to the ethnic signs than their peers who lived and died the secret code of whom you belonged to, who your people were.

  It was strange for the visitors to talk about these things, they said, because in Belgrade, Serbs were in control. They could go where they pleased; they had access to movies and television and all the things of city life that Oorus and Bujana lost after the war in 1999. Their drawings were of houses and cars. Bujana also drew a house, but hers was surrounded by thick black coils making a tight outline. Trees, flowers, roads, everything was on the outside of the coils (Figure 23).

  “Barbed wire,” she said. “Because we are trapped here. If things don’t get better, we will leave Kosovo for Belgrade. Most of the young people leave.”

  “Do you want to leave Kosovo?” I asked her.

  “I want things to go back to the way they were five years ago.”

  “Do you blame the Albanians for what happened?” I asked her.

  “Politicians cause the problems,” Oorus said before Bujana spoke.

  I would only realize when I spent that night in Babin Most without my translator how much his presence changed the children’s attitudes. Even though they had known him for years, none of them trusted him. He later acknowledged this, but told me it was the only way things would improve. He would just have to keep going out there.

  He left after lunch, and Oorus and I sat in his TV room. He poured me a glass of slivovitz, a potent homemade plum brandy. I marveled at his access to it, as he was only thirteen years old, but he poured himself juice. There was plenty of time in life in the Balkans to discover alcohol. He was in no particular rush. It would be there for him when he grew up, he joked. I might have preferred juice. Oorus’s mother had insisted I eat lunch with them, a real traditional Serbian meal, with cabbage and beef and cheese, pastries, a tomato and cucumber salad, and several glasses of slivovitz. I was a little drunk. Oorus wanted to practice his English with me. With slivovitz coursing through my body, I felt I could practically speak Serbian.

  “You like Kosovo?” he asked.

  “Yes I do.”

  “You stay Pristina?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am staying in Pristina.”

  “Pristina is not good now.”

  “Not good?”

  “Many shiptar,” he said, using the pejorative he had avoided while my translator was present.

  “You don’t like Albanians?”

  “All terrorists,” he said.

  “Terrorists?”

  “I hating them,” he said and ended the conversation by insisting we watch his favorite video, a fuzzy tape of Children of the Corn 3. He did not want to talk about the past any more.

  A few hours later, he took me to the school to watch the traditional folk dancing group practice. I helped him tie a braided belt that makes up part of the costume for the traditional kolo dance. All the children I had met that day were part of this dance group, and they were glad to have a visitor. Bujana danced with particular enthusiasm. Oorus, it seemed, was a bit embarrassed by the pageantry, but it was part of the Vidov Dan celebration every year. A group of older teens played the music and the children moved and swayed in circles, kicking and bowing and linking arms. It was a remarkable dance, one they had all practiced countless times.

  “Folk dancing,” Oorus’s mother said to me, pointing, exhausting her English with that. She called Bujana over to us from the dancing circle. The teacher looked annoyed but let her go, deferring to their guest’s need for someone who spoke English, even if it was his eager eleven-year-old dancer. Oorus’ mother spoke to her for a moment and Bujana translated for me.

  “She say folklore is good to have. It make children good.” Bujana didn’t have the English skills to clarify what she meant, and we couldn’t find anyone else in the remote village who could ease communication, so I was left to wonder what she wanted to tell me about the folk dancing. Folk dancing kept children out of trouble? Folk dancing gave children a positive sense of their national identity? Folk dancing kept them fit?

  Oorus’s mother tried to tell me that she could not say these things in front of my translator earlier, that he could not translate them. Then again, neither could she. Frustrated, she let Bujana’s translation abide.

  I got to thinking about Oorus. With my translator present, he gave lip service to the notion that people, no matter their ethnicity, were good and that the politicians caused the problems in Kosovo. At the time, that comment struck me as thoughtful and accurate. It gave me hope that reconciliation might be possible. But his comment when we were alone, which was made offhand and which, I can only assume, was an uncensored expression of his opinion, dashed that hope. He knew enough of the world to give lip service to rhetoric of forgiveness, but in his heart, he carried all the old prejudices.

  Albanian children I met said much the same things. When I would ask if it was possible for Serbs to be good, they would say, “Of course, not all people are bad.” But when pressed, they would tell myriad tales of their Serb neighbors failing them, informing on them to the police, looting their homes after they fled, throwing stones at them, joining the paramilitaries that raped and killed Albanians. By the end of the discussion they would tell me, as Nora in Zahaq said, “We can forgive them if they are punished for their crimes, but they should not come back here. There is nothing for them here.”

  I wondered how reconciliation was ever going to be possible when neither side would give any ground, when the children, like the politicians, gave lip service to forgiveness and cooperation but never showed any signs they meant it. Of course, this is not the children’s fault. They have no exposure to youth from other ethnic groups. Serb and Albanian children live in complete isolation from each other. How much difference, I dreamed, would a mixed ethnicity soccer game make?

  I talked to one boy, Milos, whose family had fled to the Gracanica Monastery when their home in Obilic was burned to the ground. Three children, the mother and father, and the grandmother lived in a small outbuilding on the grounds of the five-hundred-year-old cloister. The father complained that the Albanians were a people without culture as his son stood beside him, saying little. His father went on and on about the politicians screwing the people. I asked Milos about his school in Obilic. His father answered for him.

  “It was like a prison,” he said. Milos nodded. “Bars on the windows. The children couldn’t even go outside to play, because the Albanian kids provoke them. The teachers can’t control the kids. It’s like they’re drugged.”

  “Did you ever have problems with the Albanian kids?” I asked Milos, trying to get him to speak instead of his father.

  “Yes,” he said quietly.

  “Tell them,” the father said. Niko, my translator, rolled his eyes very subtly to me. He was trying to get the father to back down and let Milos speak naturally, but the father was not having it. Milos did not want to talk to us and we decided to let him be, but the father insisted. I felt very awkward, as if I were forcing the child to speak against his will. “Tell them,” he said again.

  “When we walked around at school, the Albanian kids came over and provoked us with cursing and swearing. They would throw stones. There were only thirty-four kids in my school, and we were right next to the Albanian school.”

  “What would you do when they provoked you?” his father asked.

  “I’d do the same as they did,” he said. His father patted him on the head. This was not a “turn-the-other-cheek” kind of family. Nearby, a cat had given birth to litter of kittens. The kittens kept slinking into the small building and the grandmother, a powerfully built stoop-backed old babushka, emerged from the doorway shouting and cursing at the kittens, tossing them through the a
ir by their hind legs. We all stopped a moment to watch the kittens fly, one by one, across the lawn.

  “The Albanians have been like this since ’99,” Milos’ father said, and for a moment I thought he was saying that they Albanians had been like the kittens, flying through the air, screeching. But he was talking about the abuse they heaped on the Serbs.

  I remembered images from the news in 1999 of Pristina after the Serb pullout. Chaos ruled. Celebrations turned easily to riots. People felt exalted, untouchable. The Kosovar Albanians had never had their own homeland and it seemed, in 1999, that they might get it. For a time, law and order broke down completely. The Kosovo Liberation Army became the de facto law, acting more like a mafia than like the police.

  In 2005 Kosovo was still technically a part of Serbia, though administered by the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). UNMIK created a police force shortly after the fall of the Serb government, as the KLA rule deteriorated into violence and thuggery that had many Albanians as frightened as they had been under Milošević. But six years later, the international police force still kept law and order and the UN still ruled the province. Albanians were frustrated. They wanted independence and felt the Serbs were holding them back. Milos’ father wanted Kosovo to remain part of Serbia. He was a farmer and was not about to leave his land. He was proud to tell me that he had no debt, no debt at all. With massive unemployment in Kosovo, especially for Serbs, this was no small feat. He wanted to pass something on to his son. He had survived the war and the post-war politics, only to lose his home to a mob. His rage was palpable and had become the only thing he had to pass to his son. Inherited anger can be the most venomous. Milos smirked when his father patted him on the head, proud of how he had thrown rocks and curses right back at the Albanians, proud of his own little war.