Fare Well, Illyria

Chapter 2: Kosovo and Metohija

Chapter 2 Kosovo and Metohija In my early Balkan years, contact with albanians was severely limited. (albania itself was, for Westerners, as inaccessible outer space.) yugoslavia ’s province of Kosovo and Metohija (abbreviated as Kosmet in those days) was even then largely albanian-inhabited and off-limits for us foreign correspondents. Journeys there had to be registered and approved by the Foreign Ministry. I discovered incidentally that none of my Serbian acquaintances spoke a word of albanian. If they ever bothered to speak of Kosovo at all they invariably referred to albanians there using the word shiptar a corruption of shqiptar (“albanian” in the albanian language), which in Serbian seemed to carry a connotation of disparagement, similar to “nigger.” The sole phonograph record with albanian folk songs available in Belgrade music stores was a 45 rpm disc with four lilting songs starting with Martesa e Lumtun (Happy wedlock) performed by the Orkestar radio Pristine —quite beautiful, too. Clearly, it was not going to be easy to approach albanians either within their state frontiers or in the Diaspora. The first albanian I met was ruzdija, a wiry Kosovan with a week’s growth of beard. In the autumn he arrived at our apartment in Proleterskih Brigada Street to tend our coal-burning furnace, a task he performed with punctilio. a sweet-natured man, he told us he was supporting two wives—a winter wife and a summer wife—and children—in Kosovo. The off-limits status for Kosovo was removed in 1965, the last year of the supposed tvrda ruka (iron fist) policy allegedly conducted by the UDBa secret police toward the albanian population in Kosovo—even then the huge numerical majority—of 75 percent. The policy was under the guidance of Vice President aleksandar ranković. 20 FARE WELL, ILLYRIA Permission was granted to drive around for a week in the purportedly autonomous province. If yugoslavia was then mostly in the second world (that is “Socialist” except for a scattering of successful enterprises), Kosovo was then definitely in the third world of primitive economic conditions , illiteracy and a vague sense that someone was watching you. and somebody was watching—earlier in the 1960s some 300 ethnic albanians had been tried on charges of irredentism, subversion, and espionage, while 9,000 firearms had been confiscated, mostly in police raids. (On a farm they even discovered a German tank—left behind from World War II— hidden in a barn, the albanian farmer thinking, “Well, you never know, perhaps a tank will come in handy one day…”) My first stop was Pristina’s Kosovski Bozur, the Hotel of Kosovo Peony, named for the red spring flowers that bloomed on the nearby Kosovo Polje battlefield—purportedly reflecting the blood of Serbian soldiers killed by the Turkish legions in 1389 (as if the Turkish warriors shed no blood). “Others to be avoided,” said the Fodor Guide for yugoslavia of Pristina’s remaining hostelries in comparison to the Peony. Built only two years earlier, it was already run down—a three-storey structure with flyspecked windows, dusty muslin curtains and flea-infested bedsheets. and (or but) this was a Serbian establishment. Sitting at a drink-stained table in the funky atmosphere of the dimly lit restaurant was a red-faced German in his forties, morosely sipping a flaccid beer that had been brewed in the Vaterland. He was alone. For company I sat down opposite him and asked what he was doing there in “the Kosmet.” “Ich verblöde,” he replied, employing an almost untranslatable phrase (literally “I am stupefying myself”). “I’ve been here eight years… und ich verblöde.” He then unloosed a torrent of frustrations about working as a mining engineer—pumps—with mainly Serbs: their lassitude, their ignorance of organizational concepts, and their indifference to breakdowns… It made me wonder whether his professional ancestors from Saxony— hired by the Serbian kings in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to use their expertise in extracting silver, copper, and lead from the mineral rich depths of Kosovo—faced similar frustrations as they helped make the Serbs wealthy. In any case, this was a powerful cautionary tale about the danger of making oneself more stupid, among Serbs, and I took it to heart, even if I did not learn it by heart. I looked around town, which had a population of about 30,000—the majority of them Serbs (today it is more than ten times larger and virtually all albanians) living in low clusters of houses...