DANGEROUS
TRANSITION
MU team helps Kosovars struggling to find peace in the rubble of ethnic war.
By WAYNE ANDERSON
Story ran on April 23, 2000
With increasing frequency in recent weeks, ethnic Albanian fighters have raked
Serbian villages and homesteads with gunfire and have assaulted Serbs on the
way to work or to marketplaces in an apparent effort to drive the remaining
Serbs out of Kosovo. This marks a stark reversal of the situation a year ago,
when Serbian forces conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kosovo
Albanians, driving more the 850,000 out of the province.
— Kosovo Daily News,
March 15, 2000
Going in
Arshad Husain, a child psychiatrist and director of the International Center
for Psychosocial Trauma, and I were in Kosovo in March to run a workshop for
teachers on post-traumatic stress in children. At 8 a.m., we left Bulgaria,
where we had just run a program on leadership for students at American University,
and we arrived in Gjakova, Kosovo, about 5 p.m. The distance between the countries
isn’t that great, but the roads in Kosovo are that bad — potholes
huge and small. At times we could have walked faster.
The drivers of the van furnished by American University in Bulgaria insisted
that they needed to work in teams of two for safety and that they would take
us across Macedonia, but only to the Kosovo border. They felt it was too dangerous
to go further. As we approached Kosovo via Macedonia, we began to pass trucks
lined up along the highway about seven miles from the border. It sometimes
takes them a week to work their way through customs between nations that were
until 1990 the single country of Yugoslavia. Even cars can be held up for hours
waiting to cross the border. It was shorter for us because we could leave a
car on one side of the border, carry our luggage a kilometer to the next customs
station and catch a taxi on the other side.
All three countries are mountainous. The villages looked much alike, except
in Kosovo there were many new red brick buildings with no windows or doors.
Massive rebuilding is going on in the villages that the Serbs destroyed. The
first thing the builders do is put on a new roof. For some reason there is
a big problem getting windows and doors for the buildings. As a result, we
passed villages where walls and roofs of the houses had been rebuilt and people
had moved back into them, but they had no windows or doors.
Background on Kosovo
Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Yugoslavia, rose to power by exploiting
the sacred rights of the Serbs in Kosovo. By use of myth-making, he roused
Serbs to a policy of "get the Albanians out of Yugoslavia" — this
despite the fact that Albanians comprise 85 percent of the population of Kosovo,
and Serbs and Montenegrins make up only 15 percent. Physically, the Albanians
had been a part of this area before records were kept. When Tito was dictator,
Kosovo had been an autonomous part of Yugoslavia.
