One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [7]
“He did this because of Brankovic,” Katja added. According to the kids, Brankovic betrayed Lazar, who was his father-in-law, by quitting the field at the height of the battle, thus allowing the Turks to penetrate the Serb lines, capture Lazar, and take control of Kosovo.
“They captured Lazar, see,” Marko repeated, and pointed again to Miroslaw’s drawing. It was Lazar whose head decorated the point of the pike. At his death, Lazar became a martyr.
“Tell him about the speech,” Stefan said. Stefan had not spoken much since the story began. He seemed far more concerned with the mechanics of soccer than the details of history, but the speech, that was the piece that lit him up. He stopped the game again and held the ball under his foot.
“You do it,” Marko said and Stefan did not need to be told twice.
“Before the battle,” Stefan said, “Lazar spoke to his soldiers. He told them that he would fight for their God, and win the Kingdom of Heaven. Lazar said: It is better to die in battle than to live in shame.”
Stefan was visibly moved as he spoke these words. The others nodded, and gazed at Lazar in the drawing, frozen in crayon, having lost his head, having lost his kingdom.
The way they told this story struck me in the same way they talked about the riots three months earlier that killed nineteen people. In mid-March, four Albanian children were playing by the banks of the fast moving river Ibar, near a Serbian village. The children entered the water, and three of them drowned. Immediately, rumors spread that the three children had been chased into the river by local Serb men with a dog. Speculation spread that that act was retaliation for the alleged gunning down of Serb children the previous summer by Albanian terrorists. Regardless, fury erupted in the Albanian community, with demonstrations throughout the country denouncing Serbian aggression. Those demonstrations quickly turned violent, and Serb homes and businesses became the targets of that violence. For the next three days, both Serb and Albanian mobs clashed, exchanging gunfire and tossing firebombs. More than 900 people were injured, 800 Serb houses, and 35 Orthodox churches were burned. Four thousand people lost their homes in three days.
These children had waited out the violence in their homes, nervously anticipating the arrival of an angry mob, but their homes were spared. The riots were over, and they had occurred for a simple reason, the children explained.
“The Albanians want to get rid of the Serbs so they can have Kosovo for themselves. That’s what they’ve always wanted.”
They told the story of the riots they survived with less outrage or animation than they told the story of the Battle of Kosovo that happened over six hundred years ago. It was as if the children had been there themselves in the summer of 1389, with their own heads on pikes, as if their own kingdom had been lost and the riots in 2004 were just aftershocks. Nothing was lost in March that had not already been lost on the medieval battlefield. In a sense they were right, as many see the Battle of Kosovo as the turning point when the Ottoman Empire took control of Kosovo, so that today Serbs are outsiders in their homeland. This is the magic that nationalism works on children. It was not an abstract historical wrong these Serb children felt. They still felt the hurt that began six hundred years earlier. They felt the hurt in their parents’ humiliation, unable to find work in Kosovo. They felt it in the fear of Albanians, who surrounded them and penned them into the enclaves. They saw their current oppression as a result of their history, their ancient history. They made no mention of Serb discrimination against Albanians or of the campaign to cleanse Kosovo of the Albanians in 1998. It could well have been that they were kept somewhat ignorant of these events, as they would have been very small at the time. But Marko, at least, had lived in Pristina itself before the war. His family fled the anarchy and the reprisals against