One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [86]
Young Marko’s popularity and charisma seemed suddenly ominous given this sordid history of play. In Kosovo, the mass graves from Serbian offensives in 1999 were still being unearthed. I had just come from the Albanian village of Lubeniq, where Serb paramilitary groups killed over eighty villagers in less than a month. The name Arkan still caused fear among the Muslim population and shame among many Serbs, though he had been assassinated in 2000. There are others, though, who see Arkan as a hero, a true patriot, and one in a long line of martyrs for Serb freedom.
Marko doing his karate chops against imaginary enemies was fighting all the enemies of history, the enemies who took his home in Pristina in 1998, the enemies who burnt houses and monasteries three months earlier, in March, the enemies who took all the jobs, all the money, the enemies who took his parents’ pride, his nation’s pride, his people’s pride, the enemies who took Lazar’s kingdom. There was no shortage of supposed enemies.
We played soccer, they roughhoused, they fought ghosts. I feared then, I fear now, that with the wrong leadership, a new Arkan in their midst, this same group of boys could be turned on real people, the other, the enemy, the Albanians and the whole bloody conflict would start again.
I pressed them to consider their beliefs.
“But why would they come here looking for trouble?” I asked when Miroslaw drew close.
“Because,” he said, in perfect imitation of Marko, “it’s the history.”
For the Albanian children in Kosovo, recent history had a firmer hold on their minds than the ancient battle of Kosovo. Yugoslavia had been a prosperous communist state until the early 1990s, when the republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence from the Yugoslav federation. Bosnia was the next to declare its independence, which led to the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II. Only a few years later, in 1999, the small province of Kosovo, located inside Serbia, became the site of increased violence. The province is the birthplace of the Serbian Orthodox Church, though it is 90 percent ethnic Albanian today. An organization committed to the independence of Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army, had begun using aggressive terrorist tactics to agitate for freedom. The crackdown from the government in Belgrade was brutal and swift, attempting to cleanse Kosovo of its entire Muslim population. The international community responded with bomb attacks on Serb military and government sites and Kosovo, though still technically part of Serbia, became a NATO occupied territory, administered by the United Nations. Ethnic tensions between the Albanian Muslims and the small Serb population left behind remain near the boiling point.
Girls like Nora, from Zahaq, and Leo in Lubeniq, Albanian children whose parents were killed by Serb paramilitary units, or like Eric who lost his home and his neighbors, did not need to go back hundreds of years to find the wrongs done to them. They held onto the memories of the recent civil war to sustain their sense of self, their difference from the Serbs. The province was dotted with monuments to fallen KLA soldiers, carved in black stone, and to several children who were murdered by the paramilitary units. Their names were engraved in the sides of buildings, in ubiquitous political graffiti, on gravestones.
“Serbs are different from us,” Eric said, “because they speak a different language and because they show no respect for Albanians.”
It sounded familiar.
Perhaps my mind played tricks on me. Did this Albanian boy look just like Marko? Probably not, but in my new turn as amateur ethnographer, trying to see the difference between Albanian and Serb, I could not. The boys were interchangeable. They were boys—snot-nosed, cocky, charming, stinky, mad as hell, mournful, stumbling graceful boys defining themselves