One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [87]
“They speak a different language,” Peter said. He was ten years old, originally from the city of Peja (called Peč by the Serbs, renamed when the Albanians took over), but he fled into the mountains during the war. Now he lives in Rugova, a stunning, but isolated region. The air is chilly and crisp. It was sweltering down in Peja, so I was glad to escape into the hills, where life is perhaps harder, but, as Eric observed, there were no Serbs around to bother them.
Peter showed a remarkable awareness of the arbitrary nature of ethnicity in Kosovo. “If I spoke Serb instead of Albanian,” he said, “I’d be a Serb.” He thought a moment more, not content with his answer. It didn’t sound right. The look Eric gave him spoke volumes as well, perhaps pushed him to reconsider his position. “If you want to be an Albanian, you are an Albanian. It’s in you.”
Malesora, a twelve-year-old girl who joined us after school in one of the chilly classrooms, added her ideas. “It’s the education that makes an Albanian. If we go away and lose our language and our culture, then we are no longer Albanian.”
The others nodded in agreement. Having all been denied access to school under the Serbs and then driven into exile, the children did not see these as purely academic questions. Their Albanian identities were nearly destroyed not long ago.
“What makes a Serb a Serb?” I asked. Malesora repeated the question to herself, thinking hard.
“A shkja,” she said, using the derogatory term for Serbs, “kills Albanians, that’s how you know.”
“Even if a shkja learned Albanian,” Peter threw in, to make sure his point was clear, “he would still be a shkja at heart. He would still hate us.” They slipped quickly, thoughtlessly, effortlessly to using the term shkja the same way their Serb peers used shiptar when talking about them.
The war had been over for five years. The children with whom I met on both sides were between eight and ten years old during the war itself. All of them wanted to be left alone, to live in peace. But few had found that peace that comes with forgiveness. The entire province still seemed to be in the mentality of war, hating the enemy, avoiding contact except to taunt or come to blows. The casual use of racist language was a symptom that reinforced the disease.
I had expected to find a society healing from the wounds of war, but the children I met were picking at one scab continuously. While, for the most part, their drawings expressed concern with the everyday problems of life—no more anguished pictures of murder and destruction as I’d seen in the ongoing conflicts in Burma and throughout East Africa. They drew pictures concerned with family and landscape—as some of the children in East Africa and Asia had as well. Politics and nationalism also found expression in the children’s drawings in the Balkans. With the Albanians it was a longing for the future, as in one drawing that showed Kosovo as it was now—dirty, crime-ridden, crumbling—and Kosovo as it could be after independence—clean and prosperous with lovely homes and shining skyscrapers (Figure 21). Another drawing showed Kosovo at a crossroads, with war and drugs and collapse in all directions but one: the shining direction of independence (Figure 22). The Albanian children longed for an independent Kosovo the way the Serb children longed for Lazar to rise, messianic, and return them to glory. Their drawings held a nostalgic longing for the past they had only heard described, had only ever dreamed in stories.
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,