One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [92]
I remembered images from the news in 1999 of Pristina after the Serb pullout. Chaos ruled. Celebrations turned easily to riots. People felt exalted, untouchable. The Kosovar Albanians had never had their own homeland and it seemed, in 1999, that they might get it. For a time, law and order broke down completely. The Kosovo Liberation Army became the de facto law, acting more like a mafia than like the police.
In 2005 Kosovo was still technically a part of Serbia, though administered by the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). UNMIK created a police force shortly after the fall of the Serb government, as the KLA rule deteriorated into violence and thuggery that had many Albanians as frightened as they had been under Milošević. But six years later, the international police force still kept law and order and the UN still ruled the province. Albanians were frustrated. They wanted independence and felt the Serbs were holding them back. Milos’ father wanted Kosovo to remain part of Serbia. He was a farmer and was not about to leave his land. He was proud to tell me that he had no debt, no debt at all. With massive unemployment in Kosovo, especially for Serbs, this was no small feat. He wanted to pass something on to his son. He had survived the war and the post-war politics, only to lose his home to a mob. His rage was palpable and had become the only thing he had to pass to his son. Inherited anger can be the most venomous. Milos smirked when his father patted him on the head, proud of how he had thrown rocks and curses right back at the Albanians, proud of his own little war.
I left Gracanica Monastary feeling more despondent than ever. Children observe, they take in the adult world moving around above them. From Southeast Asia through Africa and into this broken corner of Europe, I marveled at the way the children watched everything and learned to navigate their war zones with deftness and, often, grace. Those who survive were usually those who were most observant, most engaged. When the adult world lumbers above like blind elephants, the children, the little mice, learn to scurry from underfoot, learn to march behind the elephants, following in their footsteps. It is a matter of survival.
In Kosovo, where I expected to find youth in the process of reconciliation, the adults were modeling the most dangerous behavior for their children, the behavior that led only to war. The children observed the hatred around them, observed the divided society, and adapted to its norms. I had seen children in other war zones choose forgiveness and peace, and knew that the Serb and Albanian children I met were capable of choosing it too, even if no adults around them modeled it. How else to explain child soldiers like Musa, Xavier, and Paul in the eastern Congo? They were not blessed with positive role models either.
Why then had I yet to find one child in Kosovo who did not, in some way, demonstrate that the ethnic war was not still raging in their hearts? Why did they all hold onto these ethnic hatreds that had caused them and their families nothing but pain and loss?
“You must understand the history,” my friend Alex told me.
He was a medical student in Pristina and had been a refugee in Germany during the worst of the war and the aftermath. He was Albanian, but by no means a fanatic nationalist, though he had some involvement in the independence movement as a teenager in the Milošević days. He was more concerned with his American girlfriend, passing his first year medical exams, and finding a rare Slipknot album than with ethnic conflict and politics.
His Serb neighbor had been a paramilitary. His own apartment had been turned into a clubhouse for Serb death squads after his family fled. A bit more cosmopolitan than the youths I was meeting in the village, Alex had no special resentment for Serbs as a group, though he did not really believe coexistence was possible without independence.