One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [93]
“I know, I know, I know…the history,” I groaned, contemplating throwing myself out the window rather than hear the story one more time. “1389. Kosovo Polje.” I took a long swig of my beer.
“Sort of,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“There is never peace in the Balkans,” he said, laughing. “We just can’t help killing each other.”
“Come on,” I said.
“No, really. There was the Ottoman takeover. And the Austro-Hungarian war, uprisings right and left. World War I started here. And then World War II was fought here. Under communism, there wasn’t so much violence. But in the eighties there were marches and riots in Pristina. Then Bosnia, then the war here. There is never peace for long. Some people say, ‘It’s been five years, we’re due.’ No one really thinks there will be peace.”
At talks in the summer of 2006 about the future status of Kosovo—whether it would remain a part of Serbia, though granted greater autonomy, or whether it would gain independence—as 90 percent of its inhabitants desire—no hope of a peaceful settlement was in sight.
“Belgrade was willing to give everything but independence and Pristina wanted nothing but independence,” the UN special envoy at the talks said. As a BBC article reported, the Serbian prime minister refused to go to a joint lunch with the Kosovo delegation, and neither side offered a handshake when the talks began.
The adults, the ones in power, the ones who made the speeches, the ones that made the wars that rocked the children’s lives, modeled no behavior that could suggest an alternate view of the situation: the Albanians and the Serbs would not, could not get along.
The children have television, access to magazines and newspapers, or, if not, they have the rumor mill or the conversations going on among their parents and the other grown-ups around them. They learn about these events; they watch and listen and learn, and in Kosovo all they see is the madness of ethnic hatred and failed diplomacy. They do not live in a world where talking things out leads anywhere. They live in a world where the other wants to control them, to get rid of them, to exterminate them. The more engaged the child, the more aware they would be of the problem and the more helpless they would feel to prevent it, to change it. If the leaders couldn’t even sit down with each other….
Could that explain it? The children held onto these opinions because they were girding themselves for another war, another war that seems more and more likely? They acted like the grown-ups around them not because they inherited bigotry passively, the mindless recipients of their parents’ worldview, but because bigotry was more practical.
They chose bigotry.
After all, who would want to reach out to the other side if that would label you a collaborator when the violence erupted again? Staying in a mental state of war with the other side prepared these children for the inevitable war. The thought did not sit easily with me: bigotry as a survival strategy, each child’s internal, quite personal war without end.
Christof jogged over from the soccer field where the others were playing. I sat in the shade of a newly built pavilion petting the stray dog that had found its way to us on the slopes of Mount Igman, an hour outside of Sarajevo, Bosnia. Christof tried to practice his schoolroom English with me, the look of concentration, the search for those vocabulary words the teacher always blathered on about.
“Here, for you,” he said and stuck out his arm, dropping a rusty shell casing into the palm of my hand. He’d found it in the dirt on the soccer field. It was the third one he’d found that day, and it had become something of a project for him, picking up rusty shell casings, grim reminders that the place this youth group had chosen for its weeklong summer excursion had once been the site of bloody fighting between Muslim and Serb forces. The casing was as long as