Internal Conflict: Keeping your head with your heart in Kosovo

When I try to tell my parents over Skype what I see here, the first thing they may ask "Are you safe? Don't cause trouble. Don't get hurt."

Don't get hurt.

C'mon. This is Prishtina. Generally speaking, a safer place than New Haven, CT. But sorry to report, I have been "hurt" here.

Look, I'm not going to pretend that I am "hurt" more than someone who actually experienced the war. Not for a minute. However, let me explain.

Truth be told, trying to understand a conflict is not as easy as passive observation. It takes a desire to understand suffering, hate, violence, strategy, injustice, defense, aggression, economics, politics, law, and power. To see all of this played out on a daily basis, even 11 years after the war, and 6 years after major uprisings... well, lets just say it takes its toll. It hurts the most optimistic of optimists. And I tend to be cynical.

In reaction to injustice, corruption, hatred, defensiveness, and politics, I feel a strange sense of idleness, inability, frustration. I get angry having been thrown into a room to discuss (for 9 hours each day) the politics of conflict, listening to who was hurt more, and seeing the anger and frustration between Serbs and Albanians in the classroom (some of whom had family members in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and had family members die either from airstrikes or people). After a while, the anger, frustration, prejudice, and politics get to you. You can no longer passively sit, watch, and understand. Unless you (as the "western observer") check your emotions from time to time, they can consume you. At a certain point, your blood boils and reason is lost. Then you realize, "Shit son! This is conflict!"

Let me explain a day in my life here to elaborate:

Friday: A panel between two journalists, one Serb, Nenad Maksimovic and one Albanian Kosovar from the BBC, Arber Vllahu, and the moderator, a Kosovar Albanian, Behar Zogiani. The panel is "supposed" to be on how to conduct ethical, unbiased journalism in a warzone.

The speech begins with Arber saying that what happened in 1999 was a "genocide." He goes into a description of his personal experience of people being tortured, and wounded.

Yea. The room gets heated. The Serb rebuts with numbers (a quick fact check follows by everyone in the room). Then, all of the Albanian Kosovars in the audience sit up in their seats, start shouting out loud at the Serb, trying to convince him it was a genocide, or ethnic cleansing. A genocide, defined by article two of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, is "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.". I am not here to tell you what I think about whether it was a genocide or not (Noam Chomsky, for instance says no). There is no UN ruling or court ruling that what happened in Kosovo was a genocide. However, the Jews in the audience are getting frustrated and upset that the "G" word is applied to something they think it is not. Everyone has a conflict, an experience, a suffering, or a side to defend. Both my friend Anastasia and I ask if the moderator could clarify the argument. He had let it go unchecked up to that point.

As the conversation continues, you get more attempts at "who was hurt more and why" in the conversation. The politics in the room are heating up and soon some of the staff of the university chime in their two bits. A lone Serbian student in the room asks for respect--it was Milosevic, not him or the journalist on the panel, who conducted the horrors of 1999.

The BBC journalist is trying to uphold his unbiased view towards news. The Serbian is trying to not be the "ugly Belgrade Milosevic lover" in the room. I get so fed up with "I AM AN UNBIASED JOURNALIST" defense that I ask about the media's role in the 2004 uprisings, where 3 Albanian kids drowned in a river. The TV blamed it on the serbs and consequently riots broke out, hundreds of churches were destroyed and people (mostly serbs) were killed or thrown out of their houses. HOW can media be unbiased in a place where Albanian flags and Serbian flags still mark territory as if Kosovo itself did not exist? I get the confession, "MEDIA IS BIASED IN KOSOVO" straight from the horses' mouths.

The question remains, "Why did I want such a confession? Why did I feel so angry at both parties for their fighting?"

I leave the room wanting to crawl under a table. My blood is boiling with a frustration, "DON'T THEY REALIZE THIS FINGER-POINTING IS WHY THEY ARE STILL SUFFERING?" I can try to empathize, but I want peace. There are frustrations running all over the place by westerners in the class who just do not know what to think or do now. When you have never had to experience war, empathy may be there, but how much do we really understand the psychology of war? Its easy for me to see this, but I did not have an uncle shot by Milosevic's guys or a church burned.

Fast forward to later in the day. I'm already sweating bullets. I'm riding a cab to a group of Serbian refugees who live in shipping containers (and have for 11 or 6 years, 1999 or 2004 being the move-in date). They sit on their "porches" and usually share cigarettes, jokes, and grievances. Most are old Serbs, still fighting land disputes with Albanians.

One woman, Toni Schmilka, has been there for 6 years. In 2004, a group of Albanians brutally beat up her husband and kicked them out of their apartment. Today, an Albanian lives there. When her husband went back later (even to collect bills in his name there...), he fought with the Albanian. He had a heart attack in his car from the stress, and died. Toni is now fighting a legal battle for the land, but all of the judges are on vacation and there are way too many cases like hers for anything to happen quickly.

The refugees may have families in Serbia, but they do not live with them. Many of the refugees are older, very sick, in need of medicine, and more. They do not go hungry but eat moldy bread. They cannot get jobs. Even Kosovar Albanians cannot get jobs when 40% of the population is unemployed, and its worse for Serbs. Soon, KEK, the Kosovar power plant will start charging them for electricity. KEK does not employ Serbs and will be privatizing soon, so no hand outs to Serbs. The Serbian government does nothing for them. The Ministry of Returns and Refugees in Kosovo does nothing.

All I could do for these guys was share some fancy Djarum cigarettes I brought for them. Its about the nicest thing someone has done for them in a while. I didn't want to make any more empty promises.

The thing that angered me even more was the man with 7 children who moved there 3 months ago because of a land dispute with a brother serb. He was shouting at his wife and demanding that my russian friend Anastasia get Russia to do something for them. His daughter was dying of brain cancer.

So I sat there, angry at the Serbs, the Kosovars, the Albanians, the Serbian government, this asshole who could not take care of his 7 kids, all the while, this blind girl dying of a brain tumor traced the lines of my Orthodox cross bracelet. She pulls me close to her and kisses my cheek when I leave. I look at the eyes of a Canadian girl with me. The sense of inability, confusion, and frustration was enough to make me call a cab early and leave.

Later that day, a man came up to me in a cafe, shouting at me in Albanian. I didn't know what to do. Later, I found out that he was upset that I was an Albanian who did not speak Albanian. That I was forsaking my people. That I should be ashamed at my inability to connect to my people. I had enough.... I told him I was an American so he should just speak English to me or leave me alone. Apparently I look like an Albanian.

Later again, a man grabbed my sweater in the street and I screamed at him. I suddenly was filled with so much rage.

I can only tell you that later that night, someone asked me what I was doing in Kosovo. I was too emotional to answer. Even to someone I love, I lashed out, "I DON'T KNOW! I DON'T UNDERSTAND IT! I FEEL SO FRUSTRATED I CAN'T TAKE IT HERE! I HATE THE POLITICS! I HATE THE LACK OF ABILITY! I HATE THE ALBANIAN NATIONALISM! I HATE THE SERBIAN INABILITY TO HELP THEIR OWN REFUGEES! I CANNOT STAND THE POLITICS OF EVERY CONVERSATION! I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING HERE SO DON'T ASK!"

Later, I calmed down. I realize what I was doing. I was beginning, ever so small and minutely, to understand conflict. I was understanding pieces in the chess puzzle of conflict, and not just as another law student studying Kosovo from afar, but as a human being.

I started writing a short story.

How do you keep a mind and heart in check? How do you keep your head when conflict and violence are not there "to make things clear," but rather confusion, frustration, nationalism, hate, prejudice, and pain that you don't understand? I had been feeling these things and the fact that I felt them scared me.

I realized that I would have to continue observing, feeling, hurting, but making sure to keep my perspective. I really am learning something and understanding some of the most ugly and beautiful interactions we humans must face.

I know I have not expressed every "side" here, or everyone's experience. I have listened to the grievances of Albanians from the time before 1999. I have visited Reycak and seen the graves of the massacre there. I have listened to Serbs talk about their houses being burnt down and their husbands beaten to death in 2004. I have listened to Albanians tell me about how they watched their families killed in front of their eyes by the hands of Milosevic's army.

It hurts me. I cannot deny it. Of course not as much as they have. The first problem a "third party" faces is the feeling of inability, the feeling of the need to take sides in order to "help." Feeling these frustrations, seeing the suffering, all of this hurts you. You can't understand why they cannot understand that these ethnic hatreds are what perpetuate conflict. Yet at the same time, you know they that even though they may know this, psychology is a funny thing. Death and war does hard things to the mind. Hurt continues.

What I have written here has not come to any conclusion on "who was right and who was wrong." I only wanted to show the mental difficulty of all sides in trying to move on (or understand) after conflict. This is written for those abroad, who have not seen such things as Kosovo. Those Kosovars here, (whether you are Albanian, Serb, Turk, or Egyptian), please understand that I do not want to take sides. I only want to show something to those at home that this conflict is not so easy as they may think. I'm sorry if I have offended anyone, I do not mean to. I am sorry for what has happened to you. I will empathize, but never enough for what you truly deserve. Yet you have a heavy and hard job now to make peace. Change history. Just because fighting happened before, does not mean it has to continue. I have faith in you.