Sport 24: Summer 2000
Press ESCAPE to Cancel
Press ESCAPE to Cancel
Bruce Connew entered Kosova on June 19, 1999, seven days after Nato troops, and hitchhiked about for eight days.
A man and a woman in a small red car reversed along the dirt berm towards me. I had been hitchhiking less than ten minutes. The previous evening, in Lazio's bar, I had celebrated the Kosova Albanians return with twelve men, including the man driving the small red car. He reminded me of this, because I didn't recognise him. We established, in and out of gesticulations, and some English words, that his wife worked in a laboratory or that's what I thought we had established. When we reached their destination. I looked out the car window while gathering my overnight bag and camera, and observed, through a high wire fence, two men in pyjamas lying in long grass under a warming sun. In the way that photographers do, I took two quick photographs. On seeing me do this, the man from the small red car waved me towards the guarded entrance while his wife turned and grinned embracingly. I pointed to my camera, and then towards the entrance, and he laughed loudly, shouting, 'Free Kosova!' She laughed heartily too. We were at Enti Special Hospital for me Mentally Ill. The wife was the doctor, and her husband was delivering her to her first day back since the bombing began.
page 68 page 69 page 70 page 71 page 72The destruction in Peja was staggering. I walked around and around while loose spouting rang a dirge against itself, and broken plate-glass windows swayed in the breeze, oscillating reflections that caught my eye, startling me. It was spooky. When the few remaining civilian Serbs bussed out, under a Nato escort, perhaps forever, the atmosphere in the small, broken city tangibly shifted, as if an exorcism had concluded. It nudged me back two afternoons to when I had stepped from the car that brought me here. The atmosphere then was unmistakable. It was not a good place to be.
page 73 page 74Ismete Pajaziti, a teacher in Ferizaj, held up her wedding photograph from thirty years ago. Her eldest son sat alongside her. She said the Serbs had come on April 11, to Radijeva village, where she and her family had sought safety. The Serbs demanded her husband cross himself, in a Christian way, and he couldn't, or wouldn't.
‘Are you an Albanian?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Are you an Albanian?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Are you an Albanian?’ ‘Yes.’
They shot him there and then.
A professor from Skopje's university impatiently pulled a card from his wallet. We were in conversation over Turkish coffee after lunch. The card listed the birth rates of Macedonia's various ethnic groups. It was clear that the Albanian ethnic group was the most reproductive. He presented this evidence as plain proof of Macedonia's (and the Balkans') Albanian ‘problem’.
page 85 page 86 page 87 page 88 page 89 page 90‘Press ESCAPE to Cancel’ is a repeating line from one of Jabir Derala's love poems. Jabir is a Balkan poet, writer and journalist. I asked him, amongst other things, to describe his ethnicity: ‘My father is mixed Albanian and Turkish. My mother is mixed Turkish, Croat (Dalmatian) and (a bit) Iraqi. My blood is probably even more mixed, but I don't have time to explore it … it's not a jarring question. I find it very exciting. But, not extraordinary, because we on the Balkans, as the rest of the world, have mixed blood more than we are ready to admit. Somewhere it's a starting point for beautiful achievements, and somewhere it's a reason for bloodshed … I was raised as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, with love for people, regardless of their backgrounds. I am proud to be different. I am completely aware that it brings trouble very often. Almost always, when we mention Balkans (and, not only) … being different brought my father a bullet in the head in 1992 in Stolac. Killed by a Croat. Should I hate Croats, then?! I am a bit of a Croat (25%), too. So, I have to hate a part of myself.’
page 93 page 94I spotted a UN worker with a Polaroid camera, darting in and out of the ranks of returning refugees at Macedonia's Blace border crossing. He even climbed aboard buses waiting in the long queue, urging people off, so he could photograph them. These photographs, quickly developing in the hands of the refugees, would be proof, in the absence of other identification, that they were who they were.
I stayed two nights in separate Serb apartments. In the second, I had a bath, a splendid hot bath, and shaved in the same mirror used by the absent owners. They had been gone several weeks (their calendar said May, and it was now June 25), but they had left everything, even milk on the bench that had curdled, as if they had expected to be back in the afternoon. Three towels hung from a line that stretched the length of the bathroom. As I looked up from their bath, it crossed my mind that they might never see these towels again.
page 101 page 102 page 103
DESIGN
AND
TYPOGRAPHY
CATHERINE GRIFFITHS, epitome