| Inke Arns on Tue, 12 Oct 1999 18:30:19 -0400 |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
| Syndicate: <nettime> Shala: Personal impressions from my working trip to Kosovo |
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 14:54:18 +0200 From: Albana Shala <[email protected]> Subject: <nettime> Personal impressions from my working trip to Kosovo To: [email protected] Personal impressions from my working trip to Kosovo Albana Shala I have been dealing with Kosovo media since early 1998, but it was not possible for me to travel to the country due to the visa issue. Holding an Albanian passport made it impossible. Therefore this was my first trip to Kosovo, precisely Prishtina, due to the fact that most of the media projects are concentrated there, and out of the capital security falls rapidly. I flied from Tirana to Prishtina with World Food Programme plane, which offers its service to NGOs working the region. Still no air companies fly to Prishtina. The streets were full of people, and until the early hours of the morning I could listen sound of the music played near the only operative hotel in Prishtina, hotel Grand. Hotel Grand, once owned and run by the Serbs, now was run by people related to the so-called Provisional Government, extremely polite and helpful. Though it keeps the five stars, at least three of the stars have been falling with time and particularly during the months of the war, in which Arkan guys, I was told used to run the place. Many of our media counterparts with whom I had meetings did not like to use Hotel Grand facilitiesâ?¦ â??before we could hardly touch ground here, one did only raise suspicion while waiting for a foreigner in the hallâ?? â?? explains Sanije Gashi, the editor in chief of Teuta the only independent monthly magazine that exclusively deals with womenâ??s issues. â??For dogs and Albanians there was no entryâ??. As I previously mentioned, neither under Enver Hoxhaâ??s regime, nor during the 90s could Albanians of Albania travel to Kosova. I have not seen the â??ghost cityâ?? as one Dutch official working in the country told me, therefore most of my impressions are influenced by comparisons made with the country I come from. The streets of Prishtina remind me of the streets of Tirana, during 1991-1992, full of people, people who came in the capital in order to find a new home, but people who have left homes for very different reasons. For the first time after nearly 50 years, Albanians of Albania could travel freely throughout their country; Northerners soon called pejoratively â??malokâ?? or â??shpellareâ?? could finally meet and talk with the Southerners. These encounters did not resemble those folk festival celebrations usually organised in the birth town of Hoxha. I remember the curious, hungry eyes, who quickly overrun shame and took over aggressively the false quietness of the urbans; a defiant and often openly aggressive encounter of individuals who did not wish anymore to live together as â??one - in unity, as under siegeâ??, each of them in search of a prosperous life. Many talk of â??euphoriaâ?? in Prishtina, I did not feel that. What I felt was more the remainder of â??self-containmentâ?? - the key word used by many to describe Kosovars of the 90s. (Not a single shooting was heard in Prishtina on the day of demilitarisation). What I heard was Albanian music played so loudly by recorders placed on the pavements, and what I saw were many parked cars on the pavement. â??This did not used to happen before in our cityâ?? â?? told to me one of the old citizens of Prishtina. I saw people who just wonder for hours in the streets, many disoriented, many in search of a new home, in search of a job, in search of a telephone line that works. I also witnessed the 24 hrs hunger strike of the relatives of the ones that are still kept in prisons in Serbia. Yet apart from media, some of which Press Now supports, and whose journalists consistently report, pointing sharply at what is happening and what happened in the capital and throughout Kosovo, I could feel a certain reluctance on the side of many to talk about what has happened during the past months, how they managed to escape, and the border episodes. â??My father goes daily to his village, with some help from the humanitarian agencies, he is trying to put his house together, it was burned to the groundâ?? told me my friend Astrit. Not a single word more. They are even more reluctant when I ask them about the Serbs that used to live in Kosovo. When I insist for an answer the reaction is like â??letâ??s not open up the woundsâ??. The only Serbs I met, in Hotel Grand, were Zvonko Tarke, a journalist originally from Croatia, who together with his committed wife last July started Radio Contact, an independent Serb-Albanian station. The station was then closed down by the Serb regime, as soon as it started broadcasting. Tarle does not live these days in Prishtina, but he is thinking of coming back soon to restart again with the station. What should not happen is that the station gets closed again. In order to ensure that, in order to ensure that the â??self-containedâ??, but homeless Albanians from the rural areas do not take over the capital, to ensure that Kosovo does not go down the road of anarchy (as 1997 Albania did), KFOR, UNMIK, OSCE and international community have to be present there and govern carefully Kosovo, for some time, in order to give to the people a chance to heal, to substantiate their present and their hopes for an independent future. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] i n k e . a r n s __________________________ b e r l i n ___ 49.(0)30.3136678 | [email protected] | http://www.v2.nl/~arns/ mikro: http://www.mikro.org | Syndicate: http://www.v2.nl/syndicate ------Syndicate mailinglist-------------------- Syndicate network for media culture and media art information and archive: http://www.v2.nl/syndicate to unsubscribe, write to <[email protected]> in the body of the msg: unsubscribe [email protected]