Kosovo drama

Act One

Hopes

We are born and we die with hopes. We hope when we celebrate and grieve. We hope every morning and every evening before sleep. The hope dies last. We live in hope that is defining our feelings and our aspirations. The hope is what keeps us alive and motivates us. I woke up the other day and realized that soon I will be 40. I solemnly marked the 40 years of hopes jubilee. Sometimes I ask myself, what is it my peer from Lausanne or Reykjavik or maybe Budapest is hoping for? How realistically justified are their fears, and how essentially attainable are their hopes? I understand that my fears and my hopes have no roaming. They are not overly attributable and applicable on my imaginary friends from nearby European cities. Perhaps my fears and my hopes could be rather approximated to the fears and hopes of friends, let’s say from Sudan or Syria. One would say that my hopes are simple, and yet they seem unattainable. I realize that I have spent most of my life in constant hope that there will be no war, and I have already experienced three of them. That the hatred will stop, that I will be free, that my children will be safe. For years now, I have been waking up in hope that I will work, move, love, be free. Now I realize that I will celebrate 40th anniversary of the improvisation of life. It seems that we have acquired an incredible ability to absorb and adapt to extraordinary circumstances, political insecurity. We have only built the ability to tolerate various nonsense, hatred and injustice while persistently poisoning us with various artificial topics, fabricated problems and an abnormally large amount of hatred. I wonder what happens to a man when he stops hoping. Does he cease to exist, or does he become an ordinary hater and why are there so many of them.

Act Two

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?? (Matthew 20.3).

Life in Kosovo is anything but simple. I lived in four countries without ever moving. From one dysfunctional system we entered into another. Bad as the previous one only further adorned with huge prejudices and misfortune. We deal with pejorative topics such as climate change, lack of parking and other nonsenses, while timidly, almost ceremoniously, we play like pagans around a fire that threatens to swallow us and take with us the last thread that makes us unique, free and proud people. We have long been accustomed to behavioral matrices and thought patterns. Such paradigms have become the only sociological forms of recognition. We are either nationalists, or fascists, or we are traitors and quislings. We are rarely free. Even more rarely we deal with solving essential problems, and we do not try to solve the accumulated and still solvable problems of our social relations, within one or between our ethnic groups. Ability to self-criticize, i.e. to deal with one’s own flaws. I guess it’s easier to constantly point the finger. We draw historical arguments; we flirt with facts because someone else is always to blame. The people of this area have successfully inflicted a huge amount of evil and injustice on each other. Grieving mothers, raped women, disenfranchised children, destroyed graves and shrines, that’s exactly what the product of our conflicts is. Essentially nothing has changed. Despite the strong cleverness and intolerance generated by our politburos, the reality is that we have not made substantial progress in relation to all the problems that have been served upon us in the form of ideological inevitability in which we are forced to classify our modest existence in this region.

Act three

Twist

Our new generation of political representatives is recycling old, but proven successful, topics on which they continuously incite animosity, inequality, and intolerance. Words such as genocide, crime, territory, and government have become ordinary platitudes that further incite hatred thus generating a general sense of being under threat and create a climate of lynching. Such an atmosphere exists only to justify the inability or lack of desire to solve problems, that is, to solve them systematically and continuously. The fact is that social relations in Kosovo have been brought to a level of hatred and mistrust. It is also a fact that relevant institutions do not enforce their own laws, which one can see in the example of Dečane/Deçan. It is utterly paradoxical that the Serbian Orthodox Church insists that Kosovo respects the laws of Kosovo. I no longer even know how to characterize the completely mindless performance around the Church of Christ the Savior in Pristina. Instead of congratulating each other on the holidays, exchanging baklava and Easter eggs, in the 21st century, in the middle of Europe, we stand over destroyed tombstones, feeding on hatred as a sad response to general systemic failure. Worse than the artificially generated hatred and intolerance is only the lack of reaction from civil society and prominent intellectuals. We all seem to be silent until he gets stuck in front of our door.  The parade statements of political representatives, in which, almost dreamingly, they describe the future of Kosovo resembling Switzerland, that only serves to hide the empirical fact that, not only are we far from such a Europe, but we are also successfully pushing away. I guess the basic urge to fight against the system, ideal for citizens to manage their institutions, pass and implement laws that protect the rights and freedoms of citizens, and build a society based on trust, tolerance of diversity. Do we still know what we want? Is there any hope left or only hatred has survived?

Act Four

Power to the People

Maybe coexistence in tolerance is possible, I tell myself, to encourage myself more. I conclude poetically that it takes two to tango. We need to teach ourselves to respect our own laws, not only in order to declaratively classify ourselves as a European nation, but also to essentially regulate the society in which we live. The system of government in Kosovo is not good. Our laws are not good. The phrase that we have good laws that are not enforced is just a lackey’s justification for bad laws that do not contain punitive measures good enough to stimulate enforcement. Kosovo’s constitutional framework envisages, i.e. provides a space for broad decentralization of Kosovo municipalities in line with Western models. Decentralization, which has never been completed, persistently stifles the functionality of local institutions and systematically distances citizens from them. Of course, this problem applies to all municipalities and all nationalities. The fact is that sooner or later we will have to deal with serious issues of organizing our society, not only from the position of nationality but also from the position of citizens who manage the system in which they live. Institutions must protect the rights of their citizens and not compete with them. Local governments must dispose of their property, decide on investments. Civil servants have to become both civil and servants, certainly replaceable. In short, despite the negotiations, law enforcement and organization of society can be neither the subject of bargaining nor an explanation for inaction. It just doesn’t work that way. The media in Kosovo must become socially responsible and not party media that serve banalities to our already rather impoverished souls. Finally, our history does not begin with Milosevic or end with him, but our future begins now.

Act Five

Utopia

I guess we are aware enough that the most important thing is how our children will live. What social order we leave to future generations. I want to believe that an essential dialogue is possible and that the precondition is for us to play in the same team. In order to play in the same team, it is necessary to build trust, and in order to build trust, it is necessary for hatred to stop. I still hope. I hope so because I have two children that I raised exactly the opposite of what is currently imposed franchise of hysteria that is ruthlessly imposed on us in socio-political narratives. My people have committed atrocities against your people. Your people have committed atrocities against my people. Our institutions do not protect my rights. You are silent. When our institutions violate your rights, there will be no one to rebel against it, because we will no longer have anything to hope for. And when the last hope dies, only the graveyards of our imagined futures will remain, over which there will be no one left who will be able to plant the flag of victory.

Within Kosovo Collective Op-Ed series

Opinions expressed in this oped series do not necessarily represent those of the Balkan Trust for Democracy, the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. (BTD), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), or the U.S. Government. 

The project is supported by the Balkan Trust for Democracy of the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. and USAID.