Letter From Peja, Kosovo |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
Letter From Peja, Kosovo
The Serbian enclave in North Mitrovica, Kosovo: the end of the line of many empires. Photograph: Matthew Stevenson.
On a visit to Kosovo in 2007, I decided against renting a car and instead found a local doctor who, in exchange for western currency, was all too happy to drive me around. We went west to Prizren, a lovely Turkish city near the North Macedonian border, and drank coffee in the main square with one of his friends, who was a professor of history.
Chatting in the shadows of the minarets that give Prizren its dramatic feel of the 19th century, if not the tides of the Ottoman Empire, I asked the professor friend what would happen to the Serbian monasteries that had been, so to speak, “left behind” when most of the Serbs departed Kosovo for neighboring countries after the 1999 war.
The professor, who was wearing a suit and tie for our meeting, spat on the ground of the café and said: “With any luck we can burn them to the ground”—a sentiment that has kept KFOR (Kosovo Force NATO troops) on guard outside most of the Serb monuments around Kosovo.
On my last visit to Kosovo in 2019, I sensed the region’s growing prosperity. On that occasion, I took a local Serbian train from the city of Novi Pazar (once called the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, a wedge of the Ottoman empire to prevent Serbia from reaching the sea) to Mitrovica, technically in Kosovo but on the northern banks of the Ibar River.
Before setting out, I had thought—from my rail maps—that the train line went from Serbia all the way through to Pristina and then on to Skopje, in North Macedonia. (After all, in some respects of international law, it was all still one country.) Then the train conductor explained that the “end of line” came in a Mitrovica suburb, from which I could walk to the New Bridge to continue my journey south.
At the last station, I followed the other passengers who in the cold weather trudged toward the city center, where painted on the sides of abandoned buildings I found Russian flags, tributes to the Russian President Vladimir Putin, and angry denunciations of Serb politicians who were selling out both Serbia and history by allowing Kosovo to follow its course to independence.
On the main street, I could look south to the modern steel bridge that spanned the Ibar River to south Mitrovica—except that concrete barriers blocked car traffic from crossing.
Not sure what the barriers meant for my onward passage, I stopped in a café and asked the waiter if I could get across bridge. He said, somewhat bitterly: “You can; I can’t.” Meaning: it was a no-go zone for Serbs in Kosovo, relegated to their enclave and anger.
I drank a cup of €1 coffee, shouldered my backpack, and headed to the........