PICTURE STORY Tim Judah’s Kosovo September 2007 Tim Judah’s Kosovo It is the last piece of the jigsaw. Of all the issues that remain from the destruction of Yugoslavia, Kosovo still defies solution. Will it become independent? When? How? Will it be divided or will it, somehow, remain part of Serbia? We at ESI have long recognised the importance of the Kosovo issue but we have also recognised just how important it is to present our readers with accurate information and on this Balkan issue above all solid facts come at a premium. Now, as part of our series bringing you extracts of some of the best books on the region we have teamed up with Yale University Press to bring you Tim Judah's Kosovo: War and Revenge. We think it is the best book on Kosovo that there is and, over the last few years it has become established as a must read for anyone going to work or serve there and for students of the region. It has also been translated and published in both Kosovo and Serbia. What make's Judah's Kosovo different from most other books on the region is that he combines a reporter's eye for colour and life but never lets up on the facts. Don't forget that you won't find the whole history of Kosovo in these extracts. They are here to give you a guide to its past. For the full story, you will have to read the book! Tim Judah covers Kosovo and the rest of the region for The Economist. As a journalist he covered all the wars of the former Yugoslavia. In recent years he has also reported from North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur amongst other places, but the Balkans remains his specialism. He is the also the author of The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, also published by Yale. www.esiweb.org Table of contents 1999: Expulsion from Priština .................................................................................................... 4 1999: Massacre at Meja .............................................................................................................. 5 1999: Revenge – The Serbs Pay the Price .................................................................................. 6 1916: Kossovo Day .................................................................................................................... 7 1908: Kill or be Killed ............................................................................................................... 8 History: War by Other Means .................................................................................................... 9 1389: Empire of Heaven .......................................................................................................... 10 1878: The League of Prizren .................................................................................................... 11 1906: The Most Miserable Corner of Europe .......................................................................... 12 1912: For Kosovo – Kumanovo ............................................................................................... 13 1918-24: The Kaçaks ............................................................................................................... 15 The Lausanne Principle ............................................................................................................ 16 1941: Greater Albania .............................................................................................................. 17 Brothers with the Yugoslavs .................................................................................................... 18 Nations and Nationalities ......................................................................................................... 20 1981: Kosovo-Republic! .......................................................................................................... 21 Statistics and Lies ..................................................................................................................... 23 1986: The Memorandum .......................................................................................................... 24 1989: Gazimestan ..................................................................................................................... 26 Ibrahim Rugova: Staying Alive ................................................................................................ 27 Fury, Rage and Hatred ............................................................................................................. 28 Attack him with your teeth! ..................................................................................................... 29 The Enverists ............................................................................................................................ 30 The Road of Sorrow ................................................................................................................. 31 Surroi: What we fought for? ..................................................................................................... 32 Forgive and Forget? ................................................................................................................. 34 www.esiweb.org - 4 - 1999: Expulsion from Priština Tim Judah's book is not simply a history of Kosovo. As a journalist he has covered Kosovo's recent past, from the early 1990s to the present. So, a strand of reportage, of what he saw and of what people told him, runs through the book from beginning to end. The preface begins with three eyewitness accounts from the war in 1999. In the first, Migjen Kelmendi, the well known Kosovo Albanian writer and journalist explains how, when NATO's bombing campaign began on 24 March Train from Pristina 1999 he had gone into hiding. Then, as the Serbian police began clearing Priština, he borrowed a baby and pretended to be part of a family: The police gathered a group of two or three thousand people in the street and then prodded them in the direction of the station. "They were driving us like cattle. The children were screaming and the elderly were very slow." They marched down Priština's main street, past the theatre and the Hotel Grand. "The saddest bit was that, along the way, I saw bunches of people, Serbs. They looked at us with complete indifference. It was unimaginable. When they got to the station there were already some 25-30,000 people there. They were waiting for the train to take them to Macedonia. NATO planes wheeled in the sky above and people began to cheer and clap, until they heard shooting and fell silent. Eventually the train arrived. "At that moment, "the animal instinct in everyone, including me came out," said Kelmendi. Everyone surged forward, fighting and shoving. "The strongest got on and then got their families in through the windows." In each cabin there were thirty people and the corridors were jam packed too. There was no air and there was no water. Children were crying while parents were hunting for the ones they had lost. There were about 7-10,000 people crammed on board. The train crept out of Priština but kept stopping because people kept pulling the emergency communication cord. When they got to the first station, "police stood on the platform while exasperated Serb railwaymen worked their way down the train with a mechanical key trying to turn off the emergency brake system." Eventually the train crossed the frontier to Macedonia. Immediately over the frontier, Kelmendi turned on his mobile phone. He had been far too frightened to use it while he was in hiding. It rang straight away. It was his wife. She was in Montenegro. She was crying: "You're alive, you're alive!" Of course, the Kelmendis were lucky. [pp. xiv-xv] Kosovo: War and Revenge. 2002, Second Edition. [Yale University Press] www.esiweb.org - 5 - 1999: Massacre at Meja On the night of 27-28 April 1999 Judah stood on the Albanian side of the border with Kosovo at a place called Morina. Refugees, or rather people who had just been ethnically cleansed at gunpoint were flooding through. They were a group of about 2,000 from villages near Djakovica, Gjakova in Albanian. Judah talked to some of the people on the first tractor-trailers. They said that they had started their journey with 37 packed on the trailer but that at a hamlet called Meja, the police took ten men off. A 15-year-old boy was then ordered to drive. They told me that, apart from small boys, he was the only male left on their trailer. This was not quite true. A middle aged man said: "I have a bad leg. One policeman said 'Get out' and the other said 'Stay in.'" They left a blind man too. Then I saw an old man sitting in the corner, still cutting a fine figure in his traditional felt cap and with a curly grey moustache. "What about him?" I asked. "We forgot the old man," laughed Sevdie Rexha, the young woman I was talking to. Reburial The people on the next couple of tractors said the same thing. Many of their men had been taken off at Meja and they had seen them sitting in a field under police guard. A little later more tractors began to rumble across the border: A dog sniffed at the first one across. "Did you see the men in the field at Meja?" I asked. The tractor was still moving. These people were in shock, their eyes red from crying. "They killed them, they killed them," shouted a woman as she passed. I ran to catch up. "In a field…in a field…more than a hundred…they took two from us…They're dead! They're dead!" A hundred metres away Sevdie Rexha, the old man, the blind man, the lame man and the rest