Prisoner in Kosovo - American activist; member of Peaceworkers

Progressive, The, July, 1998 by Peter Lippman

In March, I became a prisoner in Kosovo, along with a group of activists from Peaceworkers, a California-based organization that monitors human-rights abuses and promotes nonviolent conflict resolution. I arrived in Kosovo as part of the Peaceworkers' delegation, at the invitation of the Independent Student Union there.

We witnessed the brutality of the Serbian government in this Albanian-populated province. And we noted the remarkable efforts of Kosovo's Albanian citizenry to stave off disaster by engaging in creative nonviolence.

In Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, we met the people who are holding together the infrastructure of Albanian society--professors, doctors, journalists, and human-rights workers.

The dean of philology at Pristina's underground university told us how, in 1991, the Belgrade regime had imposed an exclusively Serbian-language curriculum. When the Albanian professors refused to teach the curriculum, they were fired. The same thing happened in the high schools. Teachers and professors soon set up a parallel educational system in private rooms, basements, and storefronts.

We visited an English class in an unheated, empty store. The students sat on makeshift wooden benches, wearing their coats, hats, and gloves. The young teacher shivered as she gave a lesson in prefixes: neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism, pan-Hellenic, pan-Balkan.

All of the college-educated people we spoke with said they were convinced that their conflict with the Serbian regime must be resolved peacefully. One of our young translators was the most eloquent. Asked how she felt about the Kosovo Liberation Army, she responded, "Did anyone ever win a war? You can take territory, but everyone still loses."

At the same time, many people are at the end of their patience. A journalist said to me, "Each night I go to bed knowing that the police can break into my apartment and do whatever they want to my family. This is psychological terrorism. Every parent is a potential fighter." One student in the English class told us, "If the police hurt my father or my brother, I will have to fight."

At the student union office, I looked at pictures of the victims from Drenica, the region west of Pristina where Serbian police and paramilitary units surrounded more than a dozen villages in late February and massacred at least ninety people. I saw photos of the bodies of old people, men, women, and children. Many had been shot at close range. Half of one woman's face was gone.

Later I watched the Serbian television coverage. Only the male victims, that is, "terrorists," showed up on TV.

We met a former Serbian politician who was forced out of his job after he spoke against the regime when it took away Kosovo's autonomy. We asked what would happen to him if he protested now against massacres of Albanian civilians. "Probably the same thing that happened to the people in Drenica," he said.

Another Serb we met, a shopkeeper, said he had friends and customers among the Albanians. He came close to tears when he talked about the Albanian woman who used to take care of his children. He told us he wished the Albanians would receive their independence so that things could calm down.

But his mood changed when we brought up the recent massacre. "I knew some of those policemen who got killed," he said. "In America, what do you do with your terrorist problem? You hunt them down and shoot them, right? I am just waiting to leave here."

The shopkeeper blamed the Kosovo Liberation Army for the troubles in the region. But he also expressed hateful views of the Albanian people generally. "The Albanians just think about sex and guns," he said. "If they have two wives and we have one, they can have ten or fifteen children, and we usually just have two. And they always make sure to have lots of guns. The Albanians I know here in town are mostly normal. But not those in the villages. Did you see the pictures of the people who were killed? They looked like monkeys."

At noon on Friday, March 13, my colleagues and I walked up a muddy hill in Pristina to observe a protest. Demonstrators chose the hillside location, among other reasons, because of its inaccessibility except by foot. No cars could make a sudden attack. The demonstration started earlier than announced, so the police wouldn't have time to block it. About 50,000 people stood among the houses on the edge of a sloped field. They sang freedom songs, waved Albanian and American flags, carried signs saving, Serbian Terror Out of Kosovo, NATO: S.O.S., and Drenica, We're With You. Protesters made speeches, and then the demonstration broke up. The crowd marched down Qafa Street, renamed Yugoslav National Army Street by the Serbian government.

We went to visit the Mother Teresa clinic, located in a small house in the poor part of Pristina. It is the only free women's clinic in Kosovo, staffed by doctors and nurses who donate their time. One doctor told us about her surreal firing from the state hospital in 1990 by a policeman wearing a doctor's white coat, holding a gun in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.