B. A man’s war: Skënderbeu, Milošević & Femi’s jade water
In China, where I spent the early years of my
childhood, the fireworks blossomed out like roses in full red bloom,
celebrating festivals, holidays, and, even once, Hong Kong’s return to the
mainland after two centuries of British rule. In Kosovo, my home from age ten
to fifteen, fireworks were scarce, as most things were—water, electricity,
food, heat, doctors, teachers. But one thing we had in plenty: M16s. Even
Pastor Femi had one leaned up behind his front door, in the room where we took
off our shoes to visit around cups of çaj,
pistachio wafers, rice pudding, Coca-Cola from glass bottles. The entire nation
was armed to the teeth in the aftermath of the war. On New Year’s Even, while
the rest of Europe celebrated with fireworks, all of Kosovo ran out into the
streets, shrieking and firing guns into the air. My mother and I stood on our
balcony beside the pile of wood she chopped each morning to heat our house,
listening to the roar of automatic weapons across the city, humming like bees
in their hive.
In the early years, when we lived in Ferizaj only
months after the war’s end, farmers sent their cows and horses out onto their
land to graze and to clear the landmines, watching their cattle blow sky high.
All too often, children playing in the woods or fields found them instead. My
family often hiked on Sunday afternoons in Gërmi, Kosovo’s national park that
boasted a long, shallow swimming pool filled with emerald green water, a
petting zoo consisting of goats and rabbits, and the city’s annual celebration
of National Socialist Day. Along the paths we hiked, the sun dancing pale green
through the leaves, every fourth or fifth tree trunk displayed an emphatic orange
sign lettered with a warning against leaving the designated path and bearing
the symbol of a mine exploding.
In those days, from the time I was ten to the summer
I turned fifteen, we lived in the capital city, Prishtinë. My mother and I often visited the Prishtinë plaza downtown by the theater and Nënë Tereza
Street with its cappuccino shops and pizzerias, buying byrek from the bakeries
and walking to the treg, the Albanian outdoor market that sold everything
imaginable—gold Turkish coffee pots, batteries, bags of walnuts and red
peppers, wedding lace, live chickens. After we finished our shopping, we often
stopped in the plaza to sit on the broad steps, angled like an square amphitheater
looking down toward a fierce bronze monument of a 15th century
Albanian war hero, Skënderbeu. Skënderbeu was a lord who successfully defended the
Albanian people from the Ottomans, rallying an army that resisted the Ottomans
for over two decades. In his day, he was famed for his bravery and nobility, so
much so that Vivaldi even wrote an opera about his life. As a ten year old, I
was enamoured of him. Every time we passed his statue, I felt the rush of a
cheer rippling up from my toes and fighting to burst out. Sometimes I saluted;
sometimes I talked to him almost like praying. I envisioned myself on a horse
beside him, charging out across the Field of Blackbirds to face the Turks,
brandishing my saber and howling.
If Skënderbeu was my hero, Milošević was my devil. I
often passed by a certain fence near the parliament building whenever I rode
the bus downtown. The fence was papered with hundreds of photographs of young
people missing after the war, a protest organized by grieving parents
frustrated with the government’s efforts to find their children. The
photographs were posed, like the portraits American students take their senior
year of high school. Their faces haunted me as I passed by. The war in Kosovo
was a man’s war, led by Milošević and his armies against the Albanian people
after their nationalistic Kosovo Liberation Army began to violently resist Milošević
after enduring years of punishment and repression at his hands. It was a man’s
war—fought by men, because of men, against men, men killing men—but I read the
story of the war in the faces of the women and children I knew there, in the
wrinkles of my nanny Tete Lumturije, in Riada’s sudden silences whenever any
mention was made of those war torn years, in the innocent, smiling portraits
outside parliament, and in the tears of the mothers making weekly pilgrimages
to the fence to pray for their missing. Though the colours faded with the
years, dark eyes bleached pale by the sun and weather, the memory of those rows
of children remains as vivid as when I first saw them nine years ago.
Though the war was over, thousands of soldiers
remained behind to keep the peace and lead the nation back toward stability. Despite
their peaceful mission, military rule hardly made me feel safe. I remember
standing on street corners for what seemed like ages, waiting as to cross over
to the other side as mile-long military convoys barreled by. I remember waking
up in the morning to find that the clay road we lived on had been torn up by
tank treads, the ground churned up in two long trails. I remember the soldiers
coming to shoot the packs of vicious strays that lived in our neighbourhood,
jumping out of Hummers and mowing down dozens of dogs outside our front door
and in our garden.
When I was twelve, far away in German boarding
school, ethnic tensions agitated the people into conflict, and widespread
violence broke out between Albanians and Serbs for the first time since the
war. This time, though, the Kosovar anger extended to foreigners as well, as
resentment had grown against the Western powers that still occupied the land.
The tensions led to attacks, which led to riots, which led to a pogrom that
raged across Prishtinë, burning
United Nations trucks, targeting the NATO headquarters, and burning churches,
symbols of Serbia’s Orthodoxy. When the Serbian armies burned houses during the
war, soldiers often painted the sign of the cross on the rubble, and the
Albanians retaliated during the pogrom with their own vengeful fire, lobbing
Molotov cocktails into the churches near my house.
In the midst of the chaos, armed men broke into my house in the dark
of the evening, ripping my three-year-old brother out of the bathtub and holding
my mother at gunpoint downstairs, demanding money and valuables. My father wasn’t
there. He was at church, holding a prayer service with Pastor Femi, praying for
the peace of the city. My mother called him as soon as the men left, and he ran
through the streets with riot police shooting at him as he broke through their
ranks and raced toward our house, shouting the word “home” in every language he
knew.
They shot our neighbour in the leg, the same neighbour who had framed
the bullet holes in his wall after Serbian troops shot his Kosovo Liberation
Army poster during the war, when they occupied both his house and ours. Our
floors those five years were pocked and scarred with the marks of Serbian
army-issue cleats. When Milošević died in prison, I was wracked with guilt. For years, I had
wished for his death, and I felt the angels look down on me and cringe.
To be continued?
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