Advice On How To Eat Honey In The Morning: Independence For Kosovo

 

New Albanian vocabulary: njohje (recognition), diell me dhëmbë (sun with teeth)

 

 

Independence speculation was growing. On Friday 15 February, Rob came home from work with a posh envelope, lined with tissue paper like a box of chocolates. When I opened it I found a very precious gift– an invitation from the President of Kosovo, for us to attend the concert to celebrate Kosovan Independence. All the details of time and venue twirled in italics around the card. Only the ‘date’ section was left blank.

The information to complete that blank section had been missing for a very long time. Not only the month but even the year had been a matter for speculation ever since we had arrived in Kosovo. At the political briefing we were given by a British Office researcher on our first day, in June 2006, we had been told that ‘final status’ (the phrase sounded chilling) should be resolved by December that year. In December, it became clear that the New Year would pass without a decision, but the Kosovars were asked for patience.

In February 2007, Martti Ahtisaari, the UN Special Envoy to Kosovo, presented his ‘package’ of recommendations for the final status of Kosovo, which included, in its covering letter only, the word ‘independence’. But neither independence, nor any other final status solution was agreed that month, nor in the weeks that passed. When Bush and Putin met at Camp David in early July 2007, experts predicted that Kosovo would be part of their discussion, and of the compromise they would reach.

But it wasn’t. Instead, a new team was brought together – a new set of heads to bang against the brick wall of Belgrade, Pristina, and Russia’s unfaltering stance on Kosovo’s future. Russia had only grown more powerful during the time I had been waiting for independence; the price of oil had gone up. The ‘troika’ of representatives of the EU, the US and Russia met with delegations from both Serbia and Kosovo over a period of four months. Rob went to Vienna in Çeku’s entourage for some of these discussions, and came back pessimistic. The troika finally shared his view: there was no room for compromise, no common ground, and no way to keep the resolution of Kosovo’s final status part of a UN process.

Elections in Kosovo and then elections in Serbia caused further delays. I felt I had waited long enough for this declaration of independence, which was now being spoken of, prepared for – but not yet confirmed officially – as 17 February 2008. I mentioned my impatience one day to the owner of the corner shop. His answer in Albanian translates to something like ‘you think you’ve been waiting a long time?’ He reminded me that he’d waited not just all his lifetime, but for lifetime after lifetime – generation after generation as his family had fought, waited, lobbied, endured, then fought some more for this day.

So there was a mixed sense in Kosovo as February wore on. When I asked one of my more passionately Albanian Kosovar friends what he was going to do to celebrate independence, he said, ‘not much’. There were many people objecting to the terms (such as the positive dis- crimination for Serbs and the disproportionate weight of their votes in the Assembly) that Kosovo had accepted in order for their declaration of independence to be likely to be recognised by other countries; he said he felt it was all too little too late.

And, after all, the intention to declare independence still hadn’t been announced. For reasons that were variously alleged to be conspiracy, cowardice, or cleverness, it was only a rumour that was identifying the big day as the 17th.

Many people still couldn’t believe it was really going to happen.

On Saturday 16 February, Rob and I drove to Ana’s village for a Serbian lesson. Ana was clearly terrified. We had always been careful not to discuss politics, and she still said nothing against the independence of Kosovo itself, but she did speak softly about her fears of the violence she thought might erupt against non-Albanian minorities from Kosovo Albanians cock-a-hoop that their centuries-old dream had been realised. Her shaky muttering answers to questions were a sobering reminder of the implications of independence for some Kosovars. After the lesson, as we drove out of her little village inhabited only by Serbs, I wondered what the people we passed were thinking when they saw the British number plates on our car. It was no secret that the British were carefully nudging Kosovo into independence from Serbia.

As we passed the café, people turned their heads to watch us go. They had probably done this every time we drove here, and they probably did it to every car that passed, but I was jittery now, catching Ana’s nerves. I felt very conspicuous through the windows of our car, and I remembered the stories I’d heard of stones being thrown at vehicles with the wrong number plates in the wrong part of Kosovo. It seems a ridiculous gesture when I look back at it now, but with an uninformed instinct for self-defence I reached behind me and picked up my hat from the back seat. I put it on, pulling the brim down low over my eyes. Rob shifted his glance from the road.’

What are you doing?’’

I thought that my eyes might be protected from broken window glass this way.’

We drove on in silence and I wondered what went through Ana and Zorica’s minds whenever they came to visit us in central Pristina.

Our journey from Ana’s that day was taking us beyond Pristina. We were heading for a wonderful bookshop we had heard about in a corner of Kosovo that particularly needs wonderful concepts. The shop is in the centre of the southern (Albanian) half of the ethnically- divided-town-of-Mitrovica. The journalists’ epithet has attached itself to the town almost as effectively as the stuttering spelling of it – Mitrovicë/a– which awkwardly mixes both the Albanian and Serbian endings, as is politically correct, given its awkwardly mixed population.

But once we’d joined the main road, the journey to Blackbird Books seemed less threatening. It was like watching a smile spread across a country. At first there was just the occasional car hooting its horn jubilantly the way we were used to hearing at Kosovan weddings (though of course this was really a divorce).The horns grew louder, more confident, more numerous as the miles and the minutes passed by. There were ever-increasing numbers of people in small groups, larger groups, small crowds, singing in the streets, cars flying flags, buildings flying flags, banners of congratulation and triumph all whipped by a winter wind.

The flags were mainly the black Albanian double-headed eagle on a red background – appropriate enough for the 92 per cent of the population who are Albanians, but sounding a slightly sour note to anyone hoping that this was a celebration of a sustainably multi-ethnic Kosovo. At that point, however, there was no other flag that could be identified as Kosovan. From a public competition in which my rather fine red, black and blue fountain was not accepted, a shortlist had been drawn up. But who is going to celebrate by flying a shortlist?

Nevertheless, it was not only eagles fluttering around Blackbird Books. Alongside the Albanian flag was the NATO emblem, there were stars with stripes as well as on the blue background of Europe, and a satisfying number of Union Jacks. One Pristina taxi company had all of its cabs flying a flag at each wing mirror – the Albanians’ on the left and the United Kingdom’s on the right. In all, there were probably more Union Jacks flying in one place than I’d seen since Charles and Diana’s wedding. A poster series had been pasted up across the capital with the Union Jack and the positive if slightly bewildering slogan ‘The association friends of USA, friends of President Clinton. THANK YOU We Albanians will not forget what have done for us the Britannic friend people and his aleats.’ The poster was sponsored by a fuel company who said they sell ‘oil’, and a language school who perhaps hadn’t worked closely with their co-sponsors recently.

And there were more flags still going up. We saw people at the side of the road, worrying about how best to tuck theirs into car doors, and tableaux like the front garden where a man worked with his three-year- old son who solemnly held the hammer while his dad forced a flagpole into the freezing ground.

Some people were doing a roaring trade. Sellers of flags, of course. But also stalls with red and black wristbands, ashtrays, lighters, T-shirts. My favourite T-shirt had a picture of the unlovely Adem Jashari, a local thug turned nationalist hero when he held out for three days in his compound of family houses against the disproportionate fire power of the Yugoslav army. Photos of Jashari in other contexts leave me cold, but this one instead gave me Goosebumps. The slogan said ‘bac, u krye’. ‘Bac’ is a term of respect for an old man, for which we disrespectful English have no translation. ‘Sir’ is too formal; ‘dad’ too familiar. The rest of the slogan translates as ‘job done’. It gave me Goosebumps I suppose because it was wonderful to think that the job might be done. Not that the Serbs were finally beaten (though that was one way of reading it), but that all that fighting and dying – which seemed by implication to be glorified whenever people hung a picture of Jashari in their office or home – really was over.

We discovered when we reached Mitrovica that Blackbird Books, by contrast, was not doing a roaring trade. There was a power cut and the door didn’t open properly. When the guy inside had tugged at it to let us in I explained our reason for coming. Firstly, and most simply, we had heard that this was a place where young literary Mitrovica hangs out. And we wanted to reach young literary Mitrovica because of the literary competition Rob was organising, for which he wanted as wide a range of entries as possible. So we handed over a brick of leaflets about the competition, and explained our second interest in the Blackbirds. We had heard that the shop operated as a library, exchange, and market. Some of the second-hand books and DVDs were available to read on the sofas and chairs provided; some were available to swap (we had brought an English translation of some Albanian stories we had been given recently, but which we already owned a copy of. It turned out that the shop had one already too), and others to buy. I was tempted by The Time Traveller’s Wife – the most wonderful book I had read in 2007, and one I would give as a present to anyone I really liked. But we were told that the person in charge today wasn’t really ‘authorised’ to sell us any- thing. He was only standing in for someone who wouldn’t be back for some hours, and the organiser of the shop was away in America, his home.

I was sad that the owner wasn’t in – I had heard that he was a bee- keeper. But for now it was a cold February day, with all the relevant people away, and our money and our book swap being refused, so we decided we should leave, with our Albanian short stories still in our bag, throwing ourselves back into living the last chapter of the lengthy narrative of Kosovo’s quest for independence.

But back in Pristina, there was still no news of anything definite for the next day, despite the adrenaline running high in everyone we spoke to. We dealt with it in our own ways; Rob went out with friends, into Pristina’s hubbub to drink and talk (the same conversation over and over; would it be tomorrow? How would it be done? Might the celebrations get out of hand? Which countries would recognise Kosovo’s independence once it was declared? Who would be first? How many EU states would recognise? Another raki?). I stayed at home, feeling tension tingle and tighten in every fibre of my body. I had no appetite, and no concentration. I would have been terrible company.

We woke the next morning with the same sense of uncertain jubilation around us. Making notes as I lay in bed at 10 am, I had a sense that I might end up looking like Michael Fish in 1987, gesturing benignly at his weather map. And what was there to say? So far, nothing had happened.

Except the black birds, perhaps like harbingers of historical significance. They perched on the roof overhanging our window; they tapped with their fearsome beaks on the satellite dish I could see from the bed. They came up close to the glass and looked cold – there were icicles suspended above them from the eaves, and each of their movements stirred up flurries of the powdery settled snow that swirled along with what was already falling in a light gusty wind.

There was only one fact of everything that I had read on the inter- net so far that day that, despite the ghost of Michael Fish, I trusted to turn out to be true, on this day when anything could happen. That was the online weather forecast that told me that we would have a high of-5 degrees, and a low of -11. So far, the day was what the Albanians call’sun with teeth’ – a stunning bright sunlight glittering on the snow- covered roofs that I could see across the street.

For the rest, who knew what would happen? There was the sense of being at the beginning of a slow crescendo though the only music I had heard since waking up was the solitary wail of a passing car playing a patriotic Albanian song. Since it passed, I’d heard nothing else. There had been three fireworks so far, set off at intervals of thirty minutes. You couldn’t see the stars against the sky’s brilliance: this was just pissing in the wind.

So perhaps it was more like the sense of taking your seats as the orchestra tunes up for what will eventually be the start of a crescendo. We had our invitation for the Kosovo Philharmonic’s Independence Day celebration concert, and we were assuming that it would take place that evening. By then, I hoped, the music would be deafening.

And what does one do at the start of a day like this? Ordinary things seemed banal; grand gestures not yet appropriate. It was, after all, only 10 am.

I put down the computer and looked through the pile next to my bed for a book. There was one that I had been meaning to finish since September 2006. I rejected the Albanian books, the thrillers, the parochial English paperbacks which all felt wrong for the moment. But picking up the Booker prize winner that I somehow hadn’t managed to get through right to the end, I sat and read The Sea, uninterrupted for an hour. This was a day for finishing off overdue business.

 

Later

By 1pm we had logged onto the internet and discovered that the Prime Minister of Kosovo had summoned the deputies to the Kosovan Assembly for an extraordinary ‘extraordinary’ session.

Things were moving forward. But there was still nothing to do yet. Even the most patriotic Kosovar would find it hard to celebrate the calling of a parliamentary session, however extraordinary.

We turned on the television, and channel-hopped between a variety of presenters all seeming to grapple with the same problem. Some channels had opted for traditional music accompanied by large ladies in traditional dress. Other channels were showing uncommentated cheap footage of the growing mob of flags in the main streets of Pristina. I skipped from one channel to the other (via the scantily clad Channel 39 that also goes for uncommentated cheap footage) and found the channel showing a previously prepared montage of ‘the road to independence’ including footage from the nineties, and the stages of the attempts at consensus in the recent round of talks. There were the civil resistance movement rallies of the 1990s, President Rugova, the intellectual with his bohemian scarf flicked over one shoulder, elected in illegal polls Serbia would not recognise; his declaration of independence in 1991 which no country recognised, and which therefore led to nothing but intensification of the Serb government’s oppression. There was the grim footage of civilian massacres that had drawn the world’s attention to Kosovo. Clinton, Blair, Milošević, Madeline Albright. The KLA’s campaigns, with the young heroes’ faces staring out from under camouflage caps sometimes recognisable as slick suited politicians I’d seen more recently. The Rambouillet agreement which was supposed to bring Serb military personnel out of Kosovo and allow NATO observers, Serbia’s refusal to sign, the NATO bombardment which lasted three months and left Belgrade and Serbian strategic installations crippled, and caused tragic civilian casualties. And then the arrival of the UN and NATO by ground into Kosovo, and the political process that had lasted so unexpectedly long. Coming back to this montage as I channel-hopped I was occasionally panicked by seeing international or local politicians going apparently live to camera with statements such as ‘we do not think there will be independence this year.’

I was saved from the choppy television waves by a telephone call. Valon from the Ethnological Museum was reiterating an invitation he had issued airily when Rob had bumped into him the previous evening. ’My mother has prepared an Independence Day baklava; we are inviting you to share it.’

This was perfect. My fears about independence day had included the worry that it would never happen, the worry that it would be accompanied by inter-ethnic violence, proving right the cynics who said that all the investments in peace-building over eight years had been wasted effort – but also the fear that Rob and I might find ourselves at home, grinning at each other in a rather sad lonely way. We had been reticent of suggesting celebrating with Adem and Xhezide, or other Kosovan friends, knowing that they would want to be with their families, and feeling that we hadn’t earned the right to celebrate alongside people who for generations had suffered and fought, and lost so much in a cause we had just dabbled in on our international salaries for 18 months.

Equally, we hadn’t wanted to celebrate without Kosovars, even with the other international salaried dabblers we knew and liked in Pristina. When people you love are celebrating you want to be celebrating with them. What better way to watch the Declaration of Independence than from one of the enormous extended sofas, built to accommodate the enormous extended families, of a Kosovan front room.

We drove to the village of Hajvali outside Pristina and were greeted by an enthusiastic Valon, beaming hospitality and national pride with his every gesture and every garment. He was dressed in a tracksuit emblazoned with the England football logo, but on his head he wore the traditional Albanian plis hat, now normally only seen on old men, at folk dance performances and on war memorials – the latter because of its iconic status as symbol of the Gheg Albanians. Today, everyone was proud to be an old Albanian.

Valon is serious and slow in his speech, which gives what he says the gravitas of ideas carefully considered. But his favourite phrase is ’jashtëzakonisht e mirë’ (‘extraordinarily good’), and his sober pronouncement of enthusiasm for whatever is under discussion has inspired me in conversations with him about the museum, the people we’ve met together, the ideas we’ve sparked off each other.

But never, we agreed as we stood outside his house, had there been a day so jashtëzakonisht e mirë as today.

Brought inside his house, we were all introduced. ‘I am the head of the family,’ began Valon’s father, and then went on to present in turn each of his family, including those who were absent, telling us their degree subjects and jobs. Three sons and a daughter were seated along the couch that ran around the edge of the room. A son-in-law and his daughter were also there, and we were shortly joined by a neighbour and his wife and son too.

The familiar rhythms of Albanian hospitality continued, and I felt increasingly delighted with the day and with our luck in being here – in Kosovo and in this home – and now. We were asked again how we were. We were asked how our health was, how our families were.

Drinks were offered generously. I accepted a juice; Rob a raki. Valon’s father and his neighbour (though not Valon who doesn’t drink, for religious reasons) discussed the traditional Kosovan raki, and Rob marveled politely at the Albanian habit of having a raki for breakfast.

The neighbour replied very seriously: ‘the raki you have at break- fast should really be accompanied by a spoonful of honey.’ My ears pricked up. He explained the science of the Albanian breakfast: ‘the spoonful of honey should come first. This is enough to attract all the microbes that live in your gut. They swarm in to eat, and while they are busy, you down the raki which then kills them all off.’

It sounded like a terrifying start to the day, for all concerned.

And now Valon’s father picked up the lecture, as Albanian hosts of a certain age are allowed to do. Moving on from advice about our health, familiar themes surfaced, surged, receded – the ancient history of his people, the superiority of his people (never asserted without sup- porting evidence – in this case an international study which concluded that Albanians had the highest spatial intelligence in Europe), sparse and never indulgent narratives of the family’s misfortunes in the 1990s under Milošević, and their experiences during the NATO campaign.

It is important to hear about the men of the family dismissed from work in the early ‘nineties, just because they were Albanian. It is important to hear how Valon’s father was called in repeatedly for questioning by the Yugoslav secret services, because of his political activities with the parallel Albanian government set up in opposition to Milošević. It is important to hear about the final time they came to question him during the first day of the NATO bombardment, when he chanced to be away from home. That night he took the children to someone whose name he still won’t give me, near the family’s old home in the mountains, and they hid out there until the end of the bombardment.

And as if as the continuation of his story, the television (that additional member of the Kosovan extended family, always present and often loud) was suddenly showing a picture of Prime Minister Thaçi entering the Assembly hall. The agenda of the day was read out; item number one was the declaration of the independence of Kosovo.Valon’s father stopped talking.

It was really happening.

We sat in silence as the opening speeches were read. And then everyone realised that we should be videoing the big day. As the Prime Minister started on his Declaration, new machines were bidden to action in Valon’s front room, the channel was changed, the signal wavered, the words of the Declaration became indistinguishable, were lost.

Valon skipped desperately across the bandwidth trying to find the channel again, and the room was one huge held breath. Eventually it was suggested that maybe we should just watch and leave the recording. ’There’ll be a repeat tomorrow,’ the neighbour said comfortingly, and we went back to the original channel, feeling calmer now – as if we were settling down to what promised to be a particularly good episode of Eastenders.

The episode was indeed jashtëzakonisht e mirë. The Prime Minister read the Declaration with dignity, and he mentioned all the right things:

 

Answering the call of the people to build a society that honours human dignity and affirms the pride and purpose of its citizens; committed to confront the painful legacy of the recent past in a spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness; dedicated to protecting, promoting and honouring the diversity of our people; reaffirming our wish to become fully integrated into the Euro-Atlantic family of democracies; observing that Kosovo is a special case arising from Yugoslavia’s non-consensual breakup and is not a precedent for any other situation; recalling the years of strife and violence in Kosovo, that disturbed the conscience of all civilised people; grateful that in 1999 the world intervened, thereby removing Belgrade’s governance over Kosovo and placing Kosovo under United Nations interim administration... honouring all the men and women who made great sacrifices to build a better future for Kosovo... we, the democratically-elected leaders of our people, hereby declare Kosovo to be an independent and sovereign state.

 

The deputies voted unanimously to adopt it (those who might have had dissenting voices – those whose names were later read out, and almost all of which ended ‘vić’ – had chosen not to come that day), and Valon’s brother and sister and brother-in-law and father and niece and neighbours – and his two English guests with the odd accented Albanian – clapped and cheered and opened some sparkling wine and smiled at each other and still couldn’t quite believe it.

Over the rest of the day we ate and drank to excess, with Valon’s family, and then back in Pristina with multiple different groups of friends in bars and restaurants, the concert hall and people’s homes, singing, dancing, hugging, luring and obliterating those microbes with exuberance, if without the attention to technical detail that Valon’s neighbour had advised. Without a preceding spoonful of honey, Rob’s final celebratory raki was, nevertheless, drunk early in the morning. So were we.

Eventually we climbed into bed, in the newest country in the world.