Honey Fudge In The KLA Heartlands

 

New Albanian vocabulary: gjallë (alive)

 

 

Since my visit to Rexhep’s house had still not given me sight of a ’primitive’ hive in operation, I wondered how I might find another chance. I felt I was working backwards in my beekeeping apprentice- ship, becoming familiar with the Langstroth hives without under- standing the extent to which they were modifications of the bees’ natural environment. I just couldn’t understand what the architecture of a bee colony would look like without Adem’s neat frames of wax starter sheets – the Ikea model of flat-packed interior design. I imagined the ‘primitive’ hives as heads that could buzz with ideas like bees. The ones I had bought and kept at home as decoration were empty- headed, vacant. But perhaps if I could see inside one of these composite brains, I could understand the fundamentals about bees and beekeeping.

From Bajram’s register of Kosovo’s beekeepers it had looked like my best chance to see a skep was in the municipality of Skënderaj. I was going to have to enter what has been described as ‘the rural rebellious region of Drenica’. This region, with Skënderaj its main town, has always been the poorest part of Kosovo, previously the poorest part of Yugoslavia, and now has a disproportionately young population, even by Kosovan standards – the average age is twenty-one. Great ingredients for rebellions.

From a walking group we belonged to, I knew an Englishman, Bob, who had held the unenviable post of UN Municipal Administrator of Skënderaj in the time before these UNMIK positions had been returned to local people. By chance I bumped into Bob in a Pristina street and when I explained my quest he said that he knew a bee expert in his former municipality. Apparently, if Avdyl himself didn’t keep bees in skeps then he would be sure to know someone who did. With a phone call it was arranged that I would hitch a lift in Bob’s car one day when he was visiting the municipality on business; while he was having his meetings, I could visit the homes of Avdyl and his bees.

The journey down to Skënderaj with Bob was an education. As he and I drove through the villages which formed the furthest boundary of the municipality, he started to parse the landscape for me. Whether it is with Adem listening to his hives, or a masseuse telling me what she reads in the knotted grammar of the muscles of my back, or a teacher engaging her class, I love being in the presence of people exercising their expertise. And just as Adem will point to a cell that looks just like all the others to me, and tut about problems to come, or a masseuse will notice the way I have been storing tensions that even I’m not aware of in my right shoulder blade, Bob was reading the villages, the small businesses, the new greenhouses, the state of the roads that formed part of his manor. He told me which car workshop was owned by the mayor’s cousin, which piece of land was lying fallow as a result of political interference in the plans for building, showed me which houses and factories and roads were due to which international aid agencies.

Soon we passed the road which leads to Prekaz, the deepest I had penetrated into Drenica before now. Prekaz is the home of Drenica’s most famous son – and grandson, daughter, nephew, niece… It was the home of the whole Jashari family until the day that 51 of them were killed by Serbian forces. The story of their death occupies a special place in the history of Kosovo’s Albanians. It was Adem Jashari’s face on the ’bac u krye’ t-shirts that had been worn to celebrate independence.

Hunting for bee skeps is not a common reason for visiting Drenica. If ever there had been a bucolic idyll in these rolling valleys, it was thoroughly shattered in March 1998. By then Serb police had already come to Prekaz twice to arrest Adem Jashari, wanted by them for his contribution to the formation and arming of the KLA. On both occasions, Jashari had resisted their attempts to enter his family compound, meeting fire with fire. When the Serb police withdrew, Jashari had declared his village a ‘Serb-free zone’.

I had read the vivid account of what happened next in the book that Shpresa’s boyfriend had told me to buy on our first meeting. In Be Not Afraid, for You Have Sons in America, Stacy Sullivan narrates the forming, arming and activity of the KLA. Her book has all the pace of a thriller novel, with the chilling edge of the events having really happened. It describes what took place in Prekaz on 5 March 1998, when the Serb police returned for a third time, this time fully prepared for confrontation with Jashari. They sealed off fifteen villages in the region and moved into Prekaz with tanks, helicopters and artillery. Surrounding the Jashari compound, they asked Jashari to surrender, and when he refused they attacked. The Jashari family – men, women and children – held out against the attack for two days but were ultimately unable to match the Serbian force. When the Serbs moved into the compound, they found the only survivor there, Adem’s eleven-year-old niece, hiding in a kitchen cupboard. They forced her to identify the bodies of the rest of her family. Later reports on the corpses showed that some had their eyes poked out, and one was decapitated.

These killings were not the largest massacre committed against Albanians by Serb forces during the dark days of 1998. But they were to be the most significant. This is as much a result of what happened after the Jashari deaths as the events which caused them. The remaining villagers of Prekaz demanded that a team of international forensic experts should be given access to the Jashari bodies before they were buried. Foreign diplomats supported the call for forensic workers from abroad to be granted visas to attend the bodies, but Milošević refused. Stacy Sullivan’s book had drawn powerful images of how the Serb police had meanwhile gone to the barn where the bodies lay, loaded them into trucks, driven them to a hillside and bulldozed earth over the top of them. In the face of this further insult by the Serbian regime, the Albanians of Prekaz went to this burial site the next day with rakes and shovels, and retrieved the bodies for proper burial. Tens of thousands of Albanians from across Kosovo attended the funeral. Sullivan narrates how immediately afterwards US diplomats met with Milošević and threatened to use ‘every appropriate tool we have in our command’ to stop Serb aggression if paramilitary forces were not withdrawn from Kosovo. Two days later, Tony Blair called an emergency meeting of the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the US which recommended to the UN security council a comprehensive arms embargo against Yugoslavia and the denial of visas for senior officials.

The death of Adem Jashari and his family was therefore a turning point in international attitudes to Kosovo and the Albanians, and started NATO thinking on the route that would lead almost exactly one year later to its bombing campaign which forced Serbian withdrawal from Kosovo. Despite the voices of human rights activists questioning Adem Jashari’s right to take his non-combatant women and children with him to his hero’s death (he was apparently asked by the Serbs with loud- hailers to send the women and children out before they began their attack), the sense of bravery and nationalism embodied in the story of his family’s resistance has maintained it as a powerful shorthand for what Kosovo Albanians suffered and of how and why they ultimately triumphed. Prime Minister Çeku had only two pictures on the wall of his office: that of the fourteenth-century Albanian hero against the Ottomans, Scanderbeg, and the other showing Scanderbeg’s twentieth- century counterpart against the Serbs, Jashari.

So my previous visits to this area had been coloured with blood, not honey. I had visited Prekaz three times; indeed, it is the most visited site in Kosovo, a statistic that made me sad when I saw what the site offers to the visitor. The Jashari houses have been left as they were in the immediate aftermath of the attack – burned and gutted, splattered with shot marks. If the 1389 Battle of Kosovo is the Serbs’ repeatedly picked scab, then Prekaz is the Albanians’. The first two visits I made there were in daylight, but most recently I had attended the annual ‘night of the fires’. This is held on the anniversary of the final attack on Prekaz and is a mixture of pilgrimage and party – the spirit of Glastonbury in the fourteenth and the twenty-first century simultaneously. With an evangelical message, ‘He is still alive!’, proclaimed on enormous banners, the temporary stage mobbed by a crowd of tens of thousands hosts scantily-clad stars, political figures and traditional dancing.

When I went there for the March celebrations in 2007, Rob had already arrived in the government party, and with a bit of text-message echo-location, I negotiated my way to him through the crowds and the mud and the sunflower-seed sellers (I am sure that British youth would be in better shape if our rock concerts and festivals were fuelled by sun- flower-seeds rather than doughnuts and hamburgers).The government party had front row seats, and space was found for me squeezed next to Rob. So while young Kosovo gyrated behind us, we genteelly tapped our feet in time to the various acts rolling across the stage. A few places along from Rob in the front row sat an older man with an enormous grey handlebar moustache. A really astonishing moustache – bushy, but

tapering to impressive points out beyond his cheeks. Occasionally the camera-happy concert-goers would dive under the barrier, avoiding the police supposedly separating the VIPs on seats from the groundlings, and take snaps of the performers, and then sneak a quick picture of the moustache. A couple even dragged their children with them and had them pose with the moustache.

I mused on how direct and tactless Kosovars can be, and how tolerant Mr Moustache was of people focusing on his facial hair. After a few more people had come up and snapped the man, Rob turned to me and asked whether I would like to be introduced to his photogenic neighbour. I declined, whispering that I didn’t want to be as rude as everyone else. And then Rob explained who Mr Moustache actually was: Rifat Jashari, the brother of Adem, and only surviving member of that generation of Jasharis, having been living out of Kosovo at the time of the attack on Prekaz. No wonder people wanted to take his photo.

I was an ignorant, foreign fool.

I was, nevertheless, introduced to Rifat, and beneath the wail of the loudspeakers and the singing I muttered something to him. I can’t remember what I said, and I don’t really know what I could have said. What is the appropriate way to address a man famous now mainly because the rest of his family were murdered, while he was out of the country. I don’t know what the days – or the nights – must be like for Rifat Jashari.

I was grateful that on this trip, Bob and I could ignore the turn-off to Prekaz and its legacy of blood, and follow the signs taking us to Skënderaj – and bees. Though it was impossible to ignore this area’s past; if you were only looking at the road signs, you could still be for- given for thinking that this KLA heartland was still the ‘Serb-free zone’ that Adem Jashari had dubbed it, even though there are, in fact, Serb villages dotted around the area. The official convention (and legal requirement) in Kosovo is for road signs to be in both languages. The unofficial convention, as I’d seen from my very first day, is for the second (Serbian) of the names to be regularly spray-painted out. This occurs even when the name of the settlement is, as is sometimes the case, the same in both languages. I once commented to a friend in the British Embassy that in these cases the government could save on materials and just print the name once. ‘Then each community,’ I said, ‘could assume that the government was privileging only their name for the settlement on the road sign.’ The diplomat corrected me: ‘No, then each community would assume that it was their language that had been missed off.’

As expected, most of the signs on the way into Drenica advertised ’Skënderaj’ with a black smudge in place of the Serbian version of the place name, ‘Srbica’. However, as we passed Prekaz, the sign announced proudly ‘Skënderaj/Skënderaj’. Perhaps there is still no place for a Serb in Drenica.

We followed the patriotic signs to arrive at my rendezvous with Avdyl and his families – both human and insect. Despite the conflict- scarred setting where I met him, in the brief time that I spent with Avdyl that day, he seemed to embody all the best elements of my experiences in Kosovo. He is gleefully multi-talented, coming from a family of beekeepers going back generations, and being proud chairman of the local beekeeping association, he nevertheless trained in business and textiles, and then worked in a Socially-Owned Enterprise textile factory until the 1990s.Then, like most Kosovo Albanians in SOEs, he was dis- missed from his job.

During the war his family suffered: a father, brother, and uncle all killed. ‘In front of their children,’ he added with no further explanation. He himself fought in the KLA. He has children of his own now – a coy, chubby three-year-old girl, a more serious five-year-old son, and two others who were at school when I visited. It was clear that he adores them, taking an almost embarrassing time to show me a pile of paintings that his son had done which genuinely showed precocious talent, but which were nevertheless mainly daubs of colour.

’Working before the war in an industry which was mainly women was important preparation for one of the jobs I’ve had since the conflict,’ Avdyl told me. ‘I trained as a psycho-social counsellor, and then I became a part-time beekeeping trainer for the international Women for Women programme.’ The programme offers women training and resources for small start-up businesses.

’From the beekeeping I spotted a gap in the market for beehives – the modern Langstroth-Root wooden boxes. I taught myself a bit of carpentry, enough to set up a small workshop in my garage producing hives.’

Before I was allowed to see his working hives, let alone a working skep, we went to see the empty boxes, stacked up to the roof; a miniature Manhattan ready for insect inhabitants. He said he is the only Kosovan producer in this quantity. ‘I hate waste,’ he explained. ‘If you just have flowers, they look nice for a while, and then they die. But if you have bees, then they take the nectar from the flowers, and you have honey which you can eat and you can sell. The flowers aren’t wasted.’

Did he know that the Rev. Langstroth had had a similar passion for maximising resources? His prototype was apparently an adaptation of a champagne crate. Avdyl smiled appreciatively. ‘I hate waste,’ he repeated. ‘And while I was making my hives this year, I started thinking about the offcuts of wood and what I could do with them.’ He showed the little blocks to me and I tried to explain the game of Jenga, the tower made of wooden pieces of almost exactly these dimensions, which competitors remove one by one until the tower falls down. I mentioned how popular it is in London, where my friends will sit together of an evening, carefully demolishing a tower in this way. He didn’t seem to be impressed with this as either a money-spinner or a leisure activity for Londoners.

When he heard that some of my work in Kosovo was with kindergartens, however, he asked saw an opportunity immediately: ‘do you think they might be interested in buying a sack of the offcut blocks? It’s untreated wood – no varnish or chemicals. You can chew it’ – he modelled for me – ‘and have no ill-effects.’ He spilled a handful of the little blocks into my hands, and another handful in front of his son. The child immediately started thoughtfully laying them out. It was pure Montessori.

I was rapidly warming to Avdyl, the former counsellor, textile engineer, freedom fighter, now trainer, carpenter, entrepreneur, devoted father and beekeeper. Perhaps this is the apotheosis of the rural rebellious spirit of Drenica – all of that energy channelled into creative rather than destructive activity.

But before I had the chance to see the traditional beehives, Avdyl was keen to show me his skills in another area – hospitality. Another thing I love about Kosovo.

We went into his house and I was seated while Avdyl got out bee- keeping magazines, certificates, newspaper cuttings, to show me. I didn’t like to ask again to see the skeps but I was wondering whether this would be a repeat of my experience with Rexhep. Given his attitude to waste, and his enterprise manufacturing Langstroth hives, it seemed unlikely that Avdyl was really going to have one of the old, inefficient ’primitives’ in use.

Avdyl’s wife appeared, silently bearing a tray of drinks and food for me. I said hello, asked her how she was, complimented her on the gorgeous children I’d met outside, and she answered politely, but with some embarrassment. Looking back on the situation now, I try to find the equivalent of her discomfort for a similar situation in London. It was rather as if someone took you out to a restaurant, where, instead of talking to them, you tried to engage the waiter in small talk. She was our waitress. Or servant. This is one of the things I love less about Kosovo.

The tray she had brought in offered me not only tea but the ubiquitous Fanta. A nation whose taste buds and habits seem sophisticated when it comes to the appreciation of honey appear to be completely blind to the true foulness of Fanta. They even call it ‘juice’, as if there is somewhere a Fanta tree, budding little bubbles of orange carbon dioxide, where luminous fruit bursts open hyperactively from the branches.

From the tray I was also offered a fine glass of what looked like sludge – or fudge. It had a small spoon in it and when I helped myself, I discovered it was crystallised honey. Avdyl chatted away as I savoured it: did I know that honey crystallises naturally in the cold but that, conversely, jars can be brought back to liquidity by warming them in a pan of water on the stove?

I tried to match him fact for fact. I had read that it takes the life- time of twelve bees to make a teaspoon of honey. Lovely as it was for me, I wondered whether it had been worth it for them. Not to be outdone, Avdyl got out a magazine cutting and started painstakingly reading out loud about the properties of honey. He told me how excel- lent it is because of its high energy content. I looked sadly at my spreading stomach. One kilogram of honey – he put in front of me a kilo jar of his own honey as a visual aid and present – has the same calorific value as three kilograms of bread, 1.8 kg meat, 2.1 kg fish,780g cheese, 5.5 kg milk, 50 eggs, 1.2 kg walnuts, 30 bananas or 40 oranges. I tried to imagine eating any of these quantities of food, and failed. I felt slightly sick.

The article Avdyl was reading also compared the average per capita consumption of honey in different countries. In Kosovo it is apparently only 200g per person a year. Looking at the empty glass in front of me I realised I had been doing extraordinarily well at raising that figure. In the UK we apparently eat 300g of honey per person per year – still way below the world average of 1000g per person per year.

Avdyl asked his wife to bring in more honey – I was told I should have some in my camomile tea. He was quite right, it tasted great, and I thus added another few grams to my daily intake. I was feeling slightly dizzied by the high levels of blood sugar and statistics.

And I wanted to see a skep. But Avdyl really wanted to go on talking. He was bursting – buzzing – with schemes. He told me about the programme he had run for Serb and Albanian beekeepers, together, in 2004 (two thousand and four, he emphasised, reminding me of the inter-ethnic violence which marred that March). ‘Imagine, there were Serbs and Albanians sitting in a room together learning about bee- keeping. It was great. But then the funding was withdrawn.’

’Why?’ I asked, but he didn’t know. There may be more to it, or it may just have been a classic international aid agency cock-up. The fact that he didn’t know reinforced his sense that the strange, wilful, unpredictable international gods might be willing to donate again. He had no idea of their criteria. I said that I would like to help – perhaps we could sit down together and write a proposal. I said I would speak to Bob about it.

’There are other things that are needed, too – reforesting of the area, to increase pollen to increase honey production. And systems for beekeepers to be able to work together, pooling their produce for joint analysis and marketing.’ He talked about micro-credit schemes. I believed he was right about all of them, and I checked that he had my phone number so we could keep in touch and take some of this further. He stored the number in his phone and as he did so, asked me my name again. ‘Isabel?’

No, I repeated (this was perhaps the third time). I tried to connect it for him – the same as the Queen of England? I am constantly amazed at the lack of recognition of the Queen’s name in situations like this when I am abroad. Gritting my teeth, I tried my other famous name- sake, which has achieved nods and smiles when I have introduced myself in countries from Syria to Ghana, Indian villages to Mexico City: ’Elizabeth Taylor?’ No, Avdyl hadn’t heard of her either.

’I’ll just put you in my phone as Anglia [England]’ he said. Then I really did feel like the Queen.

At last he suggested we went out and looked at the beehives. I held my breath. The majority of Avdyl’s hives were of the wooden type, which he had, of course, made himself. But off to one side was some- thing that might have been a very short wizard. It wore a sheet of metal (Avdyl uses the discarded plates from newspaper printing. I shouldn’t have been surprised – he hates waste) curved into a conical hat, and little winged creatures blew in and out of its small mouth like breathing. It was perhaps what would result if two L Frank Baum characters got themselves mixed up.

Avdyl went over to the strange form and lifted its metal hat off. And I finally got a chance to see a working skep.

The skep had been woven from withies – Avdyl again – and then plastered with mud to cover the holes in the weave. Studying it I could understand the exterior architecture of the skep but I still couldn’t imagine how the bees made their honeycomb within it. Luckily Avdyl, ever the beekeeping trainer, had one they had made earlier. In a corner of the field where the hives stood, there was an old skep, with some of its empty honeycomb still inside it. To my surprise, the honeycomb was in slabbed layers, perhaps two centimetres thick, running vertically down the skep. The space between them is just enough for a bee to pass. Seeing this, the sense of the Langstroth Root hive design was obvious. If the bees like building in straight lines, then giving them a square space to do it in is most efficient for everyone. The Gotham City of Avdyl’s garage was nothing to what the bees themselves were building in his garden.

So this is where it began. This is what bees did before beekeepers interfered and harnessed the honey-making process for their own sticky ends. It felt like something profound that I’d learned today – a glimpse of the structures that develop in the absence of exploitative superior forces. I was still thinking about Adem Jashari.

But it was time for me to go, and I thanked Avdyl profusely and genuinely for his kindness. I tried to thank his wife, too, but that just embarrassed everyone further.

As I left I said again how much I was going to enjoy the honey Avdyl had given me. I was running low on my stores, having resolved to substitute honey for sugar in all the baking I did, as a way of sup- porting local economy, cutting down on food miles. It was very kind of him, I said. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s marketing.’ I got the sense that the untiring Avdyl didn’t see this as an ending – that he saw in me the beginning of a beekeeping project. I felt the same about all the things I’d learned from him.