Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed; The Politics Of The Hive

 

New Albanian vocabulary: gaz lotësjellës (tear gas)

 

 

Bees have been used as a metaphor for political systems from the first time some sticky-fingered analyst took a look inside a hive. I’d recently read Bee Wilson’s book The Hive, which devotes a whole chapter to the way that bees have been seen in political terms: as republics (Virgil’s Georgics) or as socialist paradise (for Maeterlinck the hive was where ’private life was eroded in a sacrifice of the individual to the common interest’).

I’m not really interested in politics, but I’m glad someone else is. In Kosovo, there is one grass-roots political movement in particular whose passion had impressed me, and I was to discover a new respect for their beekeeping too.

One of the first words my sister learned to read was the word ’Hoover’, as she followed my mother around the house, with the distinctive font on the vacuum cleaner just at eye level for a three-year-old. In the same way, one of the first words I learned in Albanian was the word ‘vetëvendosje’ (‘self-determination’), sprayed in even red and black letters wherever you look in Pristina.

Vetëvendosje is probably the most efficient organization in Kosovo– a movement of mainly young Albanian activists fighting for full independence and sovereignty for Kosovo, and thus the withdrawal of UN and international missions. They protest with a creativity and vibrancy that is unusual in Kosovan public life, and they lobby with an articulate voice of opposition lacking elsewhere in Kosovo’s political life.

As well as managing to daub almost literally every public building in Kosovo with their red and black ‘no negotiation; self-determination’ slogan (formed with stencils that maintain a brand consistency that many multi-national companies would be proud of), Vetëvendosje activists have developed a range of attention-grabbing stunts and campaigns. On the ubiquitous white 4x4s which roamed Pristina labeled with ‘UN’ in big letters on their doors, Vetëvendosje added an ‘F’ and a ‘D’ to spell out ‘fund’ (Albanian for ‘end’), making each official vehicle driven by UN personnel a mobile advert for the idea that the internationals’ time was up.

When in early 2007 the UN envoy Marti Ahtisaari published his ’package’ of recommendations for the future of Kosovo, falling far short of recommending the unconditional independence which Vetëvendosje considers Kosovars to have won for themselves in 1999, the organisation launched another campaign. Every skip in town was graffitied with the words ‘Ahtisaari package’ – and thus every litter-conscious citizen who threw their rubbish away was made complicit in the view that Ahtisaari’s package contained only garbage.

The organisation has done more, and far more controversially. There is a ruthlessness to their mass actions that gives them an uncomfortable edge. In the demonstration in May 2008 that railed at the UN but also the Kosovan government for their weakness in the face of the Serbian local elections being held illegally in Kosovo, and their undemocratic acceptance of a new constitution without proper debate, Vetëvendosje activists sprayed sewage water at the Assembly, government and UN buildings. When they didn’t move away after Vetëvendosje’s warning, police officers standing on guard were caught by the spray too.

In Vetëvendosje demonstrations on Albanian flag day – my birth- day – in 2006, activists broke windows in the government, UN and Assembly buildings, with thrown bottles containing red paint. So when the organisation announced another demonstration in February 2007, the police stepped up their level of preparedness. The British Office issued warnings asking British citizens in Kosovo to stay at home. I did as I was told; my friend Alex didn’t take any notice. She is a British woman who came out to Kosovo to interview some of the Vetëvendosje activists as part of her PhD in non-violent resistance movements. She stayed, and stayed, and is now a leading figure in Vetëvendosje, writing their weekly newsletters and helping to organ- ise their campaigns.

What exactly happened on 10 February 2007 is still a matter of legal debate. The protest certainly began peacefully. When the protestors neared the government building they discovered that the police had blocked the road to prevent them accessing it. UNMIK police and Kosovo Police Service officers were lined up facing the oncoming demonstration. The protestors started removing the barricades and linked arms trying to push through the police cordon, some throwing the wooden staves on which their slogans were mounted. To disperse the crowd, the police responded with pepper spray, then tear gas, and then with rubber bullets.

As they ran from the crowd, two Vetëvendosje activists were pursued by a Romanian contingent of police, posted here as part of the international effort to support Kosovo. The activists were shot at close range with plastic bullets later found to be of an outlawed type.

Sitting at home in the centre of the city that day all we could hear were the sounds of police sirens. Later the phone rang. Rob was being asked to accompany the Prime Minister to visit the injured activists in hospital.

I was in bed when he came back late, and quiet. He didn’t want to talk about it.

’It was just a hospital. The two guys were young; they looked terrible.’ He turned the light off and we lay there in silence.

When we woke up the next morning we heard the news that the two men had died. Eighty-four other protestors had been injured, three seriously – one lost an eye.

The leader of Vetëvendosje, Albin Kurti, was arrested on the charges of calling for resistance with force, participating and leading a crowd which committed a criminal offence (the offence being the intention to throw 351 glass bottles filled with red paint at the vehicles and buildings of Kosovo institutions) and participating in a group obstructing official persons performing official duties. He was moved from prison to house arrest, without charge. When his case did come to trial, court procedures were farcically irregular. Kurti wasn’t allowed to address the court, reportedly being told to ‘shut up’ by the international presiding judge. Amnesty International and the Helsinki Foundation, among other human rights organisations, took up Kurti’s cause.

And all this took place under the auspices of the United Nations and international judges, imported to Kosovo at great expense to show a new country how policing, how justice should be done.

Alex and I talk about this and other stuff when we meet. We naturally have much in common – she, too, has learned Albanian with Gazi, it was with her that I ran the half marathon, and limped through training for it – though I disagree profoundly with some, but not all, of her and Vetëvendosje’s conclusions. However, I really appreciate their existence. Alex tells me that in political science there’s a recognised challenge for all movements agitating for change, because the presumed benefit they bring will be a benefit for all society, not just their members or those who take to the streets. Which means that there is no reason for any one individual to take to the streets, as long as he knows that his neighbour will do so.

During one of our conversations it turns out that Alex is scared of bees. I check, ‘but you like eating honey?’ Oh yes. ‘Well, if you want honey, someone has to get close to bees.’

’Yes,’ she answers, ‘but someone else.’

For the political metaphors of the hive, Virgil and Maeterlinck rest their case.

Alex offered to take me to visit a Vetëvendosje supporter, political activist and former KLA fighter who now keeps bees. The trip was the perfect combination of our interests, off to hear an expert’s take on both bees and organised resistance movements. Halil lives in an idyllic spot high up in the hills above the town of Suhareka, some hours from Pristina. According to the statistics I had been given when I visited the Ministry, this municipality is the area with the highest number of bee- keepers in all of Kosovo; as we drove through this blazing hot day, amid fields spattered with poppies and blue flowers I don’t know the name of, and looked out across the area’s lush hillsides, I could see why.

We continued driving up and up, and arrived at Halil’s house. Greeted by him and his family we were immediately ushered to a deliciously shaded table in his garden. Chickens and children clucked around us, and I could hear the hum of the hives.

He has a lot of hives, and most of them three or more ‘storeys’ high. Nectar gathering here must be rich – looking out over the drowsy fields and woodlands with not another house in sight, I could imagine that this is a bee paradise. Halil wanted to show me the hives close up so, while Alex and the others sat talking politics, I set off with Halil and his young daughter, who was wearing her own small bee suit, to see inside the hives.

We walked down the aisles of hives, looking in on occasional colonies where there were things of interest; Halil was fascinated by one hive where there was an unusually high number of drones being hatched. These are the males whose only task is to fertilise queen bees. They do no work (Bertie Wooster’s gentleman’s club took its name for a reason) but their life is really rather sad. They are harmless old chaps (they don’t have a sting as this is a part of the egg-laying equipment possessed by their sisters who make up the majority of hive inhabitants) who hang around until the time seems right to them to go on a mating flight. They will look for a queen (usually not from their own hive) and couple with her in flight. As they pull away at the end of this giddying process, their genital organs are left inside the queen and ripped from their body. They die shortly afterwards. It doesn’t sound like the queen stops to worry too much about the fate of her paramour – a queen will mate with up to twenty drones in one flight. We looked curiously at this fin de siècle hive where so many of the distinctive outsized drone larvae protruded from the honeycomb, capped with wax.

Once we had taken off the covers, and held frames up to the light, we could see that they were nearly ready for harvesting. They were drip- ping with pale lemon-coloured honey and as we lifted each one, we marveled at its weight. My mouth watered, and Halil told me that the honey should be ready to harvest in a week or so.

Suddenly, on a whim, Halil levered out another frame from the hive. He handed it to me and asked me to take it back to the table. We were going to get a chance to eat some now!

I had never eaten honey this fresh, even from my own hives because I had always centrifuged the frames before eating the honey. But in Halil’s garden, once we were all sitting down with saucers in front of us, he simply took a knife to scrape the wax caps from the cells and then, in great sweeps, cut the honeycomb into enormous honey steaks and gave one to each of us.

The honey was really the best I’d ever tasted. It wasn’t cloying, and was served to us at the temperature of the hive, which is pretty much the same as the core temperature of the human body. With its liquidity and warmth, I was almost unaware that I was actually eating anything – just that my mouth was suffused with a sweet light fra- grant treat.

And when the honey had gone, we were all still masticating on the wax, like a high-class chewing gum.

Once we were sat back down together to eat, Alex had her chance to hear Halil’s politics and his stories of the resistance he was so active in during the ‘eighties and ‘nineties. He had been a comrade of the national hero Afrim Zhitia, and Alex asked about him. He had been in prison with Halil, and Halil became nostalgic and animated talking about their time there.

’That man was incredible. Honestly, sometimes you could believe that he might grow wings, and fly – it seemed that there was nothing he couldn’t do.’

In Kosovo at that period, Albanian-language education had become scarce. Albanian-language schools were run as an illegal activity, in people’s garages and basements, with minimal equipment. With this dearth of schools and universities open to them, intellectuals and the young had few legitimate structures where they could share their ideas, and little opportunity for work. The cream of Kosovo’s Albanian youth instead put their energy into organised resistance. In some cases this was peaceful demonstration, and in others it was the militarisation that led to the formation of the KLA. Either way, the result for many activists was imprisonment.

Political prisoners were kept together and thus these prisons of the former Yugoslavia were stuffed with young thrusting Albanian men who were bursting with ideas and arguments. From what Halil says, the cells replaced universities in the education of these young men. Another activist I met through Alex who had also been in prison during this time told me that he learned his English in prison, with a book. Sometimes they weren’t allowed books or television or other forms of entertainment: ‘we would work out calculus on the flour sacks that lay around the room.’

Halil told us ‘I wouldn’t change my time in prison for anything – it was the biggest gift I ever had. The only problem was when it ended and we had to work out how to recreate it.’

Vetëvendosje seems to have reproduced that forum for many young people, in a way that the University of Prishtina, now open to Kosovo Albanians as it wasn’t for Halil, may not have done. In many ways, this could be seen as the fundamental challenge facing Kosovo today – how to channel the energy and ideas of its young men (the dominant group in a society where fifty per cent of the population are under 25) who have traditions for using that energy only in resistance to formal government structures. Halil himself now works as a teacher in the local school, high up in the hills. I wondered how it compares to doing calculus on flour sacks.

Moving from the beekeeper to the bees, I asked about the history of Halil’s hives and he narrated it from the beginning. There’s a superstition that I heard here for the first time that to set yourself up as a beekeeper you should go out into the woods and capture one wild colony, buy a second hive, and steal a third. It sounded rather like the rubric for being a British bride, without the requirement for the blue garter. It also made me realise that I wasn’t yet even one third a proper beekeeper.

Halil assured us that he didn’t start up like that either. Nevertheless, by the time the war started he had something like sixty hives. But when he and the family left their home, fleeing from Serbian forces, he knew that he was abandoning his hives.

’Sure enough, when we came back all the hives had gone. I found them later in the garden of a Serb who lived in the village,’ he pointed it out to us at the bottom of the hill. Maybe, I suggested, the Serb was wanting to set up in beekeeping. He’d bought one hive, gone out and claimed another wild colony, and this was the final thing he needed.

Halil wasn’t put off by the wholesale loss of his beehives, and began beekeeping again, building up his colonies although they are now less than pre-war numbers. Since the war he’s had no more thefts from Serbs, he said, only from bears that have occasionally come down from the mountains and helped themselves to pawfuls of this excellent honey.