kosovo

What is happening in Kosovo?

We worked with CCTD in and around Pristina in Kosovo from 17 July to 22 July 2006.

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Stories and images from Kosovo
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Day One: Monday 17th July

This trip was undertaken by Jonathan Chadwick. Arrival at Pristina Airport to be met by CCTD director, Jeton Neziraj and his colleague, Merita with whom he had just been working on a international drama workshop in Prizren.

That evening we met Nenad Maksimovic. He worked for the Institute for Educational Advancement creating media resources the aim of which was to put the reconciliation process in a human frame. He felt the reconciliation processes that were going on in Kosovo were fake and more to do with the desires of the international community and the sponsors of NGOs than with the needs of the people of the area. He referred to himself as a professional Serb in the sense that his job was simply to be a Serb, proof of cultural diversity. He moved away from Kosovo during the war and when he came back he suffered three assassination attempts. He spent a year and half out of the country in Germany and the Netherlands. He determined that he would come back. He talked about the indelible experience of losing your home and he told us that he would leave when he decided to. Jeton talked about the difference that he sensed between the forums in the Serbian and Albanian communities in the Voices project that we had worked on the previous year. Whereas the Albanians who had suffered loss in the war felt grief this was mitigated by the feeling that they had gained their freedom, the Serbian community suffered grief in a more painful way since they could not justify the losses.

Later in the evening we talked to a group of young people in their twenties who felt they were going through a period of becoming adult and facing the attendant insecurities in a time when the circumstances of the larger social political context was unstable. They were aware of the uncertainty of the outcome of the negotiations currently taking place about the status of Kosovo.

Day Two: Tuesday 18th May

We met Ibush Vishi, Director of Culture in the town of Kacanik, a small town in the hills to the south of Pristina. He had spent 6 years in Serbian prisons. He was supposed to have served 7 and still feels a nagging uncertainty that one day he will be asked to serve the remaining year. He had been badly treated and now holds an influential and respected position in the local community. When he spoke about recovery he told the story of finding a snake in his house. He carefully donned gloves and cautiously approached the snake, taking it behind its head and carrying it out of the house and depositing it in a nearby field. He was relieved to get the creature out of his house but he was not absolutely certain that it would not come back in. He admitted that he was somebody that had suffered personal pain and it was true that there was always the fear of the return of the 'phantasm' but having been through the fear this made you braver. He said he still had problems with memories; they were impossible to remove from your mind. He said there were two elements in recovery. One was the international aspect, the other was independence. He talked about giving a lift to a Serb to the airport and he realised how difficult it must be to suffer unemployment and displacement and once to have had privileges that you no longer enjoyed. He saw parallels with the conflict in Northern Ireland. he talked about the relationship between art , being like a circle, and politics, like a straighht line touching the edge of a circle.

Reflecting on how he coped with being in prison he told us that to prevent being eaten up by anger and hatred you had to find an internal balance with those feeling and cultivate restraint. When he was being badly treated he told himself that he would never hurt the children of those who beat him. The process that he went through led up to a climactic time where he felt he made a breakthrough. He was made to feel he was about to be killed. His captors used the morning roll call as a way of demonstrating that some of his fellow prisoners had disappeared. One day he was blindfolded and taken to place in the mountains. He was given a sense that his death was imminent. At the height of these feelings he thought about his recently deceased brother. This sense of contact with his dead brother seemed to come to his rescue. At this moment it seemed as if a decision was taken not to kill him.

He said that the reward of freedom made all the suffering worthwhile. He gave me a plaque of the International Memorial Chess Tournament named after his friend Reshat Shehu held in Kacanik this year.

Later that day I ran a workshop for eight actors some of whom I had worked with before in the Longest Winter and Voices projects. We did a number of exercises and composed images of stories of recovery. There was no translation of Alcestis in Albanian so we reviewed the story of the play.

In the evening we went to see the opening of Jeton Neziraj's play GOMARI DIVERZANT (Saboteur Donkey). This satirical play set on the border of Yugoslavia and Albania was presented at the National Theatre in Gjilan.

Day Three: Wednesday 19th July

We met Adam Kurti the leader of the Vetevendosje (self determination) movement. The demands of this movement calling for 'no negotiation' are painted on walls all over Kosova. Last year his campaign was around the issue of the missing. This year the movement was campaigning for a boycott against Serbian goods. There were a series of posters which focused on the fact that Serbian companies and economy were profiting from the destruction that the war had caused. He spoke about recovery being the fulfillment of a common dream and after all the violence that the Albanian Kosovars had suffered this dream was an independent Kosova. He pointed out that it had been Milosevic's strategy which had led to the Albanians having such a strong sense of identity. Now it was not a matter of negotiation with Serbia. It was for the Albanian Kosovars to determine their future. He asserted that the Serbs had shown no regret or remorse or had even admitted what had happened in Kosova. There were still more KLA in prison than Serbs for what had happened in the war. People need social and economic development and day-by-day improvements in their lives. The international community were not interested in solving the crisis but only concerned with preventing the crisis exploding. He talked about the way power constructs identities. He described this dominant identity as being like a scar on the body. He described his role as a student leader in the 90s and the impact of his time in prison. He said the issue was not one of Kosova's status but one of freedom and individual freedom could only be gained through collective freedom. He identified the art of social change as involving a transformation of people from passive spectators to actors. In the situation where there was no improvements in people's lives they would resort to forms of transcendentalisms and religious fundamentalism.

Later in the day we held another workshop with the CCTD actors. We explored the story of Alcestis and went on the work on stories using the tableaux of still images representing the situation before and after the recovery story. Each participant narrated a story using these forms.

We then had a meeting with multi-media artist, Flaka Haliti to explore ways of developing the decoration of the stage background cloth. Flaka was to join us for the following days work with young people at Kacanik.

Day Four: Thursday 20th July

At Kacanik Cultural Centre there were 9 participants. We worked on tableaux, creating still images of moments from stories and then created stories of recovery using the image making technique. The group then worked on painting, adding new elements to the cloth.

In the early evening we met Agim Selimi who works both as a psychiatrist and a theatre director. He talked about recovery and said that he believed that if somebody felt that what they had suffered was a necessity then they were more likely to be able to resume normal life. One problem was that the longer the trauma was left unresolved then the more likely it was that people would start to blame themselves. People often needed a mythical story that would give their sacrifice a meaning. Also people who were in some way prepared for traumatic events were in an advantageous position. He recalled there were three brothers who had between them lost eleven members of their family. He recalls meeting these brothers in Albania after the evacuation and he was shocked by their vital capability, by the life force they embodied. He talked about a tradition in Albanian culture which asserted that crying was good neither for the living or the dead. He believed this repression of feeling could create an outward strength but an inner collapse. There was a custom whereby old women would be employed as mourners.

In dealing with grief and loss there were many principles in islamic culture which helped to shape the timing of mourning and there were traditional ways of coping with grief and trauma. He noticed that these traditions were less and less strong. He linked this to people's need for occupational therapy which would give them a schedule and a structure.

There was also a problem with changing roles in the family. Children would take on roles that may not be in harmony with their age and life experience. Women would be taking on their husband's role and therefore may be prevented from dealing with the uniqueness of their own pain.

The fact that families were tending to get smaller, the 'extended family' was less common and this diminished an important support structure. He had a feeling that families had lost control. There was also a lack of support from the state.

Though the war had made people seek for psychiatric help there was a feeling of shame about this. There were primitive and traditional forms of cures and therapies, like folk doctors. It interested him that many people who consulted psychiatrists might present their problems as having to do with the war though it turned out often to be the case that their condition had its roots in events before the war.

There were tendencies in periods of uncertainty like the current one for people to turn towards religion.

He thought that it was very important to familiarise teachers with psychiatric methods and procedures because they were often the first to be able to spot difficulties.

He considered work in the arts and the expression of emotional impulses in some form of disciplined practice to be extremely important. It was a way getting feelings out in the open. Working in groups and breaking down isolation so people can experience the other was a key part of art work and this helped people's self esteem.

Working as both a psychiatrist and a theatre director meant Agim could release in his theatre work the tensions and anxieties he had absorbed in his medical practice. Catharsis and well-being was infectious and this made the theatre very powerful.

The key quality for a psychiatrist was the ability to relate one story to another but this led him on to speaking about a story which had confirmed for him the power and importance of art. He had a woman patient who had been raped but the husband was finding the situation far more difficult then she did. He decided to treat the couple together. The man told him that he felt like an unexploded bomb and that the fuse was alight. At the same time he was working on a play about rape. He invited the couple to come and see the play. They refused at first but eventually came along. He saw them a few days later and they were able to use the characters as a way of talking about their situation in a different way. He asked the man if he still felt like an unexploded bomb. The man said he did but the fuse had been cut. They were able to speak more freely and they were grateful to the artists for doing something for them.

He told us that the therapist's art was something that could be learnt but you needed to have a transformative energy. In turning destruction into creativity the first step was to encourage the patient to identify the destructive element. The second step was to be able to offer models of how they could be led to more creative practices.

He asserted that humanity could move beyond war and prevent the apocalypse if people are free to grow up in good conditions.

Later in the evening I gave an interview to a journalist from the Express newspaper.

Day Five: Friday 21st July

In the morning there was a meeting with Kujtim Pacaku who was a poet, writer and cultural leader in the Roma community. He was a translator and had worked to create a dictionary. He was also engaged in the collection of Roma fairy tales.

He was accompanied by two friends one of whom , Milazim Hajredin talked about the problems of soldiers readjusting after the war. A big problem was the lack of work. Naser talked about his obsessive need to work. Through activities you could work things out. They thought the international community were sometimes forcing a reconciliation and not taking account of real conditions. There were post-war problems like drugs and divorce and the break down of stable social structures.

Kujtim talked about the attempts he was making to construct civil society and how he had found inspiration in the work of an Indian whose method had been used in the reconciliation between the Dravid and Aryan peoples. He told me how important images were and how important it was to work across the language divide. He said that writing never dies. He was concerned to break prejudices against Roma people and also to create channels for education and communication within the community. He had seen old men pick up a book for the first time. The Roma did not have a long tradition of a written language. He went on the talk about problems of leadership within the Roma community.

He said there was a lack of clarity about the position of the Roma people in a Kosova with a revised status and pointed out that this community was not represented at the status talks.

Roma music was an important means of communication at a cultural level and talked about the work of Qallgesit e Prizrenii who provided a collective focal point for Roma music in Prizren. People liked roma music and then discovered it was roma music and this offered a bridge of recognition.

Next I had a meting with Jeton Neziraj and we discussed the prospects of founding an international academy for dramatic arts in Pristine. This was envisaged as a three year training programme which might be linked to and accredited by a university in the UK. We agreed to work for a pilot project where we would invite practitioners together to create the basic creative heart of the course.

I then met Brian Jones, a second political secretary at the British Office. He was enthusiastic about our project and offered all possible support.

In the late afternoon I ran a workshop with a group of young people with whom CCTD had a long term development relationship through an arts and reconciliation project called ARROW (Arts a Resource for Reconciliation Over the World) initiated in the UK. After some warm up games we made an agreement to make a video the structure of which would be : Problem! Solution! The group was asked what problems they felt they had and what solutions there might be. They came up with a story about children's rights. There was a teacher who discriminated against children from poor families and gave preferential treatment to children from rich professional families. In the first scene a girl objected to the teacher's behaviour and got into trouble. The principal of the school was passing the classroom and backed up the teacher. This girl then went home and persuaded her mother that something had to be done. They went to the family of the poor girl who had been discriminated against and together they went to meet the Principal who agreed she would look into the case. In the last scene the teacher was dismissed by the Principal in front of the class.

When the group were asked to reflect on what the problem was they said that the real problem was inequality between the classes. When asked what the solution was they said the dismissal of the prejudiced teacher. They were asked to reflect on all the different decisions which the people involved in the story had to make.

There was a commitment to send the group a copy of the work. They were told about Az Theatre's project.

Day Six: Saturday 22nd July

Departed form Pristina.

For Az Theatre's previous work in Kosovo see the Az Theatre website.

If you would like to contribute a story or image, or give feedback please click here.