The Sandstone Blog
Remembering Kosova by guest blogger Simon Varwell
This guest blog comes from the author of our forthcoming non-fiction, Up the Creek without a Mullet, Simon Varwell and was taken, with his permission, from his own web site (soon to be redesigned) http://www.simonvarwell.co.uk. Soon Simon will have his own blogspot on this web site to engage with his readership, to talk about his first book, his continuing travels and much else. This piece refers to another Sandstone Press book and is titled:-
Remembering Kosova
I’ve just finished reading Shadow Behind the Sun, a book I blogged about a wee while ago. By Remzija Sherifi, a Kosovan Albanian, it tells the story of her life under the oppressive Serbian regime and and the 1999 war, and her family’s escape to Scotland as refugees. Intermingled with this narrative are reflections on the refugee and asylum-seeker community in Glasgow, where she found work.
It’s a brilliant book – told plainly and uncompromisingly, but with dignity throughout. The way that the increasingly fascist (my word, not the author’s) regime in Belgrade began to clamp down on the majority Albanian population in Kosova was a dark time, and while the general drift is known to me, many details were helpfully revealed in Sherifi’s book. She does not hide the facts about what happens to the Kosovans, but neither does she demonise Serbs or find reason to hate them as a race.
The book brought back memories of my own time in Kosova in 1999. Shortly after the war and when the NATO troops had moved in, Kosova was in a state of devastation, but also an exhausted relief and an emerging optimism.
While a decade of UN administration and constitutional uncertainty – still not resolved despite Kosova’s recent and controversial declaration of independence – has led to a something of a reality check, and the euphoria had gone when I re-visited in 2001, there are still things to celebrate. This article on BBC News http://bit.ly/2USRSm , for instance, covers the unveiling of a statue of Bill Clinton in the Kosovan capital, Pristina.
The US President in 1999, along with Tony Blair and other NATO allies, led the military action against Milosevic’s regime which – although shamefully late – was successful in ending the war in Kosova and freeing the Albanian majority from around a decade of apartheid. Clinton, Blair and others were seen as heroic liberators by the Albanians, and even the then-NATO press spokesman Jamie Shea was held up as a saviour – it was he they saw on Albanian TV broadcasts every night powerfully repeating NATO’s promise that Milosevic would be beaten.
Indeed, in one of the most surreal moments in Kosova’s time in the headlines, I remember seeing a news report some months after the war, in which Shea – then basically just a NATO civil servant – was utterly overwhelmed on his first visit to the province by a delighted mob of joyous Kosovans all chanting his name.
There are so many stories to tell of my time in Kosova – which, it is amazing to think, was a decade ago – and I’ve never really told it in a formalised way. Although my forthcoming book contains a few tangental anecdotes from that adventure, one occasion not in the book which is worth telling now is when our truck was painted by some Albanian kids in Pristina one afternoon.
Most of what they did was graffiti – misspelt endorsements of heroes such as Clinton, Blair and the UK’s Foreign Secretary at the time Robin Cook. One creation struck me as quite peculiar, though. A tall, dense, red column had been painted by one child, towering over the work of his friends’, and the best way I could describe it would be as a cross between a triffid and a skyscraper. The young artist informed me it was Madaleine Albright.
Two years into the disappointment of the Blair years, our government in 1999 seemed awfully flawed to us; increasingly in the pocket of big business and increasingly unable to avoid perpetuating and exacerbating the inequality and moral bankruptcy of years of Tory rule.
To the Kosovans, however, who sought not political perfection but merely freedom from death, Blair, Clinton and co were everything they’d hoped for. In their eyes, they delivered. They were liberators.
No wonder Kosovans – the Albanians, at least – have built and celebrated a statue to Clinton. The horrors you can read about in Remzije Sherifi’s Shadow Behind the Sun make it perfectly, chillingly clear why.