Belgrade & Pristina

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Belgrade & Pristina

Words by: Bence X. Szechenyi

I took a total of fourteen hours’ worth of bus rides to Serbia and Kosovo in turn. These nations have a bloody history that is more recent than I think most Americans know. The war between them only ended in 1999. There has been a flurry of press coverage concerning the region in the past month as tensions have elevated the risk of another conflict. This would mean the further destabilization of Europe, and even present the risk for a world war. Russia is a historical ally of Serbia, and NATO, intervened in the war on behalf of Kosovo, making a conflict between these small nations a bigger international issue than it initially appears. I investigated the sentiments of the people in these countries to put the deeply concerning headlines in context. 

To teach the history of the conflict would require a university course or two, but here are the cliff notes: Kosovo is south of Serbia and was a part of Yugoslavia. To many Serbs it is a region that is historically tied to the Serbian nation as it used to be the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church. It was also where the Battle of Kosovo was fought against the Turks in 1389, a significant historical event in the national consciousness. Despite only 6% of people in Kosovo being ethnically Serb, with 92% being Albanian, these historical associations have in part kept many Serbs from acknowledging Kosovo as a sovereign state. 

Albanians in Kosovo had long protested Serbian dominance of the province and the oppression of ethnic Albanians within it. This dissatisfaction reached its fever pitch when the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) launched an uprising in 1998. Serbian and Yugoslav forces responded, attempting to reassert control of the area, resulting in numerous atrocities, including a program of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Serbs against the Kosovo Albanians. After condemnation from the United Nations and failed diplomatic negotiations, NATO eventually stepped in, deploying peacekeeping troops and bombing various parts of Serbia, including Belgrade, for eleven weeks in 1999. Kosovo declared independence in 2008, although only 99 out of 193 United Nations countries recognize its sovereignty. Kosovo has not obtained United Nations membership because Serbia to this day, along with its allies, have not acknowledged Kosovo’s independence, and block its attempts to join international organizations. NATO has maintained a presence in Kosovo because of the persistent risk of escalation.

This conflict flared up again recently because the Kosovo government ordered that all cars must have Kosovo-issued license plates. Members of the Serbian minority, about 50,000 people, have opted to keep their Belgrade-issued plates as a statement against Kosovo’s autonomy. The government in Pristina issued a deadline of November 24th for license plates to be changed or they would begin fining those who resist €150. This move has resulted in large protests in Serbian areas of Kosovo such as North Mitrovica. Serbs have resigned from Kosovo government positions en masse, attempting to destabilize Kosovo’s government. 

On the 24th of November the countries reached a deal. Kosovo said they would no longer mandate the reregistration of cars baring Serbian plates and would not issue fines, while Serbia agreed to stop issuing plates with Kosovo cities’ denominations. The governments have negated this conflict for the time being, but it is a superficial fix. The underlying problem, Serbia’s refusal to acknowledge Kosovar sovereignty and blocking them from joining international institutions, means that flare-ups will likely continue to occur. International anxiety around this conflict has been further exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Fears have emerged in the Western press that Serbia could follow Russia’s lead and assert their territorial claims in Kosovo by force. 

In preparation for my trip, I read as much as I could about the region’s recent history of war and turmoil. It was shocking how little I knew. Through conversations with American and European friends, I learned I was not the only one with this knowledge gap. I set out for the Southwestern Balkans to further fill this gap and learn about the persistent conflict from people on the ground. 

I was travelling to Belgrade from Budapest. According to Google Maps, the drive between the cities was just four hours, but my only option to get there was with a six-and-a-half-hour bus ride as I can’t drive (on the road but get me on the track and I’m like a young Lewis Hamilton). Travelling west from Budapest, trains work well. Vienna, about a three-hour drive, takes slightly less than that by train. Belgrade is separated from this efficient train network.

The bus trip wouldn’t have been bad except for the delay at the border. Officers snooped through everyone’s bags one at a time while we all looked on, huddled in the cold. Border control confiscated a book with a black cover and a bottle of beer. I wondered if that was considered a fruitful search and seizure or not. We proceeded into Serbia. 

I knew that Serbia had not joined the EU in their sanctions of Russia and are completely reliant on Russian oil supplies. It was still rattling to see Gazprom stations and advertising billboards. One such billboard featured the Serbian flag twisting over and becoming the Russian flag with ‘Together!” written in Serbian, and the Gazprom logo on the bottom. Billboards like this are obviously paid for by the majority state-owned Russian company and are not necessarily representative of Serbs’ feelings of kinship with Russians, only the Russian desire to promote this kinship. Still, the presence of this propaganda was jarring. I’m used to seeing Ukrainian flags everywhere.

However, I was not completely stranded - there were signs of American influence as well. Like, for instance at one rest stop along the highway, sharing a parking lot with Gasprom, was a KFC. This rest stop was a microcosm of a geopolitical power struggle. In Serbia, Russia and the United States jockey for influence through chicken and gas. Soft power versus hard power, I’ll let you decide which is which in this instance

Truthfully, I was anxious, even scared to arrive in Belgrade. Most of what I had learned about the region was about atrocities and violence, and I saw Russian influence out the window as the bus sped down the highway. A journalist friend of mine, who is from the region, warned me to be careful before my trip. People distrust the media, they told me. I was sat on the bus thinking that all these factors could result in a less than hospitable reception for a certain American reporter. 

I know that the preconceived notions you have when you arrive somewhere dictate how you see it. Predictably, my fear heightened upon my arrival in Belgrade. The bus pulled into the city through the New Belgrade side which is a real exhibition of communist architecture. It’s all housing blocks. Low and long ones, skinny and tall ones, all grey, concrete, and disheveled, fallen even from the very low heights they reached with their initial construction. ‘Post-communist’ was my first impression of the city. 

Belgrade has architectural ties to Vienna, but almost all these buildings are decrepit. As I pulled my suitcase towards the hotel, I kept thinking to myself “the scars that communism leaves,” a dark double-entendre. Communism left psychological scars for sure, but there are also deep physical scars on cities themselves in the form of dark grey concrete slab buildings. Belgrade had been cut up. Despite Belgrade translating to “white city,” it was entirely grey, “Soviet grey,” as I’ve taken to calling the particular shade. I was grateful to be meeting my friend Jana shortly after my arrival because I initially felt very alone and isolated in Belgrade.

It started torrentially raining as I walked to meet Jana. I found her using a massive statue of a Serbian prince as rain cover, standing under it, smoking a cigarette, and holding a dachshund. We went up to her family’s apartment to seek shelter, drink tea, and talk about my article. It took two hours to discuss everything as we dried off and the room filled with cigarette smoke.

The apartment itself was, as she described it, a “box of wonders.” There were collections of things everywhere, plates on the wall from different places, colorful glass vases covering the tops of all the cabinets, it was pure maximalism. I came to theorize from my time in Serbia that it is a culture that valued collections. Vintage watch shops were everywhere, I even saw a store devoted to stamp collecting in a prominent location right next to the National Assembly building. A collection culture is nostalgic in nature, and one of the first things Jana told me was that Serbs are often riled by nostalgia, like the memory of Kosovo being a part of Serbia.

She somewhat dismissed the recent escalations of the Kosovo conflict as a political maneuver by the Serbian government. “Whenever shit hits the fan, it’s really easy to pull the Kosovo card,” she said. They bring up one of the national myths, tug on nostalgic strings, and distract the public from the serious governance problems, she told me. In Jana’s view, Serbia is a mess. She told me with unsurprised disappointment that despite being a candidate for joining the European Union for fifteen years, they are not even close. “There is no rule of law in the country,” she argued, and that’s partly why Kosovo keeps coming up.

Jana’s distrust in the government was apparent. She suspected the government of paying people to spread negative propaganda about Kosovar Albanians and of planting fake opposition to serve as political opponents. When I hear discussions of government manipulation and conspiracy, my point of reference is Q-Anon, so I wondered whether she was so frustrated with the situation that she had started believing nonsense. However, I heard similar things from many other people in Belgrade. 

For example, one time I was sitting on a park bench across from Serbia’s National Assembly where people were camped out with big signs in Serbian that I couldn’t make sense of. I was writing observations in my notebook when I was approached by two broadcast journalists. One held a large television camera and the other carried a microphone emblazoned with a news channel’s logo. They asked me something in Serbian, I presume seeing if I would do an interview. I told them I didn’t speak Serbian and instead asked them what the people camping out were doing. The one with the microphone laughed and told me that it was a “government project.” They proceeded to tell me that these people “no one knows who” camp out there with pro-Russian signs and the government pays them to do so. They informed me that the man I couldn’t recognize on one of the posters was Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister. The poster called him “the greatest diplomat of all without whom Europe wouldn’t exist.” It’s just government propaganda, they told me. 

All this distrust was still suspicious to me. I decided to ask a prominent Serbian investigative journalist about all the conspiracy claims I’d heard. They looked amused saying “that’s possible,” after each accusation I brought up. 

Things in Serbia are often not what they seem, the journalist, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. We were sat in a crowded and chic café, they were leaning back in their chair, with a bemused smile. They revealed to me the true complexity of the problem I was trying to wrap my head around, and understandably found it funny seeing me struggle to comprehend it.

“Serbs will sometimes say the opposite of what they mean,” the journalist posited. Inat, is the word and philosophy behind it, they said, the Serbian superpower. We talked about it for a long time, it’s hard to sum up but I’ll do my best. It’s basically doing the opposite of what is proper or expected, a type of stubbornness to appear strong in the face of opposition. Examples are the best way to illustrate this characteristic of the culture. During our conversation I threw out examples for a good ten minutes and they kept responding with a nod, saying “yes, that’s inat.” Here are some of the examples we discussed: Serbs would throw rooftop parties during NATO bombings because inat; they would use bridges that were bombing targets because inat; Serbia, a small country, produces many great athletes because inat makes them intense competitors. Novak Djokovic’s refusal to get vaccinated? “That’s inat too,” the journalist told me. 

“It’s a good thing and a bad thing sometimes, but it is important to understand if you are going to talk about Serbia,” my journalist friend told me. Especially because, according to them, with a long and successful career documenting the country, Serbia’s relationship with Russia, with the Serbian government being friendlier than most European states towards Russia, is an example of inat. A combination of inat and reliance on oil, but both contribute to the way it looks from the West, they said. The pro-Russian graffiti I saw everywhere was largely inat, they argued. A lot of Serbian foreign policy, when accounting for inat, makes twisted sense. Kosovo, despite the existence of a border, and most UN countries recognizing its sovereignty, is not acknowledged by Serbia in another display of inat, they told me.

“How am I ever going to explain this to Western audiences,” I moaned. “You probably can’t,” they replied simply. It is easier for the West to propagate a narrative that Serbs are violent, the journalist told me, reporters don’t make the effort to understand the culture because it’s hard to wrap your head around.

I can easily see why Western reporters might take a shortcut and just conflate Serbia with Russia. I mean, that’s the position the government and people seem to take if you don’t account for inat. The pro-Russia graffiti, for example, looks like a clear message without the inat factor. 

A close observer will notice a war taking place on the walls of the city. The letter ‘Z’ in support of the Russian military is sprayed all over the place, but many of them have been converted into hourglasses. There are Ukrainian flags with Zs sprayed over them and Zs with Ukrainian flags sprayed over them. In the fortress of Belgrade there is a display entitled “Mom, I don’t want war!” which powerfully shows children’s drawings from times of conflict. These displays are an important battleground for the rival vandals. A giant red “Slava Rusiji” is written on a panel about Ukraine, though a rival added a small “Ukrania” written in black between these two massive red words. Former Zs are scrawled over the children’s drawings, all turned to hourglasses. Ukrainian flags adorn some panels, but they all seem to have been scratched with a key. This looks to be the product of split public opinion. Inat is still in play though, so it’s apparently possible that both sides of this graffiti war are being disingenuous. 

The fracturing of Serbian public opinion is also seemingly present in the discourse surrounding Kosovo. Jana told me that if there was a vote, she would predict that most Serbians would vote to acknowledge Kosovo because they are tired of the conflict. This view was reinforced by my journalist friend who was an editor of a prominent Serbian newspaper throughout the war. They told me that when the front page of the paper was about Kosovo, sales would drop, reflecting a lack of public interest. However, various Serbs told me that they thought if a politician acknowledged Kosovo’s independence, it would sabotage their political career. This is seemingly a contradiction that I could never sort out. This was why my journalist friend was amused, my face was twisted up in frustration as I tried to make sense of all this. “It’s really complicated,” they said.

I was presented with the picture that Serbians both want and don’t want Kosovo to be acknowledged. The public may be ready to move on from the issue, but inat prevents the acceptance of what looks like defeat or succumbing to the will of others. 

Over my time in Belgrade, I made considerable steps in walking back my initial fear and apprehension. I found oases all over the city. For example, I found a crowded clock and watch repair shop on a side street where the old man who worked there took me through his collection of vintage pocket watches and showed me how each of his cuckoo clocks chimed the hour. Belgrade is full of little boxes of wonder. The city was maybe a bit off-putting to me initially, but the more I explored it, the more it rewarded me. 

My anxiety returned for the journey to Pristina, however. Every Serb I told about my upcoming trip from Belgrade to Pristina doubted that the bus line even existed. I heard various rumors: that there were no buses to Kosovo, or there were only busses to North Mitrovica, a Serb dominated area of Kosovo where recent protests took place. So, as I waited for the bus in the rain, I was doubtful that it would ever come and aware that if it did, it may leave me stranded somewhere I did not want to be. 

The bus showed up, but I couldn’t relax. For the first bit of the ride, we were on highways whizzing past small towns. At one point I saw a truck towing several ominous-looking military armored cars. Soon though we were driving down small roads, winding up mountains, and through even smaller villages. Many of these were in very bad condition. I found myself imagining growing up in these isolated and crumbling places, trying to brainstorm ways out. The closer we got to the border with Kosovo, the worse the conditions appeared. It was getting dark outside at this juncture, but out the window I saw streams of brown water, the banks of which were composed of plastic waste and litter. Half disintegrated houses were the norm. Approaching the border, the road fell into disrepair. It was one lane, the bus had to stop and wait for long periods, letting other cars pass before we could go. These fifteen kilometers closest to the border went excruciatingly slow. It was dark outside by the time we got to the border, and I was on edge.

The border control station between Serbia and Kosovo was in better condition than those on the Serbia-Hungary border. On the outside of the main building there was a six-foot-tall plaque with the EU flag. A border guard, with a Kosovo insignia on his shirt sleeve came onto the bus and checked each of our passports as he moved down the aisle. The sides of the bus were lifted, revealing the luggage compartment, and I thought a similar baggage inspection to the one I experienced at the Serbian border was going to take place, but the luggage compartments were only open for a brief check. Just like that, we were through.

The signs were no longer in Serbian, but Albanian. We passed through a roundabout where a giant Albanian eagle was lit up in red. As opposed to the destitute conditions approaching the border from the Serbian side, the towns we passed through on the other side were the product of newer construction. The contrast was striking and impossible to miss. Our bus passed newly constructed supermarkets with automatic sliding front doors, buildings that reminded me of the newer construction I have seen all around the European Union, from Hungary to Portugal.  We were driving on well-paved roads. I kept thinking ‘I’m back in the West.’ It is unfair to disassociate Serbia from the West, I am not doing so, this was just what struck me when I crossed into Kosovo. 

In the taxi from the bus station to my hotel, I experienced a sense of relief. On the corner close to my hotel was a building with a big sign that read “Welcome to Europe House” with a logo reflecting the EU flag. Right across from the Europe House was a board of advertisement declaring support for Ukraine. This was right next to a large building belonging to the Kosovo government, outside of which flew another EU flag. A short way down the road was a monument honoring Madeleine Albright, with a US flag flying. From an American perspective, Kosovo felt safer, like I was amongst allies. This probably results from NATO’s intervention in the war, the position they took, but in Kosovo I found a place that seemed keen to be associated with the West. In Serbia, this desire, which I know is present in the minds of many Serbs, was less obvious. It is understandable why many reporters may think EU sympathies are non-existent, or at least not dominant in Serbian society. 

Pristina itself slightly reminded me of places I had travelled in Greece, like Corfu especially. The buildings were largely tan, or sort of auburn as opposed to the dominant grey of Belgrade, and many of the streets were narrow, with stray dogs curled up napping along the sidewalk. Pristina has an Ottoman charm. There are mosques dotted around the city that played prayers over loudspeakers as I wound my way through residential districts on the sides of hills. 

On my first day in the city, I had a meeting with one of Jana’s friends who I had never met before, a young woman named Eriona. She immediately took a vested interest in my research in Kosovo and referred me to her boyfriend and many of her friends. In a few hours I had a full friend group in the city and a packed schedule of meetings. This is reflective of the type of kindness I experienced all over the city. Everywhere I went, people were willing to speak to me. People invited me to join them at bars when I was sat by myself watching World Cup games, or just started a conversation with me when I was alone in a café. It’s the type of place where everyone I met referred to me as “my friend.” At two different cafes, after just my first day, I was shaking hands with everyone who worked there when I walked in and was treated like an old friend. Even though I was only in the city for four days, on my last morning I felt I had people to say goodbye to. I experienced a level of friendliness in Pristina that I have not found in many places.  

Eriona and Jana knew each other because they both participated in a program that aims to build understanding between Serbs from Serbia and Albanians from Kosovo. Eriona had participated in lots of these types of programs. One where Albanians from Kosovo and Serbs from Serbia met in North Macedonia, another in Northern Ireland. She told me about a program where Serbs from North Mitrovica and Albanians from elsewhere in Kosovo visited sites where atrocities were committed against Albanians, and places where innocent Serbs were killed by NATO bombings. The Serbs didn’t know about the massacres of Albanians that took place, she told me, and she was unaware that innocent Serbs had been killed in Kosovo. There was a fundamental disconnect in the way the populations had learned the history and, through the program, their knowledge was rounded out. 

Not every program was successful, she told me. In some, the Serbian participants truly regarded Kosovo as a part of their country and couldn’t get past that. She tells me that some Serbs, particularly those living in Kosovo, are “victims” of the media and Serbian government narratives. Everything is different for them, she said, from the history they are taught, to the maps they see, to the news stories they read.

Misha Glenny in his book The Fall of Yugoslavia, wrote “The Serbs living in Kosovo are genuinely frightened, victims of their perceptions of Albanians.” My edition of the book was published in 1996, before the war in Kosovo, so it was a little haunting to hear Eriona reiterate such a similar concern. Misinformation and disinformation, Eriona struck a difference between these two in terms of intention of the disseminator, runs rampant and worsens the conflict. Reconciliation seems impossible if public opinion is being manipulated to promote distrust. 

From what I heard, many Serbs and Kosovars thought the other side hated them. Jana told me about the warnings she got from an older Serbian woman on the bus to North Mitrovica, telling her to be careful of Albanians because they are dangerous and hate Serbs. Eriona told me that when she visited Belgrade for yet another program, she had friends responding to her Instagram story saying, “are you crazy? You’ll be killed!”

Both Jana and Eriona took great pride in telling me that they had a great time in Kosovo and Belgrade respectively. Their ability to communicate, befriend, and collaborate with the other side was a badge of honor for them, and it should be. They are told to be afraid, getting past that takes a level of bravery. 

It’s understandable why this belief in the other side’s hatred exists. The war between these two sides was recent, the trauma is fresh, and people as young as twenty-five have vivid and haunting memories of violence and destruction associated with the other side.

Eriona told me stories of her mother’s side of the family. Her two uncles and grandfather were killed in the war by Serbs. She told me, “My mom suffered a lot. She lost two brothers at the same time, they had kids. Her life was ruined by Serbs. I wouldn’t want my kids to have these problems. I wouldn’t want them to point their fingers at me and say, you didn’t do anything and now we aren’t living in peace.” This is the primary reason she participates in so many programs and receives training in peacebuilding. She says she feels a sense of responsibility. For her mom it would be too hard to enter programs like the ones she does, her generation are still hurt by what happened, she said. Her mother didn’t understand at first why she was working with Serbs, “how could you cooperate with someone who did that to my family,” but she’s gotten over it now, Eriona told me, understanding that these are steps towards peace. 

This ongoing conflict is a story of generational and societal trauma. The threat of war emerging over license plates may seem petty from a Western perspective, but on the ground, you realize how recent and how deep the memories of conflict are. Many people I spoke to told me personal stories of the suffering that resulted from the war. Building peace is so challenging when the pain is recent and pervasive.

Eriona and Jana both said they see potential for young people to create future peace. Through their participation in programs and peacebuilding efforts, they have witnessed people’s desire to move on from historic tensions, though it’s not a straightforward process. “We have two problems, our two governments,” Eriona argued, “They don’t want to cooperate.” I asked almost everyone I spoke to about what it would take for the conflict to be resolved. For most Kosovars, the resolution begins with the recognition of Kosovo’s independence. How can you negotiate with someone who doesn’t even recognize your existence? This was a question that was repeated to me again and again. 

Kosovars expressed outrage to me that Serbia has not officially acknowledged the atrocities they committed during the war. Jana summarized the Balkan post-war paradigm very succinctly for me: “We never want to take responsibility for what we’ve done to the other, only under the condition that the other admits it first. It’s perpetuum mobile.” 

Serbia’s efforts to join the EU are hindered by the Kosovo issue. Progress is prevented by this continuous conflict. The same goes for Kosovo; EU membership is similarly obstructed by Serbia’s blocking of Kosovo from international organizations. The motivated young people I met have ambitions of societal improvement, European improvement, but the relative isolation of their countries, born out of their ongoing struggle, is an additional disadvantage they must circumnavigate. 

This conflict is frustrating from my outsider perspective. In Belgrade and Pristina, I met intelligent people with good intentions. The continuation of tensions, the risk of conflict, is a barrier to these citizens, and reconciliation would benefit both nations in terms of their international standing, but you cannot take the conflict out of its deeply emotional context. Trauma, anger, hurt, on a societal level, is fresh in this region, and emotion is often the enemy of rationality. 

Even if the need to move on from these conflicts is acknowledged, the act of doing so, and pushing through pain, is a different challenge entirely. The youth give me hope, people like Jana and Eriona are doing this laudable work of looking trauma in the face. Serbs and Kosovars alike told me this healing will take a long time. In the short term, as everyone told me, conflict is possible. NATO, I’m sure, won’t let any violence get to the level of a full-scale war, but the anxiety is still there. This risk of violence is not new to the people in the region, “I get why this looks scary from the West, but this is just a regular Tuesday for us,” I was told. There will be no simple answers, I just hope the strength embodied by Jana and Eriona is more contagious than the anger born from pain.