Kossovo: We are independent but nothing depends on us
Kossovo: We are independent but nothing depends on us
There are places in the world where hope is just a word, an empty box to capture one’s dreams. In these places there is no point in talking, there is no point in remarking the uselessness of the present. The only thing to do is to listen. By listening one can build a little treasure, a rare one. In the Balkans there is a proverb for almost any situation as if everything had been lived already in the past. A few days ago, with a few words, an Albanian friend of mine made me realize the frustration of those who live their everyday reality without catching a glimpse of a brighter future. He said: “We are independent but nothing depends on us”.
The same frustration is hurled in my face by an old Serbian lady who welcomes me in her bare house: “My pension is 11 Euro per month, I can hardly buy a kilogram of coffee. I dedicated my whole life to my State but for them that is not enough yet, they want my dignity too.” While telling me this she looks at me, smiles and carefully begins to prepare Turkish coffee. I can do nothing but listening, I am left speechless. It seems to me I have no tools to understand how it feels to live the life of a puppet in the hands of the politicians on duty. In this region politics is everywhere; its presence spreads to any sphere of everyday life. Here, offering a coffee to an Italian is a political act.
Politics built a new Kossovo, an independent and sovereign state, recognized only by 55 of the 192 United Nations member states. On March 24th 2009 the tenth anniversary of the beginning of NATO bombings on Milosevic’s Serbia was remembered, it was also the beginning of the war that lead to Kossovo’s independence. Today Kossovo is an independent country with its own flag, government and army. At the same time on the territory there are still about 16.000 soldiers of the international NATO contingent, coming from 34 countries. The new mission of the European Union, called Eulex, is in charge of organizing all these forces and of supporting the new Kossovarian State during this transitional moment toward the longed for aim of Freedom and Democracy.
I sometimes wonder just how much of a “state” it is, the seventh country born after Yugoslavia’s death. In this new country the unemployment rate is about 50%, over 90% of firms do not employ more than 9 people and in many cases firms are one-man-businesses. The average salary is about 200 Euro per month. The only entity that keeps on growing richer is the mafia. Almost all the heroin going to rich Europe travels through the new Kossovo. Besides drugs, the mafia grows rich thanks to smuggling of weapons and to trafficking of young girls, sold and sent to any corner of the planet. Today’s Kossovo resembles more and more to a narco-state, a black hole where people’s hopes are swallowed up.
Nobody seems to care about this. Nobody has to know the well-hidden truth about what is happening inside this “human corral”. Maybe the reason lays in the fact that the 55 States who recognized this new country (including my Italy) produce 70% of the World’s GDP. This fact highlights all the hypocrisy of those who draw horizons of Freedom and Democracy, thus taking advantage of their economic strength in order to extend their domain on the international chessboard. Freedom here in Kossovo is just a stain of ink on a blank sheet, a sound coming from the mouth of someone blind. There is no connection between what is told by the media in Italy and in the World (not much anyhow), and everyday life lived in this place. Out of everything said only a few segments correspond to reality. The reasons are quite clear since the interests of great powers are concentrated in this little region. Seeing everything from a close up perspective, contradictions leap out, everything is so dirty that it is impossible not to see. This is one of the many written pictures of today’s Kossovo, a picture I would prefer to throw away. But I feel urged to write about it, I owe it to the many faces that talked to me, hitting me with their stories like a punch straight to my stomach, teaching me how to keep my head up in the clouds while keeping my feet firmly on the ground.
I also learnt from them to always consider a very important fact: we are in the Balkans, in the young, suffering, beating heart of contemporary Europe. Kossovo is the youngest country in Europe, more than 50% of the people are less than 20 years old and the average age is about 24. In this region from generation to generation people got used to resist in their everyday life, always standing up against an authoritarian system imposed from outside. The Balkans have always been land to conquer for foreign reigns and empires. Nobody considers the great strength handed on from father to son, the strength of those who already lost everything but don’t want to give up or resign to it.
Some time ago, while in Italy, I read a sentence of Gandhi’s: “One can win in perfect solitude if it doesn’t renounce its own dignity”. When in Kossovo every day I can see real evidence of how this concept can permeate people’s lives giving them the strength to shield their own dignity and to try to find new solutions to old problems. There are people here who don’t give up, who want truth and are ready to shield it with their own lives.
Today here in Kossovo who is fighting this fight is the new generation who lived through the war only partially and who saw it through children’s’ eyes. This generation finds itself stuck everyday in the contradictions of a system that talks about freedom but at the same time acts and legitimizes itself by denying it. The contradictions are clear; I can’t close my eyes anymore. One day an Albanian friend told me he felt lost and young people all over the world feel the same, “we are lost” he said. I agree with him, I feel lost too; at times I cannot distinguish the colours of the picture we are protagonists in. Everything gets black or white and there is no more room for shades. But right when everything seems dark without any future one can discern the little flames of hope and change. The only thing I can do is foster these little flames along my way, because I always have to remember that a righteous world is not born made.
Today, around 9:00am, around fifteen masked Israeli settlers from the illegal outpost of Havot Ma’on attacked three Palestinian shepherds who were grazing their flocks in a valley south of the outpost. The settlers came running down from a ridge above the shepherds, hurling rocks.