FINDING JELENA: Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo
by Jen Marlowe
On February 17, Kosovo declared independence.  The declaration was unilateral; Belgrade, which ruled the province until NATO air strikes in 1999 brought it under UN administration, refuses to consider anything other than a status of autonomy for Kosovo. 

 

Kosovo, Belgrade insists, remains the cradle of the Serbian nation.  Modern Serbs still commemorate the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje; it’s key to their sense of national identity. The US recognized the newly declared state; Russia has not. Tensions have erupted once again, though at the moment most of the violence has been directed towards the US Embassy and international troops, it could spill over into new violence between the communities.

 

As Albanians in Kosovo celebrate their new independence, and Serbs in Kosovo pointedly don’t, I thought about a bitter cold day I spent criss-crossing Kosovo, trying to track down the whereabouts of Jelena Trajkovic, a Serb in Kosovo.  In this search for one young woman, I tasted first-hand the recent history, tensions,complexities and nuances between the two communities and was left pondering the question: can there be a common future for Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo?
    
I first met Jelena in March of 2001, at a pan-Balkan youth reconciliation workshop. It was only two years after NATO air strikes throughout Serbia and Montenegro had halted Serb atrocities against Albanians in Kosovo. Jelena was sixteen years old.

 

She kept mostly to herself. Part of that may have been due to shyness. But there was a political element as well. Albanians in Kosovo had undergone years of oppression and brutality at the hands of Serb police and policy. But after the US-led air strikes and the UN administrative takeover of the province, the balance of power had shifted.  It was now Serbs in Kosovo, those who hadn’t already fled, who were living in a state of insecurity and fear. And that fear expressed itself in all of Jelena’s being.

In the ensuing three years, I saw Jelena at several more workshops.  It seemed that tensions in Kosovo might be lowering, and Jelena’s confidence grew. Albanian friends of Jelena’s visited her in her home—albeit with UN escort. Jelena herself had gone a few times to Pristina for meetings with her Albanian colleagues. Jelena’s relationship with the Albanians in the group grew stronger and more honest as they delved into the painful recent past and began to examine questions about the future.

Then came March 15, 2004. There was a drive-by shooting in Caglavica village in central Kosovo. An eighteen year old young man was killed, Serb. The next day, three Albanian boys drowned in the Ibar River. Rumors circulated immediately that they were chased into the river by Serbs seeking revenge. Violence erupted, beginning at Ibar River’s bridge in Mitrovica, linking the southern, Albanian part of the city with the northern, Serb part.

 

Eight people, Serbs and Albanians, were killed at the bridge and hundreds more injured. KFOR, the NATO-led Kosovo security force, closed the bridge, but the violence continued to spread. Serb homes and holy sites were desecrated and burned. It seemed as if the incident unleashed rage at the torments and abuses Albanians had suffered at the hands of Serbs.

Jelena and I exchanged emails in the days that followed. She and her family had managed to flee into Serbia.  They were shaken but unharmed. Whatever fragile hope there had been for Serbs to feel secure living together with Albanians was dashed. 

 

Jelena expressed hurt in those emails that the Kosovar Albanians she considered her friends hadn’t reached out to her to check if she and her family were okay.  After the violence calmed down, she told me that she and her family were returning to their home.  And then we lost touch.

January, 2006. I was in Belgrade, planning a trip to Kosovo with my friend Orli. Before leaving Belgrade, Orli sent text messages to Arta and Blina, Kosovar Albanian colleagues of Jelena’s, notifying them that they were coming. They responded enthusiastically.We tried to call Jelena, but couldn’t get through. We sent her a text message. It was undeliverable.

Orli and I took a mini bus heading to Pristina the following dawn. Rainy Belgrade slipped away from us, morphing into farms with idyllic rounded haystacks and occasional towns with square, concrete storefronts. Seven hours later,we reached the demarcation point between Serbia-proper and Kosovo. We called Arta to tell her we would be in Pristina soon.

“Great! Where are you?” she asked. Any response had political undertones. Should we say we’re at the Serbian-Kosovar border, signaling that Kosovo was on its way towards independence? Or were we at a checkpoint, indicating that Kosovo was an autonomous province of Serbia?

Arta and Blina were waiting for us in a café in downtown Pristina.  It was nighttime by now, and bitterly cold, but Blina insisted on taking me on a tour.  We walked to the Assembly of Kosovo Building, surrounded by a chain link fence. Laminated photographs covered the fence with flowers woven through and candles lit underneath. The photographs were grainy, some color, some black and white, mostly of young or middle aged men.

“Photos of those still missing,” Blina explained.  “They’re here to remind members of Parliament to keep trying to find out if they’re alive, or bring back their bodies. About 2,000 people are still missing.”

I lingered by the fence, trying to make out the faces in the candlelight, thinking about the mass graves that had been uncovered in Serbia until our hands and feet grew numb.
    
The next morning, Pristina’s grit was covered in a dusting of snow. I tried unsuccessfully to reach Jelena again. Eighteen months ago, Orli visited Jelena in Mitrovica where she was studying and living in the university dorms. It was all I had to go on. I jumped on a bus heading to Mitrovca from the depot in Pristina. The ride was a straight shot down a freeway and ninety minutes later, the bus pulled into the terminal in south Mitrovica—the Albanian side of town.

I asked a vendor selling gum and cigarettes from a shack outside the bus stop if he could direct me to the bridge.

“The bridge? Just walk straight down this street for a few kilometers. You can’t miss it!” he said cheerfully.

It was cold and windy.  I passed grimy coffee shops filled with men smoking and drinking dark, sweet, small cups of coffee.  Before long,the Mitrovica bridge loomed ahead of me.

I had been in ethnically divided cities before; I lived in Jerusalem for years and had worked in Mostar. But crossing the Mitrovica bridge reminded me of Nicosia, with a UN administered “no man’s zone”  (officially called the Green Zone) separating the Greek and Turkish Cypriot sides of the city. A dead dove swung on a noose in the middle of the Green Zone. There was no symbolically slaughtered peace symbol here—but there were also no people crossing. Aside from a few black-booted KFOR soldiers and jeeps, I was alone on the bridge.

The sign on the bridge was formidable:

“Obligatory possession of legal identity card.
Checkouts by law forces are possible at any time.
Gatherings are prohibited.”

And, at the bottom, in large red letters:

“Malicious or provocative behavior shall be repressed immediately”.

On the other side of the bridge, I was in an entirely different world. The posters stapled to a wooden kiosk were in Cyrillic, as was the storefront of the pharmacy on the corner. An old woman sat on a bench next to the kiosk, hunched down inside her coat.

“Do you speak English?” I asked her.

She shook her head, stood up and shuffled away. Two young women emerged from the pharmacy, chatting energetically with each other. I walked briskly to catch up with them.

“Excuse me!” One glanced over her shoulder. “Do you know where…?” she turned away, speeding up her pace before I could complete the sentence. The response to me was much different here than on the southern side, I was finding. Was it because my government had spearheaded the NATO-led bombing campaign of Serbia?

I wandered a few blocks deeper into town. A tall young man with dark hair and glasses overheard a third failed attempt to ask someone where to find the university and took pity on me. “Come with me, I’m going there myself.”

“When did you come to Mitrovica?” he asked me. Just now, I told him, on a bus from Pristina. “You took a bus into southern Mitrovica? It’s dangerous there.”

“I didn’t feel any danger.”

“Well, you can come and go across the bridge,” the young man responded.  “If I go there, they’ll kill me.” He paused as I digested that. “So what are you doing at the university?”

I told him I was looking for an old friend of mine, Jelena Trajkovic. Did he know her? I described her: long, wavy, light brown hair, glasses…

“Trajkovic you say? I don’t think so. Where does she stay?”
“I don’t know. Two years ago she was living in the dorms.”
“Well, what does she study?”
“Actually, I have no idea.”

He looked amused.  “There’s 10,000 students at the university. How do you expect to find her?”

I didn’t have a good answer.

The young man led me to two large cement dormitories.  He pointed to one. “There’s a café in the bottom,” he said.  “Maybe somebody there will know her.”

I walked into the building and down a half-flight of stairs into a small coffee shop. Two young men sat at a round plastic table.   “By any chance, do you know Jelena Trajkovic?” I described her once again.  “I know her from a camp she attended in the US.” One of the young men shrugged. The other showed some interest.

“Camp in the US?” He grabbed his cell phone and began to punch buttons.  Within seconds, his phone beeped in response. He glanced at it.  “Jelena’s cousin is coming down.”

Moments later, another young man joined us, shaking my hand warmly. “You know Jelena from the US?”

“Yeah, is she here?”
“She’s at home. She finished her exams and has a break.”
“Can I call her?”
“It’s a problem.  She doesn’t have a land line and there’s no cell reception at the moment. But you can go there, it’s just over an hour from here. You’ll find her at home.”

On a scrap of paper, he wrote down Jelena’s name and the name of her village: Ugljare.

“You can find a van heading there a few blocks away.  Just tell the driver to drop you off in Ugljare.

I had no idea where Ugljare was or how I would return that evening to Pristina. But I had come this far. I wasn’t going to leave Kosovo without seeing Jelena.

Battered, white vans pulled up to the curb right where Jelena’s cousin told me they would. “Ugljare?” I asked each driver, showing them the slip of paper when they raised eyebrows at my pronunciation.  

Finally one driver jerked his head, indicated that I should climb in the back of the van. I did, along with several young women who looked at me curiously. The van pulled away blaring Serbian music and, heading, I hoped, to Jelena.  

It took me some time to recognize that we were traveling towards Pristina.The van was driving fast; whether as a matter of norm or a feeling of insecurity, I couldn’t gauge. I wondered about the loud music as we drove through the outskirts of Pristina. My fellow passengers would most likely be afraid to disembark and walk through the street, but in the not-so-distant past, the dynamic of power and fear had been the opposite. Was there a message behind the blaring Serbian music as we sped past Pristina?

Twenty minutes later, the van turned onto a snowy road, leading through houses and fields. The driver stopped and slid open the door.  “Ugljare.”

I climbed out of the van.  It was snowing lightly again. I was alone on a residential street. Almost alone. A man was shoveling snow in his driveway behind me. I approached him, saying hello in my limited Serbian. I showed him the slip of paper. “Jelena Trajkovic?”

He leaned against his shovel, wiping his forehead, then made two circles with his hands, bringing them up to his eyes as if they were spectacles.  “Jelena?”

“Yes, yes!” I said, repeating his gesture. He pointed straight ahead on the main road and then indicated to the right.

I thanked him in Serbian and began to walk down the road, past a snow-covered field. I heard him whistling behind me. I turned, and saw the man gesticulating to the right. He wanted me to turn into the field.  Could that be correct? I took a few tentative steps, following a tractor path.  He flashed a thumbs-up, so I trudged across the snowy field.
    
In fifteen minutes I was across the field and approaching the tail end of another road.  It was well into the afternoon by now and I didn’t see anybody outside. I decided to knock at a random door. A young woman opened it.

“Do you speak English?” I asked.
“A little.  How can I help you?” she smiled warmly.
“Thank you,” I said in Serbian and, switching to English, took out the slip of paper to show her.  “I’m looking for Jelena Trajkovic. Do you know her?”

The woman’s warmth and smile evaporated immediately. She pointed stiffly across the road. “That’s a Serb house,” she said in an icy voice. “Ask them. Maybe they know.”

The door shut abruptly. I was bewildered. The woman was Albanian, I now realized, but wasn’t I in Ugljare?  And wasn’t Ugljare a Serb enclave?  

I crossed the road, wondering exactly which house was the “Serb house”. A pre-teen boy with blond hair and ruddy cheeks walked out of a house with a shovel and began to energetically remove snow from his driveway. Which language should I greet him in? I tried a hello in Albanian. He said hello back with a big smile. Clearly I had chosen the right language. But my Albanian was even more limited than my Serbian. I showed him the slip of paper.

“Jelena Trajkovic?” I asked hesitantly.

His eyes flew open and he grabbed the paper out of my hand, taking off in a run, motioning with his arm that I should follow him.  He ran to the next home and began pounding on the door.

A middle-aged version of Jelena opened the door. The boy spoke a few excited words, waved to me, and bounded back down the stairs to his house.

“Jelena!” her mother called out and suddenly Jelena was at the door, shrieking excitedly, pulling me into the house and hugging me.  

“What are you doing here, Jen? How in the world did you find me?”    

As we ate a lunch of pork, cheese and bread, washing it down with plum brandy, I told Jelena about my day’s search. She laughed at me that I had gone all the way to Mitrovica only to return to a town outside of Pristina.  She asked if I encountered any dogs in the field—often there are dogs there, she said--and she cleared my confusion about Ugljare and her Albanian neighbors.  

“Ugljare is a Serb enclave. But we live in Kosovo Polje.  Kosovo Polje used to be a mixed town. But since March 2004, there are almost no Serbs left.”  

Jelena’s house was on the very outskirts of town, she said. If they were to exit their house and turn right, they would walk towards the center of Kosovo Polje. But Jelena’s family can’t turn right anymore; they’re frightened. Most Serbs’ houses in Kosovo Polje were burned down during the violence in March 2004; Serb neighbors of theirs included.  Jelena wasn’t sure why the rioters stopped before burning her house. Anytime Jelena or her family walk outside, whether it’s to go to the university, or buy milk and eggs, they must turn left and traipse across the same field I had, connecting them with Ugljare, the Serb enclave.

“There’s no future for my family here,” Jelena told me.  “We don’t want to leave our home, but we’ve held out as long as we can.”

I asked Jelena about the boy who led me to her house. He was Albanian, and it seemed her family had a relationship with them.

The edges of her voice grew icy, similar to the woman who had identified Jelena’s home as “the Serb house”.  

“They may have helped prevent the house from being burned or looted. We exchange gifts and food on holidays.  But still, I can’t trust them,” she said. “When we fled, they came into our house, searching for things. What were they looking for? Weapons? It’s just my father here, with his wife and daughters.”

The afternoon was slipping into evening. I needed to get back to Pristina. Jelena’s mother went to ask the neighbor if he was willing to take me to the end of the road where I could find a van to Pristina. She and Jelena couldn’t walk me themselves; they couldn’t turn right.

The neighbor insisted that he drive me directly to Pristina. With Jelena’s help in translation, I tried to protest that it wasn’t necessary, but he was adamant.

I hugged Jelena and reluctantly said goodbye. There was so much still to say. After a day spent tracking her down, we only had ninety minutes together.

In the car, the neighbor asked me in broken English if I was a journalist or worked with the UN.  I told him, no, that Jelena was my friend.

There was silence for a few moments.  

Then, emphatically: “Jelena good.  Jelena family---very good!”

I tried to sift through the layers.  An Albanian man was giving a ride to an American woman as a favor to his Serb neighbors.  Jelena’s family, he proclaimed, was very good, and yet Jelena harbored so much fear and mistrust of his.

Kosovo declared itself independent and the international community plays the geo-political game of “to recognize-or-not to recognize.” Belgrade cries crocodile tears over the fate of Serbs in Kosovo.  Arta wrote in an email that there are fewer photos on the chain link fence outside the Kosovo Assembly Building; Serbia is slowly returning the bodies that it buried in mass graves.  Jelena wrote that she and her family are still in Kosovo Polje, turning only left as they exit their house and crossing through a field to get to Ugljare.  

What will Kosovo’s declaration mean for these two young women? Will Jelena’s car have Kosovo plates or keep the Serbian ones? Will she be able to go to Pristina to meet Arta and Blina again, or travel safely anymore to university?  Is there a common future Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo can build together?  The reality I tasted one snowy day trying to find Jelena Trajkovic doesn’t offer much optimism.