Hard to believe it’s been 8 years – nearly to the day – since I was last in Kosovo. Then it was much different, of course, coming in as I did just one day after the end of the NATO bombings that forced the Serb withdrawl from the province. I walked past teh Grand Hotel here in Pristina today, and remembered having a coffee on it’s street-side terrace, watching a poorly-driven British NATO tank careen off of another parked tank in the middle of the street on June 17, 1999. A random memory. Everywhere I look now I see homes that are newly built. I well remember the scale of the damage as I drove in from Macedonia in June 1999. Every house along that route was damaged or destroyed. On a more personal level, its harder still to believe where my life has gone in those 8 years. Kosovo was my first major emergency, as I was then just two years into a job with Catholic Relief Services. After three months in the Balkans that spring and summer, I moved directly to Africa, where I worked for most of the next 6 years on an Emergency Response Team, traveling almost constantly to places like Kosovo.
If the physical scars of the war here have healed, the more subtle reminders of that ethnically-charged conflict remain. All these years later, miinority Serbs and Roma are still afraid to return, or unable due to the lack of job opportunities in Kosovo today. While Kosovo awaits a UN vote on its future, many seem to be waiting to see what their next moves will be. Any vote is sure to see a movemnt, into or out of Kosovo, by some elements of the population. A vote for independence will surely bring some movement of Serbs from the province. It remains to be seen how many, but right now the mood here is one of waiting, while the long process of rebuilding from the conflict of 1999 continues, slowly.
May 27th, 2007 | by David in Uncategorized
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All Material © 2008 David Snyder
