Kosovo Uncovered Pt. 3 – The Kids

Postponed Futures Beginning To Rise?

Words – Hana Marku

: It’s impossible to describe Prishtina without mentioning the amount of young people in it: most of the population is under thirty. And there would be nothing to differentiate them from young people anywhere else, except for the fact that opportunities for them are so limited, and the weight of the past is so visible everywhere.

When asked, it’s surprising how matter-of-factly most can speak of sleeping in refugee camps, being threatened and harassed by the police, or thrown out of their homes by the military - while calmly stirring spoons in porcelain coffee cups.

There is frustration beneath the surface energy, and given the chance a good number of people would get up and leave, go anywhere to get away from the slow chaos that is a constant irritant. Their wants are pretty basic: freedom to travel, liveable wages, and a degree with some quantifiable value.

I mention degrees because a decent education in Kosova is very difficult to come by. It is possible only if one has the resources to either study abroad or attend a respected private university, like the AUK (American University of Kosova). Those whose families can afford to pay their way make up a small number of young people in Prishtina - those who have the privilege of being able to enjoy themselves whenever and however they want. They are the ones who set the scene for what is cool.

One day I was waiting for a friend at the Hard Rock café, a place in Prishtina that has no affiliation to the actual Hard Rock café, but a popular place for the type of people mentioned above. It has a rundown chic, strategically run-down and derelict in just the right places - just dingy enough to be cool. Everyone has long hair, t-shirts with bands on them, and distressed, store-bought jeans.

As I waited for my friend a young girl of about 9 or 10 in an orange dress walked from table to table, begging for money. Beggars are not an unusual sight in Kosova, often haunting cafes and busy places in the same manner as this young girl. There was something just ugly about the way young fashionable café-sitters, my age and older, ignored her, not even looking her way when she spoke to them.

Despite scenes like this, young people direct most action for change that occurs in Kosova. The Vetevendosja (Self-Determination) Movement is the loudest and most popular activist group in Kosova. Its manifesto is one of decolonisation, as it sees the UN administration in Kosova as one of the biggest impediments to independence. A great deal is in flux right now, especially values and traditions that have remained unquestioned for what seems like forever.

A good example is the history textbooks I learned from in elementary school. For years the books I bought denounced the Serbs, the Greeks, the Montenegrins, the Macedonians, the Turks, and most of Europe as being horrible, nasty barbarians. They’ve been rewritten since my time, but it will take much more to rid us of our ingrained martyr-hero complex. Patriotic music and symbols are very popular, and everyone knows Albanian history more or less by heart, thanks to the early drumming given to us since birth.

This is where I truly thank God for the Internet. It is the best escape valve for the intellectually curious in Kosova. One of my cousins already has the long messy hair and pale skin of someone who reads a lot and surfs the net a lot. I want him to continue to do so, all through his adolescence and into adulthood. Well-read computer nerds drive societies forward. It sounds facetious, but it’s true.

His views and values will be different from those of his parents, and different from those of my generation too. He won’t assume that his teachers have all the answers, and he won’t feel the need to live up to the expectations of his parents. The world will seem bigger to him, and he will be able to find a place for himself more easily beyond the borders of where he lives.

On this visit, I didn’t venture far from Prishtina. I didn’t visit any of the countless poor and dusty villages where the majority of the population lives. Prishtina is a small oasis away from that. There’s a sense of striving beneath the passivity, a burning frustration which shows up in bursts, and will one day surely erupt. It’s hard to say with people who are so tough yet so resigned.

The part of Kosova I experienced was the shadow, the faint dream of what Kosova could be: a place where there is constant movement of a different kind, the constant movement of moving forward, not in circles.