The wreckage of intervention

In a vivid article for The National, Christopher Stewart reports on the unstable conditions in seventeen-month-old Kosovo, the world's youngest independent nation. His compellingly detailed examination includes an interview with the poet Basri Capriqi, president of the Kosovo PEN.

Capriqi was a youthful 31 in 1989, when Slobodan Milosevic made his infamous speech at the field of Black Birds, invoking the Serbs’ defeat there at the hands of the Turks in 1389 to incite anti-Albanian sentiments among the thousands of Serbs in his audience.

In the months that followed, Kosovo’s status as an autonomous province within the republic of Serbia was revoked, and ethnic Albanians were purged from public institutions – judges, prosecutors, police officers, teachers. Out of a job, Capriqi watched as street signs, storefronts and newspapers all came printed in Serbo-Croatian and any Albanians deemed enemies of the state were arrested and tortured. Capriqi retreated into literature, reading books to remind himself that there was a sane world beyond the horizon, and writing what he terms “antinationalist poetry. Everyone else was writing about being brave and fighting. I wrote: ‘I’m scared like a duck. I’m afraid.’” ....

"Our thought was to achieve this through passive resistance, like Gandhi. The sad truth is that nothing in this region could be resolved without war. Other places broke up without bloodshed, like the Soviet Union, but this region is different.” Capriqi paused and fiddled with a pencil. “After the war, the intellectuals felt lost. Our peaceful project had failed. We felt sorry that our ideas had failed. I came to think that war was probably the only way, but that is very sad. It has changed things.”

Capriqi’s most recent book of poetry, Taming the Snake, published in 2005, is a veiled critique of what has happened to Kosovo. “It is about taming the beast and restoring humanity to the land,” he said. “There is a lot of that to be done here, taming and restoring. I just don’t know anymore. I had high hopes, but this is not exactly the Kosovo I imagined. I’d like to be optimistic, but it is hard. Some of the people in power are warriors, not politicians,” he said.