Heroes and Villains

Judging from their history classes, you might think Albanian and Serbian students in Kosovo lived through two different wars. [Also in Russian.] by Fatmire Terdevci 20 December 2006 Arber Desku and Dejan Milic, both 17, live 11 kilometers apart. Arber attends Sami Frasheri gymnasium in Pristina and Dejan is a secondary-school student from the town of Lipjan.

They were both born in Kosovo, but the divide between them seems impassible. The differences between Arber, an ethnic Albanian, and Dejan, a Serb, go beyond ethnicity, language, religion, and culture. They have their roots in perceptions of the past, of who is a hero and who is a victim.

One side's heroes are the other side's terrorists. Even a history as recent as that of the 1998-1999 Kosovo conflict, which both of them recall so vividly, looks very different from each side.

Those differences are only exacerbated each day when Arber goes to his Albanian school and Dejan to his Serbian school. That's because two histories are taught in Kosovo's schools, and as long as the recent conflict remains in living memory, it's nearly impossible to imagine a version of history that would suit both sides.

Although education officials from both sides say their textbooks are free of hateful or xenophobic language, Albanians are often portrayed in Serbian textbooks as foreigners on Serbian soil, while Albanian-language textbooks describe Serbs as colonialists who came from Russia.

The Albanian-language books are published in Kosovo under international supervision, while books for the Serbian minority are imported from Serbia.

According to Slavomir Miric, vice principal of the Serbian elementary school in Lipjan, the students mostly learn about the history of the Ottoman Empire and World War II. “There are five or six sentences about the NATO bombardment. Then there are two or three sentences about the end of the Milosevic regime. It says that he was defeated on the fifth of October 2000 and then democratic forces came to power in Serbia. That’s all.”

Miric says the Serbian heroes about whom students learn the most include Nikola Tesla, a pioneering inventor in the field of electricity; Aleksandar, king of Serbia at the turn of the 20th century; and Vuk Karadjic, a 19th-century linguist who helped devise the modern Serbian language.

Miric acknowledges, however, that in Serbian-language history and literature textbooks, Kosovo is referred to as "the cradle of the Serbian nation," a notion rejected by most Kosovan Albanians.

Maria Vasic, 14, says the hero she most admires from her history classes is Karadjordje Petrovic, leader of the first Serbian uprising against the Ottomans at the beginning of the 19th century.

For his part, Dejan admires a more modern figure. “I don’t know what others are learning about, but we mostly talk about Milosevic and how good and safe it was for us during his time here,” Dejan says, grinning. Then he backtracks a bit. “Maybe it’s not really like this in the books, but this is how the lecture is given by our history teacher,” Dejan says.

His Albanian counterpart, Arber, strikes a similar note. “You cannot avoid mentioning the [Kosovo Liberation Army], you cannot construct a history without the Jashari family, and you cannot just ignore all the massacres and killings and destruction that happened here. Then it would not be history, and a history without all these names and events is not our history,” Arber says.

Adem Jashari was a KLA commander killed, along with 28 members of his family, in a confrontation with Serbian forces in March 1998. He has become a legend among Kosovan Albanians.

A SCHOOLHOUSE DIVIDED

The war between Serbian military and police forces and the KLA ended in 1999 after 78 days of NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia. More than 10,000 Albanian Kosovans were killed and thousands went missing. After the war and the stationing of NATO peacekeeping troops in Kosovo, local Serbs became the victims of retaliatory attacks, resulting in thousands of displaced people across Serbia and the region. Since the end of the war, a UN mission has run the province, whose status is expected to be resolved early next year. Most observers expect the UN's chief negotiator in the status talks to recommend some form of independence for Kosovo.

Albanian Kosovans suffered almost 10 years of segregation after the province lost its autonomy in 1991 under the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, when Albanian teachers and students were expelled from universities and secondary schools. Albanian Kosovans established a parallel system of education using their own books and programs.

The Serbs have followed suit, despite efforts of the international community and local leadership to integrate them into the Kosovan education system. Most Serbian Kosovans, who account for less than 10 percent of the province's population, are reluctant to be included in the system. “That’s just impossible. What do we teach then, about Adem Jashari and KLA?" Miric, the Serbian vice principal, says.

Arif Demolli, who oversees textbooks for the Education Ministry, says that after the war all the books were rewritten. “These books are free of nationalism and xenophobia. There is no criticism of the Serbian people or any other people, but only of regimes such as Milosevic's."

The books in the Albanian language were compiled after the war, under the close supervision of the UN mission. The Ministry of Education, run by locals, was established in 2002. Before that, the province's education system was overseen by one international and one local official. “We have international observers here. We cannot publish books that afterward may be prohibited," Demolli says.

Aside from international supervision, the ministry might shy away from glorifying members of the KLA because since the ministry's inception it has been led by officials from the Democratic League of Kosovo, the party of the late president Ibrahim Rugova, which did not ally itself with the KLA.

The last war in Kosovo is taught in Albanian schools in the 13th grade, in a four-page chapter called, “The KLA War and NATO Intervention.” Asked if the teachers stick to the school programs and books, Demolli says, “It’s hard to know if they go beyond what they have in books. It’s impossible to check on each and every one.”

Many parents from both sides have strong feelings about what should go into their children's textbooks. “I don’t know why my child should not learn in the future more about our legendary hero Adem Jashari and other heroes of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who represent a crucial moment of our history,” says Hilmi Zekaj, father of a first-grader.

Zekaj says the next generation should learn more about what he calls the suffering of their ancestors.

Djurica Nedelkovic, a Serbian mother of two school-age children from Lipjan, says essentially the same thing. “No one can just leave out more than 10 years of our history and events only because there is a name that the international community and the Siptari (Albanian Kosovans) dislike. Of course, they should learn about Milosevic, of course they should see him as a national hero, just like every nation has its heroes,” Nedelkovic says.

Halim Hyseni develops training programs for the Kosovo Education Center, a nongovernmental organization funded by the Soros Foundation. He says the problem of distilling recent history into textbooks exists all over the Balkans. “All the history books in the Balkans are full of the language of hate and nationalism, giving too much space to the [issue of] ethnic identity. There are too many myths and historical distortions,” Hyseni says. He argues that textbooks should be revamped throughout the region, not just in one country.

Considering the fractured relationships and stubborn denial of crimes committed in the last decades among the Balkan nations, that might be Mission Impossible.