Bringing Together Mitrovica’s Sonic Youth

A school for rock ’n’ roll chips away at ethnic barriers in Kosovo’s divided city.

by S. Adam Cardais 21 December 2011

SKOPJE | Vesa Nishliu, the 16-year-old drummer for Sparkle, was just into her solo at the dress rehearsal for the Mitrovica Rock School's final concert this summer when the audience began to chant.

 

“Vesa! Vesa! Vesa! Vesa!“ shouted the crowd of roughly 50 students, teachers, and administrators at the Ilija Nikolovski-Luj Music and Ballet School in Skopje, fists pumping high as Nishliu pounded her kit.

 

After four late-August days of jamming and practice in Macedonia's capital, the students from Mitrovica in northern Kosovo had bonded by the rehearsal, cheering through the first two sets of covers of everything from Eric Clapton to Gnarls Barkley. But it wasn't until Nishliu's solo that the students gelled.

 

It was an unlikely, if even extraordinary, scene. The students were ethnic Serbs and Albanians from Mitrovica, the divided city where they live most of the year as estranged neighbors on the front line of the "frozen conflict" in northern Kosovo. At that moment, Mitrovica was on lockdown amid mass ethnic unrest over a border dispute between Pristina and Belgrade, which have fought to control the north since the 1998-1999 Kosovo war.

 

“The north has never been this bad since we started working in Mitrovica,” Wendy Hassler-Forest of Musicians Without Borders, a Dutch organization that supports the Rock School, said a couple of months after the scene in Skopje. “What surprised me the most is the willingness of the kids to focus on the music and not be cynical. Everybody is so sick of the situation that when you do something positive, they pick it up. That's what makes it work.”

 

Launched in 2008, the Mitrovica Rock School aims to play a part in bringing lasting peace to the city by connecting local youth through music education. At a time when ethnic tension is simmering at levels unseen in Kosovo for years, the program has never been more relevant, even as it serves as a reminder of the complicated road to conciliation.

 

ONLY THE MUSIC MATTERS

 

With “only the music matters” as its motto, the school is structured around the delicate ethnic politics of Mitrovica. The city of roughly 100,000 straddles the Ibar River, the de facto border between northern Kosovo, the majority-Serb area Belgrade wants to absorb, and the predominantly Albanian south.

 

The city has been ethnically divided along the river since the end of the Kosovo Liberation Army's war for independence from Serbia. Northern Mitrovica was considered one of the only secure outposts for Kosovan Serbs suffering Albanian reprisals after NATO intervention pushed the forces of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic out of Kosovo in 1999. As Serbs fled north, most of the city’s Albanians were forced south of the Ibar. Today, many residents are refugees in their own town, unable to return to abandoned property across the river.

 

As a result of this division, the music program has two schools: one for Serb students in Mitrovica north, as it's called, and one in Mitrovica south for the Albanians. Throughout the year the roughly 80 students take free afternoon lessons with local rockers.

 

The program culminates each August in Macedonia. Twelve students from each side are chosen for a week of music training and a final concert by ethnically mixed bands like Sparkle in City Park in central Skopje, neutral turf where English becomes the common language among students, teachers, and administrators. For most of the youngsters, this is the first chance to meet someone from the other side of the infamous Mitrovica Bridge, “a huge mental barrier,” according to a Rock School founder, Milos Drazevic, a Kosovo Serb bassist who grew up in the city.

 

Guarded by international, Kosovan, and Serbian forces, the roughly 50-meter bridge connects Mitrovica north and south, but locals rarely cross it for fear of harassment or attack. Whether Serbs and Albanians really risk life and limb by crossing the river is a matter of local disagreement, but nationalist violence does happen, and the city is a flashpoint. After three Albanian boys drowned in the Ibar under questionable circumstances in March 2004, riots spread from Mitrovica through Kosovo, leaving 19 dead and more than 500 homes burned.

 

Filip Milovanovic, a drummer and ethnic Serb, had never met anyone from Mitrovica south before he attended the Skopje summer school last year. He now plays with The Architects, an ethnically mixed band that came together there.

 

“It was a chance to play good music and to meet good people from the south,” he said before a summertime practice session in Mitrovica north, where Serbian flags fly from every street corner, shop, and tricycle in sight. “On TV they talk about [Albanians] one way, but when you meet them it's different. They're friendly, and they're good people.”

 

The Skopje event “is important for these younger guys because they never had the opportunity to meet the guys from the south,” said Goran Vucetic, a guitar coach. “I'm older and had lots of [Albanian] friends before the war, so for me it's nothing new.”

 

NO POLITICS ALLOWED

 

Before the war, Mitrovica was known as a Balkan rock town. In 2002, local musicians who grew up jamming together before the city's split wanted to open a single, multiethnic music school at the Cultural Center just over the bridge on the southern side, hoping to rebuild the vibrant music scene the conflict destroyed. But it was deemed too risky to have the Serb students cross the bridge south, Drazevic said.

 

It wasn't until 2008, when the musicians organized the first, relatively informal Skopje summer school, that the Mitrovica Rock School began to take shape.

 

“It was really successful,” said Drazevic, who recently left the school to move to the Netherlands. “We didn't talk about politics, we didn't talk about things that divide. We talked about one common thing, and that was music. Most of what the kids know about each other is not positive. Then they find out they both like Guns N' Roses, that they have something in common.”

 

Within a few months the twin Mitrovica schools opened, and from there the program has expanded with administrative and financial support from several organizations, including Musicians Without Borders; Community Building Mitrovica, a local outfit; and IKV PAX Christi, a global peace-building group.

 

School program manager Hassler-Forest emphasized that music is a vehicle to promote peace-building – “we're not opening a rock school in Paris.” But teachers and students can be dogmatic about their “only the music matters” rule.

 

“We're here to make music, not talk politics,” said a Kosovo Serb singer for Sparkle who identified himself only as Milos, in response to a question about whether Mitrovica could one day host the multiethnic event.

 

But politics is hard to avoid in Mitrovica. Though Serbia doesn't recognize Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence in general, control over the north is especially contested. Belgrade funds parallel governing structures there, from municipal councils to schools. Kosovo, in turn, demands that Serbia respect its sovereign borders and get out of the north, which is stagnating as a hostage to the stalemate – with high double-digit unemployment, abysmal public services, and endemic organized crime – because no one is really in control.

 

Pristina is all but neutered above the Ibar, but Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci tried to change that in July by sending forces to the border to enforce an effective embargo of Serbian imports (in retaliation for a 2008 Serbian ban on Kosovo exports). In response, local Serbs burned two border checkpoints, and a Kosovo police officer was killed in the ensuing unrest. Though the north has calmed, with a final border settlement expected before Christmas, demonstrations and clashes between Serbs and NATO forces continued into November.

 

Mitrovica has dangled from tenterhooks since August. As the border dispute began, the Mitrovica bridge closed to traffic, businesses in the north shuttered at 3 p.m., and the streets cleared. Serb music teachers struggled to reach Hassler-Forest's office in the south to plan for Skopje. Several parents forbade their children from traveling to Macedonia, and Hassler-Forest said she worried about the summer school.

 

But the students coalesced in Skopje. The Architects recorded a mini-album, and the bands rocked the final concert on 27 August, playing for a mass of fans, roving dogs, and hundreds of teenagers drinking beer on the steps fronting City Park. Drazevic handed out "Peace Drink" vouchers for free beer and soft drinks all night while teachers tweaked the sound equipment and offered encouragement, one rushing the stage, arms pumping, to cheer on a young guitarist struggling with a solo intro.

 

"It was a very different year," Hassler-Forest said, in that the summer school had an unusually high number of repeat attendees.

 

"Some of the bands really came together as bands last year, not just a bunch of musicians on stage," she said, adding that it's critical to reinforce the budding friendships. "The friendships will last for a year if they don't see each other again, so they really need to see each other again."

 

Like Milovanovic of The Architects, most students say the Rock School is an eye-opening experience. But Hassler-Forest's point about the friendships speaks to a key question, especially given the year's unrest: how effective is the school as a peace-building initiative?

 

In a 2009 report, the Kosovo Stability Initiative noted that the Rock School has had limited success building relationships between Mitrovica youth, that most lose touch after Skopje. Today, social media is changing that, with some students using Facebook to write songs and share music after the summer school.

 

“Basically, we're working to create a virtual bridge where the real one does not function,” Hassler-Forest said.

 

Nevertheless, the friendships forged in Skopje rarely travel to Mitrovica.

 

“In Skopje, it's different,” said Gjylisha Cena, an ethnic Albanian who attended the 2009 summer school. “We're always together. But when we come back, things go back to normal. We're still scared to cross the bridge.”

 

“It's hard for the kids to stay friends,” Drazevic conceded. “But they overcome prejudice. If they become friends, OK, but at least they don't hate each other.”

 

Looking forward, Hassler-Forest said she has two major concerns.

 

First, she worries that Mitrovica will become so tense that interethnic work will be impossible. In October, she noted, teachers still couldn't cross the bridge, and in November Mitrovica saw a deadly interethnic shootout. Second, the primary grant that funds the Rock School will run out soon, so the program must become self-sustaining. Hassler-Forest recently hired two new administrators to build the business end – through concert promotion, for instance – and it’s going better than expected.

 

Then there's the dream of a single, multiethnic school in Mitrovica.

 

“It would be great,” Hassler-Forest said. “The kids really are better when they work together. That sounds like a cliche, but it's true.”

 

The students are skeptical.

 

“I think we can work together at the same school here, in Skopje, but not in Mitrovica,” Nishliu, the ethnic Albanian Sparkle drummer, said before the August concert. “We have no neutral place in Mitrovica.”

 

Despite his earlier objection to political talk, Milos, the Serb lead singer for Sparkle, spoke up.

 

“We don't make decisions,” he said. “Whatever you do, Mitrovica will be separated. And you cannot do anything about it.”