Beyond the Bridge
Beyond the Bridge
G. O’Malley: Beyond the Bridge [2]
IN THE afternoon of my first day in Mitrovica, I met a retired teacher named Destan and his former student, Lulzim, in front of the city’s cultural center, a hulking three-story edifice built by Marshal Tito that sits at the foot of the south side of the bridge, and which had just been renovated to accommodate the conference. Later in the week, it hosted a primetime American Idol-like competition between eight youths—four Albanian and four Serbian—which was broadcast live across the country; it opened with an Albanian girl belting out an impassioned version of Amy Winehouse’s song, “Rehab.” Below us, Albanian teenagers chatted flirtatiously with each other while strolling along a cracked, concrete promenade that had recently reopened. On the other side of the river, a few Serbian teenagers milled about on a much smaller, similarly dilapidated promenade. For the most part, the two groups ignored each other. Every once in a while, one from among them lobbed an insult across the divide. The rock wall behind the Serbs bore an enormous message in white spray paint that hinted at a midnight run by an Albanian youth: “Fuck Serbia.”
Lulzim, now a thirty-two-year-old filmmaker, had traveled briefly to the Serbian side of the river earlier in the day. When I asked him why, he said, “I woke up this morning, and it was a beautiful day, and there was this conference about peace happening at this cultural center, and so I figured, why not?” He had jumped on his bike, sped across the bridge, spent five minutes in the north, and then biked back over a small bridge up river, his heart racing the entire time. “I don’t know,” he said with a smile. “I guess I am crazy.”
Destan stood by silently while his former student told his story. Short, with narrow eyes and a tanned face marked by deep creases that seemed to map the burdens of his city, he looked at once at home and out of place. Despite the hot sun, he wore a wool, roll-neck sweater, topped off with a scally cap on his head, both items redolent of a Maine fisherman in November. He had spent his career teaching at a school in the northern part of the city, but he had not stepped foot in the north since before the 1998-99 war broke out for fear of being attacked. “It would not be so bad if I knew that someday I would be able to cross the bridge again,” he said wistfully. “Five years. Ten years. It would not really matter. If I knew there was a specific time period, that would be OK.”
On my second day in the city, I crossed the bridge to the north. Prior to arriving in Mitrovica, I had read dispatches about the city in various news publications, all of which featured descriptions of violence on the bridge. It seemed, in fact, from the content of these articles, that the city was nothing more than a bridge. Every story led with the bridge, bridged itself with the bridge, and ended with the bridge. I had sworn to myself that, should I endeavor to describe the city, I would dig past the limited trope that a steel truss over a muddy, polluted river defines the place. Standing before the bridge, however, staring at the other side—just a thirty second walk away—it was impossible to ignore the symbolic magnitude of the structure. Later in the week, I asked Mark Hamilton, the Chief Superintendent of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, about his impression of the bridge. Citing Belfast’s “Peace Walls,” which separate Catholic and Protestant communities, as a sad reflection of the ongoing “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, he claimed the Irish could learn something from the Mitrovicans’ decision to reopen the bridge to traffic in 2005. I understood his point, but what struck me as I first crossed the bridge was just how passable—and yet still empty—it was. One lonely police car sat halfway across, tucked onto the western sidewalk, its occupants observing but not actively checking pedestrian foot traffic, which consisted of me alone. Had walls and barbed wire blocked access, the vision would have been stark, but here, with nothing but an open road before me, it was clear that something even more powerful than concrete or steel was working to keep the bridge empty: fear.
At the end of the 1998-99 war, self-proclaimed “bridge watchers” began monitoring the bridge from the north. They sat in waves on benches at the foot of the bridge, in cafes yards away, and in apartments on the hill beyond, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on guard against the perceived threat of Albanian attacks aimed at driving Serbs from the city entirely. The sight of an Albanian, or sometimes a journalist or other unwelcome visitor, crossing the bridge would spark a rush of defense. Upon a signal, the bridge watchers would gather quickly and present the visitor with what came to be known colloquially as the “Kosovo Kiss”—a savage beating to remind the victim and others that the Serbs would defend their territory. As I crossed, I knew the situation had calmed considerably since the declaration of independence, and that it was unlikely that any Serbs would harass me. Even had they been inclined to stop a bridge walker, I would not have been their first target; wearing slacks from Banana Republic and a decent button-up shirt, carrying a backpack, and sporting an Irish tan, I was clearly not Albanian. Still, in taking those first steps to the north, I felt as if I were breaking a taboo and sensed the heat of eyes unseen cataloguing each step I took, assessing my purpose. I was also keenly aware of my nationality. As recently as two years ago, Americans were warned to avoid northern Mitrovica unless accompanied by a NATO soldier; Serbian anger at the United States for its lead role in the bombing of Belgrade presented too great a risk. Halfway across, it struck me that there is likely no place on earth, save perhaps the border between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq, where such wildly divergent opinions about America live so close. In the north, I was likely to be met with suspicion, if not hostility. In the south, Americans receive a hero’s welcome. Just last year, thousands of Albanians gathered in Pristina to witness the unveiling of an eleven foot tall statue of Bill Clinton that depicts him holding a document inscribed with the date when NATO began to bomb Belgrade.
Everything about Mitrovica changes when one steps onto the bank of the north side of the river, including the city’s name, to its Serbian moniker, Kosovska Mitrovica. Just over the bridge, an obelisk stands, bearing the names of Serbs from Mitrovica who died in the 1998-99 war—a totem reminding all who pass that the soil on which they stand is Serbian. The city is festooned with election banners spanning its narrow streets. Posters pasted on walls bear images of severe-looking candidates, mostly middle-aged men with pasty, Slavic faces and thinning, silver hair, running for local office. Markers of Serbian control are everywhere. Serbian flags wave from cars and buildings; cars carry Serbian license plates; kiosks display Serbian newspapers; televisions, playing in the open-air cafes that line the streets, are tuned to Serbian stations; shops post prices in Serbian dinars. The pan-Slavic alliance between Serbia and Russia, its greatest backer, is evident, too: Vladimir Putin stickers decorate shop windows.
Since 1999 many Serbs have left Kosovo, some out of fear of reprisals for violence perpetrated by Serbs during the war, some in search of a more prosperous life. Because of this exodus, and because of the high birthrate of ethnic Albanians, the percentage of Serbs who make up Kosovo’s population has dropped to roughly 7 percent. The Serbian government, aware that its claim on Kosovo becomes more attenuated as the Serbian population shrinks, has actively sought to stem the tide, even going so far as to double administrative salaries for professionals willing to stay. Though this results in higher salaries for some, the unemployment problem that plagues the south plagues the north, too. With deep historical attachments to the land, little money, and Serbia’s interest in having them remain, most of the residents of northern Mitrovica are wedded to the city’s fate.
Inconspicuous markers of memory dot the north, recalling an earlier time when the Serbs had influence in the region beyond their small enclaves. After a meeting, I stopped at a small grocery store located within shouting distance of the bridge. A black t-shirt bearing the picture of a U.S. stealth bomber hung prominently near the counter. In English, the t-shirt read: “Sorry/We didn’t know it was invisible/Greetings from Serbia”—a reference to Serbia’s downing of an F-117A during the NATO campaign against Belgrade. At a small public square just down the road, even closer to the bridge, residents had erected an annual makeshift flower and picture memorial for the Milich brothers, three siblings who died during the war—the twins, within a month of each other, while fighting; the third brother, shattered by the loss, a few months later, of inconsolable sadness. The brothers’ parents still live in north Mitrovica and are often seen wandering around town vacantly, “dead inside,” as one resident described it to me, another haunting, human reminder of the region’s violent history.
ONE EVENING, I traveled to an Orthodox church in the hills of northern Kosovo. Home to a single monk who lives in the adjoining monastery, the church, the restoration of which was funded by the Serbian government, is one of hundreds across Kosovo. Each stands as a foothold of Serbian culture for the diminishing Serbian population. The monk, a wiry redheaded figure in his twenties with a soft voice, deep, sad eyes, and a red beard, looked like a ginger-haired Jesus incarnate. He walked me and others around the tiny, dimly lit church and explained that it had been constructed in the thirteenth century and then taken over by the Ottomans and converted into a mosque. At the end of the Ottoman Empire, the monk informed us, the structure returned to its rightful state as a church. Religious icons—some hundreds of years old, some more recent—now adorn the walls. The monk made special reference to one set of ancient icons, and noted that, until recently, they had hung in another monastery in Kosovo, but that the “Albanian terrorists” had burned the monastery to the ground. Someone had rushed into the flames, according to the monk, and saved as many icons as he could. Now, they had found a home. His message was clear: the icons are safe for the moment, but they—and Serbian life in Kosovo—are still under threat.
When I walked outside the church, an Iraqi man named Abdul Razak approached me. “Gabriel! Gabriel!” he said in a hushed voice, in an urgent tone. “Let me show you something.”
I had known Abdul Razak for a few days. He was present that evening because an Iraqi delegation from Kirkuk was in town for the conference and had been invited to tour the monastery. They had an interpreter, but Abdul Razak—who had moved to Mitrovica in 1993 and had been married to an Albanian woman for a time—worked throughout the week as an intercultural fixer who could answer their questions about Kosovo and, more generally, look out for them. On this evening, he was interested in looking out for me, too. He took me by the arm and began to walk me around to the back of the church. “What the monk said,” he whispered, “it was a lie.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“This building was never a church before it became a mosque. It was built as a mosque, and only later became a church. Here, let me show you.” He then led me around the structure and pointed out features—such as a carving in Arabic of the word “Allah” that had been covered over, and a bowed architectural accommodation in the building’s structure for the Imam’s pulpit—that confirmed, in his mind at least, that it was Muslims and not Serbian Orthodox Christians who had created this holy shrine over eight hundred years ago. “You see,” he stated at the conclusion of his tour, with the satisfaction of someone who has just explained a mathematical proof, “the monk lies.”
As strong as the competing historical narratives are, they have cracks. Time spent in either community reveals anger not just at the “other” but at one’s own, too. In northern Mitrovica, I met a particularly memorable twenty-nine year old Serbian woman named Buoana. In her eleven years living in Mitrovica, she had never once crossed the bridge. We chatted for an hour-and-a-half in front of her family’s tin-roofed kiosk, with her grandfather, a Partisan who fought in the Second World War, sitting next to us on a bench, dressed in a tattered brown suit and brown cap. She began her story with a familiar chorus: we live in fear; the Albanians try to rewrite history; they have too many children; they are trying to run us out of Kosovo; this is our land; the Western media despises Serbia and distorts everything we do. Soon though, her invective changed course. Not from Mitrovica originally, she detailed how she and her family had been unable to break into the Serbian community in Mitrovica that predated the war. Long-time residents have been reluctant to embrace the many Serbian refugees who moved to the city after the war to find safety in numbers. Jobs, scarce as they are, go to those with connections. Clearly agitated, she scoffed at the leadership in Belgrade and at local Serbian politicians, who “try to make a better situation for themselves,” rather than attend to unaffiliated constituents, who are left to make do with few resources, frequently amidst power outages and water stoppages, like the unannounced two-day stoppage that had ended the day before. “What can one do without water?” she cried rhetorically, before demanding an answer she knew was not forthcoming. “Tell me!”
Despite its tensions, the north, too, falls into a seemingly easy state of relaxation at times. After speaking with Buoana, I walked to an outdoor cafe, to drink a cup of coffee and review my notes. About half of the tables were occupied, each dappled with sunlight that peaked through the trees forming a canopy above. A small, stray dog wandered through and turned on his belly to receive the adoration of a little, blond-haired girl wearing a yellow dress, who sat next to her father and his friends as they shared beers. To the left, beyond a couple conversing idly, a laundry line cast between two ancient windows waved a week’s worth of clean clothing. The Guns N’ Roses song “Patience” played in the background, as if on cue from a heavy-handed director intent showing that life in northern Mitrovica may improve in time. A waiter whistled along. I paid the bill and walked down the main street in the north, a steep decline that ends at the bridge. The shops were beginning to close. In the public square where the Milich memorial stood, a young couple sat on concrete steps chatting intimately with one another. Before them, a fleet of small electric cars, which could be rented for few minutes at a time by children who wished to drive in circles around the square’s fountain, sat in a row, retired for the day. Just beyond, three old ladies sat on a bench at the base of the obelisk, eager to pose together, toothless, for a last picture of the day before I crossed the bridge back to the southern part of the city.
THE SERBIAN man made it to within fifteen feet of the riot police before they shot a canister of tear gas at him. For a moment, he stood stunned. When he regained his composure, he thrust his flag into the air, grabbed his crotch, and began to scream violently. The Albanians erupted, again chanting their familiar slogan, “oo-ch-kuh! oo-ch-kuh!” One of the Serbian man’s friends, who had followed behind him at a safe distance during his dash across the bridge, inched his way forward and began to drag him back to the Serbian side. The riot police had seen enough. A whole second wave flooded the bridge from a staircase that entered onto the middle of the bridge. They rushed toward the Serbian side and formed a blockade. Automatic gunfire rang out from the north, but there was little the Serbs could do in the face of such force, just as there was little the Albanians could do on their side except scream and shout and push on the shields before them. In a last ditch effort of defiance, some Serbs began to hurl rocks across the bridge. They rained down short of their intended mark. Within thirty minutes, the area had calmed. From the first “oo-ch” to the last “kuh,” the whole episode lasted roughly an hour.
Until the Serbian man made his dash, the entire display had the feel of a coordinated event; one which offered each side the opportunity to air its anger without danger of altering the status quo. Though faced with force, the Albanians could have crossed to the other side of the bridge had they really wanted to. A foot bridge over the river stood roughly two hundred yards away from the main bridge where the demonstration took place, unguarded by any international force. Even the main bridge was passable during the first minutes of the demonstration. With the KLA protesters drawing near, the riot police had lined up in the street but had not blocked the two sidewalks on either side of the roadway. The protesters, like stage actors in a production blocked out well in rehearsal, marched directly into the line of riot police, without regard to the open paths beside them.
As I watched all this unfold, I entered into the absurd play myself. Standing on the unmanned sidewalk, I stepped back and forth between the combatants, first standing shoulder-to-shoulder with an Albanian man who represented the western edge of his column, and who was screaming and waving his fists, and then, with one step forward and a 180 degree turn, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a policeman who represented the western edge of his column, and who stood low, with his shield before him, blocking the Albanian man.
It was the roadway of the bridge—the symbolic heart of the conflict between Serbs and Albanians—that the Albanians wanted, not the inconsequential sidewalks. With the decision of the ICJ widely believed to be imminent, there was reason for restraint, too. Officials in both Kosovo and Serbia had acknowledged that the ruling would affect the balance of their dispute. Standing on the bridge, with the sidewalk free before me, the conclusion of the play seemed predictable: the Albanians would demonstrate, the Serbs would respond, and the police would maintain order, with the tacit cooperation of both sides, neither of which desired violence in advance of the ruling.
The Serbian man’s dash was not scripted, however. Nor was the brief chaos that followed on the bridge. Since then, tensions have continued to rise. On July 1, someone threw a grenade into a crowd of six hundred Serbs as they protested the opening of an administrative building in northern Mitrovica. The ensuing blast killed one and injured ten others. The next day, thousands of Serbs gathered to mourn the victim’s death. Just two days later, Peter Miletic, one of only ten Serbian members of Kosovo’s national assembly—which Serbia does not recognize—was shot as he exited his apartment in northern Mitrovica. Then, on July 22, the ICJ issued its decision, ruling by a ten–to-four vote that Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in 2008 did not violate international law. Though the ruling was narrow and did not address whether Kosovo has a right to exist as a nation-state, it was a clear victory for Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians. Outside the court, Serbia’s foreign minister, Vuk Jeremic, responded immediately to the decision, declaring, “Serbia will never, under any circumstances recognize the unilateral declaration of independence of the so-called Republic of Kosovo.” In Pristina, where the ruling was broadcast on national television, bars and cafes erupted with cheers when the court announced its decision. The deputy prime minister, Hajredin Kuci, reportedly opened a bottle of champagne and led a toast at the government hall where officials had gathered to watch the broadcast. Outside, residents of Pristina honked their car horns and waved flags in celebration.
Everyone on both sides of the dispute looked to the reaction in Mitrovica to measure the immediate impact of the decision. International peacekeepers, criticized in the past for lack of preparedness, mobilized at the bridge with added strength. Surveillance helicopters hovered low over the city. To the north, roughly one thousand Serbs gathered, many reportedly bused in by Belgrade. To the surprise of some, they expressed their disappointment quietly, and then cancelled the formal protest that had been planned. The night passed peacefully. Since the ruling, the EU has called on Serbia and Kosovo to restart negotiations about the status of Kosovo. It is unclear when these talks will commence, or what their outcome will be. In the meantime, Mitrovica remains a calm place suffused with tension: poor, plagued by a lack of basic city services, and still divided. It is a place between, laden with uncertainty, defined mostly by how it affects Kosovo’s national aspirations and Serbia’s sense of identity, rather than by what it offers to the people who live there; where a bridge remains a fixture in a frozen conflict, as much a metaphorical divide as a structural crossing, offering a path to the other side even as its existence continues to counsel against it.
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Gabriel O’Malley lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a lawyer and a writer. His writing has appeared in The Best Travel Writing 2009, the New England Journal of Public Policy, and Law, Democracy & Development, among other publications.
All photos courtesy of Vedat Xhymshiti, 2010
