“Ladies and gentlemen, now we’re going to the Pinocchio pancake house. He ate there several times a week. Usually something sweet. Now they’ve created a pancake in his memory: Nutella, walnuts, and cranberries. Look, it’s here in writing—see that? ‘Radovan Karadžić—150 dinars.’ What do I think about it? These days everyone’s trying to find a way to earn a living. What’s wrong with that? One restaurant set out a chair in the middle of the room with a sign saying ‘President Karadžić sat here.’ Another introduced some vegetarian dishes under the heading ‘Doctor Karadžić recommends.’”
The tour guide also shows us, posted in the window of the Pinocchio pancake house, a newspaper article about the fact that Karadžić used to eat there. Next to it, a famous Serbian tennis player praises the chicken pancakes. The staff say the Karadžić pancake goes over very well. For the tour guide, it’s yet more proof that this is a real gold mine.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we also tried to persuade the people at his apartment block to have one of them dress up as Dr. Dabić for our tour. He’d put on a false beard and a black sweater. He could have charged one euro for a photo. But they don’t want to do it. They haven’t got that sort of business mind-set yet. Communism is still uppermost in their minds.”
A package deal works out cheaper
“I hope you’ve enjoyed our tour. Unfortunately, it isn’t available to individual clients. We only include it as part of our Belgrade sightseeing program. Each group can choose from Tito’s, Tesla’s (Tesla was our great inventor), or Karadžić’s Belgrade. You can also get a package deal, Tesla and Karadžić for example. A package deal works out cheaper.
“At the end of our tour, we have a surprise for you. We’re driving past the state prosecution building where Mr. Karadžić ended up immediately after his arrest. You’ll be able to take a picture. Of course I’ll take one of me and you! You people from Japan are always so nice.
“Here’s the prosecution building. This is where Mr. Dabić was given a haircut and became Mr. Karadžić again. From here he was taken to the airport, and then on to the Hague.
“Where should I stand? Here? Great! All together now: ‘Serbia!’ Snap! Done.
“The tour? Most people respond well to it. They want to see the places associated with Mr. Karadžić. We answer to that demand.
“Just one lady wrote to say she didn’t like the name Pop Art Radovan. She said that people will start to perceive Mr. Karadžić as a sympathetic figure—as a nice old-timer with a long beard, in slightly oversized glasses. She wanted us to call the tour War Criminal Karadžić. Well, tell me honestly—would you have gone on a tour called that?
“But that lady probably doesn’t know how to run a tourist agency. Besides, apparently she lost a loved one in the war. That sort of experience changes people a lot.
“But there you go getting me off the point again. We just want to promote Serbia, its culture and hospitality. There’s a demand for this sort of tour, so we organize them.”
Serbia: Chickens for the Serbs
We’re racing toward Priština in a Honda four-by-four. The driver is Florent, an Albanian. Beside him sits Dušan, a Serb. Both are from Mitrovica, where the Serb-Albanian conflict is at its most heated. I’m nervously waiting to see what will happen along the way. Will they quarrel? Fight? Shoot? Nothing of the kind.
“How is it possible for you two guys to be sitting next to each other in the same car?” I finally ask.
“We hate each other. But the price of gas is really high,” says Florent, and both he and Dušan burst out laughing. “Get lost or I’ll slug you . . . ,” splutters Dušan.
“We’ve known each other since we were kids,” he finally explains. “We used to play soccer together before there was any sign that Yugoslavia would disintegrate. My parents lived in the Albanian part of the city. I’ve still got lots of friends there now.”
“Serbs have Albanian friends?” I ask to be sure. They say yes. Could I have met a more curious double act in the entire country?
Watch out for Mercedes cars
Everyone advised me against hitchhiking in Kosovo. “The Kosovars drive like maniacs. They’re tearaways, and they always try to milk tourists down to their last euro,” claimed the foreigners with whom I had a cup of coffee just after flying into Priština.
“The UN has spoiled them terribly,” said the first. “They’re giving them heaps of money for everything. I don’t believe anyone’ll drive you half a mile for free.”
“In the best case, you come upon a cheat. In the worst, they put you out in your socks in the middle of a minefield,” sniggered another.
“Watch out for Mercedes cars with tinted windows,” added the third. “Mafia. They might sell you for your organs.”
I didn’t believe a word of it. It was February 2008; just a few days earlier Kosovo had declared independence, and I wanted to see the Kosovars at this important moment in their history. I wanted to take a close look at them only days after their country became the youngest in Europe—drink their coffee, eat their bread, laugh at their jokes, and ride in their cars. And so it was that one February morning I came to be standing on the hard shoulder of the highway from Priština to Peja.
I was probably the first hitchhiker in independent Kosovo.
Trash, scrap metal, and good advice
Kosovo is a very strange place. Take the cell phones. In half an hour I’m welcomed by networks from three different countries. First of all Monaco, because that particular country once won a tender here. And as Kosovo has no area code of its own, here they use the principality’s number.
Two hours later, as I come close to the border with Macedonia, I’m greeted by the network from over there. On the way I pass a Serbian enclave and am welcomed by a Serbian network.
The whole country is covered in trash. The locals are in the habit of tossing it straight into the river. Apparently, there used to be a river flowing through Priština, but it became so polluted that the authorities had it cemented over and built a housing development on top of it.
This does have its good sides. Throughout my time in Kosovo, my hay fever disappeared. There aren’t many trees, and the grass is rather sparse too. The typical landscape is a big pile of trash, a mile or so of scrap heaps, and another pile of trash.
In just this sort of place—between a car wash, a scrap heap, and a gas station—I try to hitch a ride. I start waving a hand rather timidly. The string of speeding cars doesn’t even slow down. I wave more boldly. Still nothing. Some of the drivers speed up at the sight of me. Apparently, that’s a habit left over from the war: something weird—run for it!
Others stare at me as if I were a strange species of animal. Old geezers in Albanian hats shaped like half an egg smile in a friendly way. Someone takes a picture with his cell phone. But nobody stops.
Oh well, so hitchhiking isn’t popular around here. Every man’s ambition is to have his own car. “I might not have the money for food, but I’ll always find it for gas,” one of the drivers tells me a few days later.
A column of army trucks and two amphibious vehicles go past me. A boy comes up from the gas station and explains in broken German—I think everyone in Kosovo knows that language—that the bus station is less than five hundred yards from here. “Why don’t you hire a car?” he asks. “Because I want to meet people,” I reply. “What for?” he says, shaking his head in disbelief, and goes back to work.
A little later a black Mercedes with tinted windows stops. Just like the ones I’m told the Mafia ride around in. My heart leaps to my throat.
Executions
“Europe and rest of the world know nothing about Kosovo,” a Kosovar I’d befriended told me. “All you people know is where it is, and in which year the war happened. Apart from that, you can be persuaded of anything. You think bombs explode here every day of the week, and the women go around dressed like in Afghanistan. Meanwhil
e it’s a normal country, like in Europe, just a bit poorer.”
Then we talked for a while about Kosovar drivers. Despite the stories, they drive fairly calmly and safely.
“The police punished the road hogs with a public flogging. Several of the most dangerous were shot,” he said with a stony face. I was horrified. We sat for a while in silence, until my friend couldn’t keep it up and snorted with laughter.
“You see, didn’t I say you people will believe anything?”
Priština to Peja: there’s no inspection, but there is business
The driver of the black Mercedes is called Mërgim. Mafia? He smiles broadly and points a finger at the car wash. “That’s the real mafia.”
I don’t understand. By now I know the first driver isn’t going to sell my kidneys on the black market. I’m already sprawling comfortably on the leather upholstery. But I still don’t know what the guys clutching a bit of rubber hose have in common with the Mafia, which earns a fortune from smuggling.
Mërgim, a young businessman in a gray track suit, laughs at me. “You see the car wash on the right? I know the owner. He drives a Maybach. I have a furniture factory. I employ two hundred people. He has a car wash. He only employs his brother-in-law.”
“I don’t get it . . .”
“It’s a money-laundering outfit! The guy does some business on the black market and pays the money into a bank. The inspector comes along and asks, ‘Where did you get a million dollars from?’ And he says, ‘I’ve got a car wash. I work hard. I’ve washed half a million cars.’ Everyone knows it’s a scam. But in Kosovo the inspection services are flagging. No one’ll do a thing to him.”
“What about your factory? Where did you get the idea?”
“I never expected to have a factory. I didn’t know I’d ever see Kosovo again. In 1999, when I left with my parents for Germany, it was a complete pit. My father worked in Priština, as a translator for one of the foreign newspapers. He got us the right to stay in Bonn. I finished school there and started working for a German. He was an extremely rich and resourceful guy. We became friends. One day I was going to visit my family. He asked me, ‘Mërgim, perhaps you’d look around for some business? Maybe there’s money to be earned there?’
“So I went, and started asking around. I thought we’d open a store or a bar. I found out that a large furniture factory in Peja was standing empty. It was for sale at half price, providing that you employed people. I asked the German, ‘Should we take it?’ To which he said, ‘I’ve never made furniture!’ So I said, ‘Neither have I. But these people have.’ These days we’re selling our products to Greece, Macedonia, and Serbia. And to Germany, of course.”
“Is it profitable?”
“And how! Kosovars will work for two hundred euros a month.* These days this is a country of incredible opportunities. Do you know how much cash has been pumped into this place over the past nine years? The UN alone has contributed almost thirty billion euros. On top of that there’s the EU and the charities. I once counted it up. For every square mile they’ve put in five billion euros. But even so the investors were afraid to come in here. Now that’s coming to an end. Since independence was declared, a huge number of people have been calling me. They want to invest. They can see there’s a market here. Outside Gjakova there are about a dozen factories. They’re still empty, but I know half of them have already been bought by Turks.”
We stop in the center of Peja. There’s a building that looks like a UFO. In the downtown area, situated on a small river, there’s nothing but youth. Not surprising—well over half the Kosovars are under thirty.
Hotel Begolli: there’s no apartheid, but there is a Jacuzzi
The Kosovars from across the border who have prospered are now doing their best to invest as much as possible in the country. One example is the Begolli family hotel, where I stayed in Priština. Practicality imported from Germany combines here with an Albanian fondness for extravagance. An Albanian house must have as many floors as possible. An Albanian hotel has a Jacuzzi in every room and tacky, Louis XVI–style furniture. The fact that the Jacuzzi doesn’t work and the legs are falling off the chairs is neither here nor there.
A legendary place in Priština is the centrally located Grand Hotel, known as the worst five-star hotel in the world. There are fifteen waiters on duty in the empty restaurant. But if a guest appears, none of them will deign to go up to him.
“Well, it’s still a state hotel,” sighs Ardita, whom I’m arranging to meet there. “Even so, it’s better than it was. There used to be real apartheid here—they only employed Serbs.”
“Whereas nowadays there are no Serbs here at all,” I add. Ardita simply shrugs.
Prizren to Štrpce: there’s no electricity, but there is snow
“I am a Serb. But I have bigger problems on my mind than independence for Kosovo. Such as my roof is leaking. I’ve no money to repair it. And then there’s the electricity . . .”
“The electricity?”
Tatiana is the owner of a shoe store in the Serbian enclave of Štrpce. She picked me up on the road to Prizren. She tells me proudly that no Albanian woman would dare talk to a strange man. That’s probably a bit of an exaggeration.
We’re riding in her Opel across the Šar Mountains. We pass a KFOR post—KFOR is the NATO-led peacekeeping force. The security of the Serbs is being jointly protected by Ukrainians and Poles. A small Orthodox church on the right-hand side of the road is a sign that we’ve now entered the enclave.
“The electricity?” Tatiana takes a deep breath. “Look, the people here are sitting around candles. Do you think they’re just being romantic? Sometimes there’s no electricity for three hours on end, sometimes for five, sometimes all day long. You never know when it’s going to be on. I can’t do the laundry or take a bath or wash up. And it’s really boring too. In winter it gets dark earlier. The electricity goes off, and you sit there in the dark like a complete dope. You don’t feel like going to bed. And there’s nothing to do either.”
“So what do you do?”
“I chat with my husband. Sometimes someone comes by. But mainly it’s a sort of lethargy, torpor. Though some people say the reason why there are so many kids in Kosovo is directly related to the lack of electricity. But then, when they suddenly switch it on, you jump to your feet. No matter what time it is. I always wake up when they switch on the supply at night. Some instinct wakes me up. I take a shower, put on the laundry, watch TV. The people in my town are convinced the Albanians only switch off the Serbs’ electricity. I tell them, ‘I’ve been to Prizren. There’s no electricity there either,’ but they never go anywhere. They just sit in Štrpce talking crap.”
“Why don’t they go anywhere?”
“They’re afraid. Twice a week KFOR provides an escort for buses to the border with Serbia and to Gračanica, where there’s an Orthodox church and some wholesalers. The Albanians throw stones at the buses, sometimes firecrackers too. I have a car with Kosovar registration plates, so I’m not afraid. They cost me fifteen hundred euros. But if I had an accident, I don’t know what would happen. I don’t know a word of Albanian.”
“Are you afraid of the Albanians?”
“Are you crazy? I’m only afraid of extremists. My grandpa’s best friend is Albanian. They worked together in the mountains. One fine day they slashed their palms with a knife, pressed them together, and became blood brothers. I don’t know how they came up with that idea, because there’s no such tradition among us. They probably saw it in a western. But from then on we’ve been like a family. Memed, my grandpa’s friend, was the master of ceremonies at my wedding. When the Serbian army was on the rampage in Kosovo, we hid two of his sons. Later on, when the Albanian resistance took revenge, we lived at Memed’s. Grandpa is no longer alive, but Memed is doing fine. He has a store in a town a few miles away from here. I always stop by to see him when I go there for shoes. I lov
e him like one of the family. Though I do have one small problem with him.”
“What’s that?”
“He spoils my kids like mad. A day at Memed’s and I can’t get them to behave.”
“What does Memed think about the Serbs in Kosovo?”
“He can tell the difference between criminals and regular people. Wars are not fought between races. They’re fought between criminals from one side and the other. He understands that. After the declaration of independence, he could see that I was out of sorts. ‘Tatiana,’ he said, ‘we’re just pawns on the chessboard. The Americans are playing against the Russkies. It’s sheer chance that you’re a black pawn and I’m a white one.’”
“What about your Serbian neighbors? How do they regard your friendship?”
“They say, ‘You’re possessed by the devil.’ Every day at 12:44 they protest against Kosovar independence. That’s in memory of a UN resolution, number 1244, which ruled out independence. And then, as they walk through the city, they scowl at me, because I buy shoes from the Albanians, when I should be boycotting their goods. But as soon as those old crones’ Serbian shoes fall apart, they find their way to me. They’re gradually getting used to it. Right near here is Brezovica, Kosovo’s one and only ski resort. There’s no one but Serbs living there too. After the declaration of independence, they shouted in the streets and burned flags. The Albanians took fright and stopped going there. The skiing conditions are excellent, but the slopes are completely empty.
“These days Brezovica is a quiet place, hopefully waiting for the Albanians to get over it. And I’m hoping the Albanian government will carry out its promises and we’ll finally have some electricity. As long as we do, it’s all the same to me if the prime minister is a Serb, an Albanian, or a Papuan.”
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