-Caveat Lector-
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dispatch
Dispatches From the War Zone, Message 32
By Masha Gessen
To read these dispatches from the beginning, go to
http://www.slate.com/dispatches/99-03-31/dispatches.asp?iMsg=1
Message #32: April 29, 1999
From: Masha Gessen
To: Slate - dispatch
If you are ever in Tetovo, the largest town in western Macedonia,
and you want to find Edita Tahiri, academic and part of the
leadership of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), go to Café
Bolero, one block back from Marshal Tito Street. If, on the other
hand, you are looking for the younger and hipper crowd from
Pristina, specifically the drama and theater types, the place to go
is smallest cafe on the third floor in the new shopping center.
Then again, if you are looking for the journalists, the ones from
the Kosovo Albanian-language daily Koha Ditore, then go to Cafe
Arbi on Marshal Tito. Sure, Koha has an office, too, but what would
be the point of following complicated directions if everyone who is
anyone is holding court in the cafes? If there ever was a cafe
society, the Kosovo intelligentsia in exile, currently resident in
Tetovo, is it.
As far from Skopje's lackluster tidiness as you can get, Tetovo
reminds me of Pristina. Miserable in the drizzle of winter,
stifling in the dust of summer, Pristina was never a particularly
attractive or pleasant town, but back when life was allowed to go
on there, it overflowed. The cafes blasted and burst onto
sidewalks, crowds pushed cars off the roads, and the number of
useless, kitschy, and colorful objects for sale overwhelmed. So
when I saw decorative mobile-phone antennas for sale in Tetovo, I
had a sense of recognition. And, with Tetovo's normal population of
about 70,000 nearly doubled by the influx of refugees, the crowds
were certainly there.
The waiter at Cafe Bolero told me that Edita Tahiri had,
unfortunately, gone to Skopje. She would be back tomorrow morning,
and I could leave a message if I wished. Her cell phone, having as
it does a Kosovo number, does not work. "Is anyone else from the
LDK around?" I asked.
"Well, Shkelzen is out of town," he said, "and he is not LDK
anyway."
"That's right," I responded, eager to show off my expertise. "He is
Cafe Arbi, isn't he?"
The waiter nodded and watched--ruefully, I thought--as I walked
away toward Cafe Arbi.
"Someone here to see you," the waiter said, leading me to Baton
Haxhiu's table. Baton already had company, however, so I demurely
scheduled myself for the next time slot, in half an hour's time.
"So how does it feel to be back from the dead?" I asked in a couple
of hours, when my interview with Baton began. The day after the
NATO bombings began, the following news circled the world of those
who were concerned with specific lives inside Kosovo: the offices
of Koha Ditore had been attacked, a night guard killed, and Baton
Haxhiu, the editor in chief, was missing, presumed dead. I heard
the news in Moscow, then exchanged it with a colleague in Belgrade,
each of us growing somber at the other's knowledge, which seemed as
bad as confirmation. As Baton grew more surely dead with every
passing day, strangely, no one seemed too concerned about the fate
of Vetan Surroy, the founder and publisher of Koha Ditore, who was
rumored to be abroad--some said in Turkey, others, in the United
States. It wasn't until days later that we began to realize that
Vetan, being Vetan, would surely make public statements if he were,
in fact, abroad.
The story of Koha Ditore, as told by the staff that has made it to
Tetovo, goes like this. On the first night of the NATO bombings,
its offices were, indeed, attacked. The night watchman was killed.
Everything, including the computer equipment and all the archives,
was destroyed or looted. The paper's printing plant, located a
couple of kilometers outside of town, was also burned down. When
Baton Haxhiu came to the office in the morning, he was stopped by
the police. He called his editor, 25-year-old Ardian Arifaj, and
told him not to come to work or leave the house at all that day.
Then he went into hiding.
Ardian, a short, prematurely bald man, is someone I know, the
boyfriend of an old and dear friend, Vlera, who translated for me
the very first time I came to Pristina. The first news I had of
Vlera and her family was disturbing: They had not left Pristina
before the bombing started. The second thing I heard, already in
Belgrade, was that the family was safely in Macedonia. Still, when
I saw Vlera walk by the cafe where I was sitting this afternoon, at
first I did not believe my eyes, and then--for the first time, I
realized--I actually believed she was alive. She is working at Koha
now, with Ardi.
But back to Baton. "I really felt like a dead man for 11 days," he
says. He hid in basements, changing his location every couple of
days, only occasionally sneaking a visit with his family. "I had a
radio with me," he says, meaning short wave. "Radio is everything
in war. If you don't have a radio, you go crazy. I had problems
myself the last three days, because my battery was running low."
But he had heard the news of his own death earlier. On April 6, the
paramilitary eviction troops came to the part of town where Baton
was hiding. "After 25 minutes, there were thousands of people in
the street. I saw a woman alone with a child, and I thought this
was a good time to come out. I went to her and said, 'Now I am your
husband, and this is my child.' She asked, 'Who are you?' 'I am
Baton Haxhiu.' 'So you are alive?' " That's probably what Ardi said
when he saw Baton, days after his own arrival in Tetovo--at Cafe
Arbi.
Just over two weeks after Baton arrived at Tetovo, Koha Ditore was
also back from the dead, in a feat perhaps more miraculous than the
resurrection of any single human being. With money that was,
according to Ardi, given by the British Foreign Office, the crew
that has assembled in Tetovo--about 10 people--bought a dozen
computers. Some kind soul constructed spectacularly uncomfortable
metal-and-plywood desks. Chairs were donated by Café Arbi, of
course (consequently, they match), and the space, complete with
tinted overhead lighting, was a hand-me-down from a pub. The first
issue was printed in Germany, as copies intended for the Western
European Albanian diaspora had been before, but, starting last
Monday, the paper is coming out in Macedonia, 10,000 copies
distributed free of charge, primarily in the camps.
The office has no phone line, but an Internet connection was
provided by the nearby Internet cafe, which fits five computers and
15 people with no breathing room and which stretched a 100-meter
cable directly to Koha. Most news comes from the wires and foreign
media and is, therefore, reflective of the West's take on the
conflict: a lot of NATO, a little of Russia, much refugee horror,
and an unhealthy dose of KLA glorification. The hardest part, says
Ardi, is obtaining any news from Kosovo: Many of Koha's reporters
are still there, so the office-in-exile is understaffed and
underinformed.
Governments in exile, as well as revolutionary movements in exile,
have a rich history in 20th-century Europe. But most of them have
located themselves far away from the country of their revolution:
Lenin worked in Zurich, Poland's government-in-exile was based in
London, and even Kosovo's own parallel parliament was generally
concentrated in Germany and Switzerland. Finding a base in a
country where the greatest fear is being affected by the ongoing
conflict may be an unprecedented move, and one that forms a strong
undercurrent in Macedonia's fear of the refugees: What if most
refugees leave but the seat of resistance remains in Macedonia?
What's worse, the Koha people seem to be trying to convince people
to stay in Macedonia. "This project is to inform deported people to
not move from the camps and stay near the border," says Baton
Haxhiu.
"Do you mean you want people not to go on the airlifts?"
"Well, we want to give hope," hedges Baton, "to give some small
illusion--oh, that's not good for printing. We want to give hope
that very soon in Kosovo there will be NATO troops--and then the
deported people will be ready to go back." Actually, the illusion
Koha is spreading is not small: The paper, though already
registered and legally printing in Macedonia, is still putting its
Pristina address and telephone number on the masthead-something
that gave me a shock when I saw it at one of the refugee camps. The
volunteers there, who were passing it from hand to hand, were
convinced it was actually printed in Pristina--a long-awaited,
hopeful sign of life.
While I was doing the media in Tetovo, I met with Artan Skenderi,
the big-bellied, big-bearded director of Art TV, an
Albanian-language TV station. In a huge unfinished building that is
Art TV, Artan occupies an office so tiny and smoky that I, a
smoker, had to ask to go to another room to stop a coughing fit.
Artan is a good man who runs a good operation. Among 46 TV stations
in Macedonia (shortly after seceding from Yugoslavia, Macedonia
liberalized the airwaves with such fervor that it earned a
reputation as having one radio station for every person and one TV
station for every family--in fact, there are about 200 radio
stations in a country of 2 million), his is tops on most counts,
including, he claims, the most expensive--and therefore
professional--postproduction equipment. Now he has hired four extra
people from among the refugees, though he didn't really have the
slots, but he had worked at Pristina TV after graduating from the
university in Belgrade, and he had to help old friends. And there
are three families--16 people--living in the two rooms on the third
floor, plus seven more at his house. And his station is devoting
two to three hours a day to reciting the names of people searching
for relatives and those who are sought (TV stations in Albania have
added a round-the-clock running text line to their broadcasts for
this purpose). And all this, he says, is as it should be--for a
limited time only.
"If they are our guests, if they are our friends, if they are here
for a short time--and I believe they are--then we must be
accommodating here, to make it like home." But if they linger, says
Artan, the local Albanian-lanaguage newspaper publishers will start
asking why the British government is not paying their production
costs, and Artan will start to wonder who will pay the additional
salaries at his station, or the costs of finishing the
construction, which he suspended when the economy collapsed because
of the war. And these words, coming from this good man, are just
one more indication of how this country is about to start coming
apart at the seams.
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