UNMIK/FR/073/01

Opinion

The lesson of Prizren:
through the statue issue, the word 'minority' can gain new respect.

The saga of the Prizren statues continues, and as Koha Ditore has written, will certainly become an election issue. As with "family values" in the United States, the first party to claim ownership of the martyr/statue issue, attempts to imply that the other party is less committed to a sacrosanct principle.

Passions are raw over this controversy, but political power is the greater stake, and in this case the winner looks like Kosovo's fledgling democracy.
On 5 July 2001, the democratically elected municipal assembly of Prizren voted to disallow the installation of two statues to the slain fighters Xhavat Berisha and Ismet Jashari which veterans' associations wished to place in the center of the city.

While demonstrations, petitions, even letters from General Ceku and demarches to the SRSG followed, the fact and the inviolability of the Assembly vote stands, and the statues have been rolled to the side, to be erected in a fitting memorial park.

The vote was not to ban statues or abuse the memory of martyrs: it was to uphold standards of city planning and place statues in an appropriate area, which could be dedicated to such memorials.

It was of course the most controversial vote taken so far by a democratically elected Kosovo body, and that is why it is so significant. This is the beginning of the hard part-understanding, implementing and accepting the decisions of leaders installed by popular vote.

The losers have sought confirmation by using protests-another accepted tool of the democratic process until they get violent-as well as the language of democratic debate, to win their point. The pro-statue opposition calls itself a minority whose rights are being abused. This is an ironic argument in Kosovo where so far minority rights have been of little interest to anyone but the international community and beleaguered non-Albanian ethnic groups. Nevertheless, perhaps through the statue issue, the word minority will gain new respect.

Clearly no one in Kosovo is against martyrs or statues to them (except those who lost the war or suffered in the its aftermath: their statues disappeared without a vote), no more than any American is "anti-family." Martyrs, like motherhood, are being manipulated in a political battle. It's not pretty, but it's not bad either.

Of course one could question the amount of money spent on memorials when war veterans and handicapped people live well below the poverty level. But eventually the leaders of Kosovo will have to choose between the living and the dead. Eventually one's prior allegiances will not be as important one's allegiance to the common good and the future of the children.

Mr. Skenderbag who is rising up next to Pristina's 'government' building thanks to the money collected by Mr. Bukoshi, has been endorsed to stand there by the Pristina Municipal Assembly. He will gaze out at a newly prosperous town, liberated from the last regime, but stained by the cleansing of virtually all its Serb residents.

He'll watch the political struggles, such as today's, which has left Pristina stinking in its own garbage.
Hopefully and not before long, he will also gaze out at stimulating schools, nurturing hospitals, citizens of mixed ethnicity and mixed ideas-people with hope in the future, rather than any more stones marking the events of the past.

Note for editors
The full document may be consulted online in English at http://www.unmik.org/. Albanian and Serbian versions can be provided.

For a selection of photographs, please contact Mr Ky Chung at 038 504-604 ext. 5467