UNMIK on AIR

From Prokuplje with Love

November 12th

(Andrea Saula)

 

 

I want to go home – the sentence that usually breaks the silence after a war. The legacy all Balkan wars left us during the 90’s, are hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced people.

 

More then four years after the conflict in Kosovo, the question of the return of IDP’s is still the burden of Kosovo’s reality. While it is considered to be the most relevant political question, the lives of many of those who are in question continues to be unbearable. And what’s worst - their hope of returning fades away.

 

Hello and welcome to this edition of UNMIK on AIR.

 

Hundreds of thousands left and hundreds of thousands came back, more or less, the issue of returnees seems to be a question of figures; but within those figures there are the destinies of lots of people who are not in a position to take decisions concerning their lives. This is the story of some of them, the Milic family from Pristina, who has been living in Prokuplje a town in the central part of Serbia for the past four years.

 

Darinka Milic: I don’t want to live here anymore. My kids were born in Pristina, that’s where they finished their schools and had their friends. There were Albanians among their friends as well, but the time and politics did what they did. My kids and me, we didn’t do any harm to anyone.

 

Darinka Milic gets very emotional every time Pristina is mentioned. She lived in Prishtina for 34 years and she says those were the days, some of her best years, when she was working in a grocery store in downtown, raising her four kids, meeting friends and neighbors, having a simple normal life; but the comfortable city life suddenly changed.

 

Now the reality for Darinka and her 11- member family is quite different. Today they all live in a century old stone house in the outskirts of Prokuplje. Darinka’s daughter in law Zorica is afraid that living without a toilet inside the house, without tap water with only a wooden stove are no living conditions for five children.   

 

Darinka Milic: What to say, without job, without anything. We settled in this family house that doesn’t provide conditions for a normal life. I don’t know what to say. We’ve been really affected by the war. We didn’t succeed in selling our property in Pristina. Five pupils live in these conditions. We were without tap water till some days ago. In September we got tap water, meanwhile we were using a well. We didn’t have water for four years.

 

Three teenage girls and a young boy remained silent while their parents and grandparents were talking. The boy is attending a special school in Nis, where Zorica has to drive him to everyday. Zorica is afraid that the children have seen too much and that the consequences are too deep.

 

Zorica Milic: The war left too many wounds on the children. The oldest girl, she is 13 right now, she became reserved. She was sick during the bombing. Her legs were stiff from the fear. That’s why we brought them here.

 

Having difficulty with documents is a common problem for people in Kosovo and IDPs aren’t any different when it comes to documents also. Some of them left Kosovo in a hurry like the Milic family who left behind all their documents. Today they can’t approach their property and they don’t feel safe to come back to Pristina Municipality and take the copies. Darinka left everything behind when she flew Pristina. 

 

Darinka Milic: This is shameful. I’m afraid. For four years I couldn’t sell anything, I couldn’t go to pick something or to recover some document, birth certificate, and diplomas. Everything was left in the house. Nobody expected this.

 

Ankica is Darinka’s daughter; she is a single mother and with bitterness she remembers the days before and during the conflict.

 

Ankica Milic: I knew it was going to be this way, because I could see what they were doing. Serbs were not doing what they were supposed to do in Kosovo. That’s the truth. That was the reality in Kosovo. Everybody was looking at taking some advantage of the situation. Some people new what would happen and they were all taking advantage of it.  I tried to show them that was the wrong way, but they were claiming the opposite, “ Kosovo will remain Serbian”, “everything will be all right”, that we would remain in our homes, that would get jobs and who knows what else. Ten days after that we left from Kosovo, but we never came back.

 

Ankica says she saw a lot but that the majority of the people lived in denial, wearing blinders and didn’t want to see what was happening. There was no consciousness about what was happening at the moment, says Ankica.

 

Ankica Milic: They lived in some self-suggestion. I was always for one nation and religion, to have our history but not to abuse it. But they did that. They awoke that so called spirit of great Serbia just to abuse people and to leave them out of everything. People were under the influence of that idea; but not me. For that they looked at me, as a traitor. I was just observing the disaster of one nation, because I knew all of this was going to happen.

 

And unfortunately Ankica’s forecast was correct. The conflict did happen, creating very difficult conditions for people like the Milic family who find it very difficult to come back home. The continuous efforts of UNMIK to make the return of IDP’s happen is bearing it’s fruits, but the number of displaced persons still requires a lot more to be done.

 

And that was all for this edition of UNMIK on Air. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for more.