Faleminderit, Kosovo!

By Audra Skuodaitė

 “Are you going to Kosovo? Isn’t it dangerous?” - my grandmother asked, when I told her that I was going there as part of my Peace lab course. I already knew that such worries are rather unfounded and simply based on media portrayal, which is usually focused on the conflict more so than anything else. However, having visited Kosovo myself, I now even better realize how distorted an image of Kosovo my grandmother has (as do a lot of people). In all honesty, before taking this course, Kosovo for me was just some country that relatively recently had declared its independence and  that served as a good “case study” used in other courses to analyze complicated negotiation procedures. I did not know any people from Kosovo, nor did I even know what the cities and nature in the country are like.

Now, after having spent ten days in Kosovo, the image of the country in my mind has become much more nuanced. Kosovo to me now is the friends that I made, their voices, their stories and their laughs, the beautiful scenery we enjoyed through the bus windows almost everyday and the wonderful coffee that helped us wake up in the early mornings. It is the songs played by street musicians in Prishtina or Prizren and the dances we learned from our local friends. Kosovo is many bars and restaurants as well as children driving in their tiny children-cars late at night. Kosovo is also complex people’s histories and ongoing societal changes. However, importantly it is so much more than just a post-conflict country that is used as a case-study for diplomacy students somewhere in Amsterdam. Kosovo is many things - many stories, many perspectives, and a beautiful place that I am excited to go back to one day. 

 A beautiful view of Prizren

 Since day one, Minouche and I were very excited about our project - an artistic video and audio collage of Kosovo as we saw and experienced it. Our aim was to try and create an immersive impression of Kosovo - the place, which has multiple stories, perspectives, images and sounds. In total we filmed over 800 videos and recorded around 120 audio files, all of them ranging in length from one minute to two hours. What this means is that we were constantly alert to all the sounds and views we heard and saw, which eventually made our trip even more interesting. 

Both of us were trying our best not to miss an opportunity to capture the variety of sounds (like birds, cars, people’s chatter or music in cafes) and images (like various landscapes of the nature, cities, people, or birds) that we experienced. Interestingly, when we came back to Amsterdam and started working on the editing process, we realized that the vast amount of footage we had sometimes still seemed lacking, when it came to finding a perfect shot, which  conveys exactly the message that we want: It yet again showed that Kosovo is “more than”. 

It is versatile and more than a post-conflict country (as many imagine it to be), and it is also more than 800 videos and 120 audios we had from there. Luckily, our dear friends Blerta and Ilir that we met in Prishtina were more than happy to help and both of their voices eventually opened up our video. You can year Ilir singing an Albanian song in the very beginning and later Blerta also introduces herself in the video and tells us about the Albanian songs she knows from her childhood. 

Ilir, Minouche, Blerta and I

Besides learning about Kosovo and seeing its multiple sides, the trip also made me reflect on my own home country quite a lot. I realized how easy it is to have your own opinions and suggest answers from an outsider’s perspective, while you do not always apply the same logic to the places where you are from yourself. Being from a country that restored its independence around 30 years ago, I could see many similarities in challenges that a newly-born/restored country faces. In many ways, through learning about Kosovo I learned and realized more about my own country as well, despite the differences. I also kept thinking about what my home country could learn from Kosovo as well.

Peace lab in general has also been “more than”. It was definitely more than just a university course about peacebuilding and more than just a regular field trip. Visiting a number of organizations ranging from UNMIK to grassroots human rights initiatives, we saw many sides of peacebuilding in Kosovo. The meetings were very interesting and I am happy we had the privilege to meet such inspiring people. 

I think that the key takeaway message about peacebuilding for me was that in reality it is much more complex than in textbooks. As we heard in one of our meetings - “you cannot buy reconciliation. It has to come in our way and in our time.” It is not for outsiders, and definitely not for us, students, to decide what the best way to “solve” the issue is. It has to come from within. Peace lab offered an opportunity for us to learn this, to see what Kosovo is like, and simply (but importantly) just how people go about their daily lives. 

Naturally, we only spent ten days in the country and there is yet much more to be seen. Those ten days oddly seemed both like an extremely short and a relatively long period of time. We saw and experienced so much, while at the same time it was very difficult to say goodbye to the place--the place, where in a mere ten days we felt at home. I am very grateful that I had a chance to be part of Peace lab - definitely one of the best things I got from AUC.