By Ida Kuijper
Peace Lab 2021 has come to a close. The previous four weeks have gone by so fast. We learned so much, met so many interesting people and learned about unique programs. In the first week, we focused on theory and the history of Kosovo, remembering its historical facts and concluding this with an exam. The weeks that followed were filled with interesting meetings with a wide variety of organizations and people. These included women’s, youth, media and LGBTQ+ organizations as well as the Prime Minister of Kosovo Albin Kurti, the former (Deputy) Foreign minister Petrit Selimi and UN/ EU-related organizations.
This wide variety of meetings inspired Hareem, another Peace Lab student, and myself to make a project about the different voices involved in peace and reconciliation in Kosovo. In order to establish what these different voices do, we wanted to ask about the past and what our interviewees think of dealing with this past.
We first interviewed a project coordinator from the Kosovo Women’s Network. This network works towards including more women, and justice for women from domestic violence and sexual harassment within Kosovar society.
The second interview we held was with the program and development coordinator from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights. This Initiative looks into more active engagement of youth in reconciliation and peace at a local level between Kosovar Serbs and Kosovar Albanians.
We decided to make a ‘found footage’ documentary on youth and women’s voices within peace and reconciliation in Kosovo. We used footage we found online related to Kosovo’s past as well as footage from the organizations we met with. One of the women we interviewed told us they would rather not have their stories or the documentary included in this blog post so we will not go into much detail on what they told us within the documentary. However, generally we dealt with issues of the past and the personal stories of the war as well as a lack of engagement with the past in current Kosovar society. It was all about this human responsibility of remembering what happened and remembering the victims in order to never let it happen again. Therefore there was an emphasis on never forgetting the horrors of the war but also not becoming stuck in the past. A balance must be found with accepting both the Serbian and Albanian sides of the war and moving forward together in order to build the road towards peace and reconciliation.
There was also the issue of education in which the barrier between two systems of education, Serbian and Albanian, must be broken so that people in Kosovo learn each other's languages in order to speak with one another. These were just a few of many of the issues that were addressed.
Both organizations are looking forward to new projects in the future. YIHR is planning to build a Kosovo War Childhood museum to focus on the children and civilian victims' experience of the war, rather than the armed resistance. The Women’s Network still has a letter pending to the PM to open up dialogue to women as well and hope for this to be more addressed in the future.
These pieces of information are truly what changed me due to Peace Lab. I realised that Kosovo is still dealing with so much despite coming so far since the end of the war. Visa liberalization, unemployment, corruption, lack of implementation of non-majority rights, and the postponement of EU membership are all issues people in Kosovo still face today.
Therefore, what changed for me was the realization that I lived in a privileged bubble here in the Netherlands in terms of all of these issues. Therefore, I want to continue this documentary project by including a wider variety of organizations and voices and visualizing and voicing each of their concerns.
The interesting part about making this documentary was editing the audio of the interviews in combination with the footage that we found. It ended up being a puzzle in order to have audio match the visual. I found that both elements are equally important and need to work together because the audio-visual may end up showing people in Kosovo that reconciliation is possible between Serbs and Albanians, more than they may think.
This is shown in the documentary due to examples of such reconciliation programs talked about by the interviewee from YIHR and the visuals of a Kosovar Albanian shopkeeper helping an older Serbian woman with her groceries and taking the time to speak to her. In the end, visualising can also be a helpful tool in realising peace and reconciliation.
Overall, the past four weeks have been an invaluable experience and I truly hope to visit Kosovo and the people that we met someday.
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