Peace within the divide

By Emilie Genvrin

Tuesday 22 June 2022*

Following an evening in the sublime lake of Gazivoda we headed back to Mitrovica where a busy day awaited us with three meetings and a visit to the infamous Field of blackbirds.

The day started with a visit to UNMIK’s regional office in Mitrovica and was followed by a meeting with UN agencies such as UNICEF, UNDP and UNFPA.

 

During our first day in Mitrovica it quickly became evident that the divide in Mitrovica between the north and the south of the bridge is still very prevalent today. The population in the north is mainly Serbian Kosovars who don’t use the euro like in most areas of Kosovo and where the language spoken is Serbian. On the other side, the south consists of a majority of Albanian Kosovars. The divide that I had heard of while in Prishtina became all the more real as I was finally able to meet Serb Kosovars and interact with them.

 

Throughout the meeting on Monday with New Social Initiative (NSI) the women we saw were not very hopeful for a near future where the divide between ethnic Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo would be a story of the past.

 

Because of such discourse the meeting with Community Building Mitrovica (CBM) was all the more important to me as I was wondering in such a situation how do you create a community?

The goal of CBM is to create a dialogue between Kosovar Serbs and Kosovar Albanian and all other minority communities. They do so by organizing fun activities such as festivals, community markets, storytelling but also English classes and a program thta they are very proud of: the Mitrovica School of Rock.

  

The NGO’s workers are aware that the dialogue between the older generation is probably never going to happen and therefore target the younger generations who currently live completely separated from one another.  But thanks to CBM’s initiative, these young people get to spend time together playing guitar, for example, and realizing that they are not so different after all, and can in fact live together.

 

The younger generation that they are targeting was mostly not born during the last war and the resentment they can feel is due to the stories they have been told rather than events they have personally experienced. It is therefore easier to change their minds about the other ethnicity by simply spending time with each other in a neutral environment. The difficulty for CBM is that many parents refuse to allow their children to be around “them”. Nonetheless, the NGO was proud to tell us that parents are becoming increasingly open to their kids' spending time together. This makes me hopeful for the future of Mitrovica and Kosovo as a whole even though I am aware that it will take a long time.

 

The two representatives we met from CBM were very proud to let us know that half the staff is from Serbia while the other half is Albanian. I think it is important to them as they are trying to get different ethnicities that are historically bound to live separately to start the dialogue and therefore want to show that they can work together. The fact that they managed to create a successful project together definitely shows that there is still hope and that a dialogue can be created between the different ethnicities who live within Mitrovica.

 

*Please note that the blogposts are not appearing in chronological order of the days of the trip.