How the past determines who we are in the present

By Antonia Luserke

 

            Every place around the world, encountered at a certain point in time, would never exist without a past experienced and constructed by the people within it. This is even more so the case with Kosovo. Its turbulent and violent past persists in the form of painful and traumatic stories and encounters experienced by the witnesses of these events. The country remains divided by an invisible line, with only a few multiethnic regions and municipalities. When talking to the locals that line still seems to be particularly dominant in the minds of Kosovars. A shared history thus also has a unifying power, creating what Benedict Anderson once called an "imagined community" in which a group of people shares a will to live together based on a shared past and a legacy, and likewise a will to build a common future.

 

            Today, more than twenty years after the end of the last war in Kosovo, a new generation has grown up, many of whom cannot remember the events of or were born after 1999. Although they may not have experienced the pain themselves, the narratives they are exposed to shape the way they construct their own identity and their relationship to others, as well as how they perceive the world around them.

 

As part of our project, my group and I tried to understand how Kosovar history is mediated and reproduced as a national narrative through education, thus perpetuating a sense of "us versus them." The reason for looking at this from a peacebuilding perspective is that Kosovo still has two separate education systems. One corresponds with the Kosovo Albanian government in Prishtina, while the other corresponds to the Belgrade education agenda. This allows for the perpetuation of a hostile narrative in closed spaces.

 

During our interviews, it became clear that the curricula in Kosovo tend to focus on the ancient and regional Ottoman occupation history, especially targeting the discourse on territorial claims between Serbs and Albanians. The more recent history of war and ethnic conflict, however, is mostly left out of history books. Thus, in addition to school education, family narratives seem to be of particular importance in the representation and processing of Kosovo's history since the 1990s.  

 

The power and meaning of the transfer of history as establishing, maintaining, and belonging to a particular group is even more evident in the case of the large second-generation Kosovar diaspora. About 800,000 Kosovars emigrated, either due to persecution during the war or because of economic and political persecution in the post-war period. The places they moved to include the EU, North America and Turkey. Those growing up in the EU, North America, or Turkey are therefore primarily shaped, in terms of Kosovo, by the stories and experiences of their family members.

 

We had the opportunity to meet three young women: Blerona, Arianita and Julia. They are currently working as teachers at the International Language Group School in Prishtina and were either born in Switzerland or have lived in Switzerland since their earliest childhood. When asked how they came into contact with Kosovar history, the three girls unanimously answered that it was always an important topic in their families; stories were often retold and experienced. Blerona told us how this inherited trauma affected her life in many ways, and as a result, the conflict was passed on beyond Kosovar borders, into her Swiss classroom.

 

“[…] when I was in 5^th grade one of my classmates was Serbian and I remember avoiding contact from the beginning […] you know in my mind she was my enemy. […] And after talking to my parents, who told me that she did not have any responsibility for what had happened during the war we actually turned out to be good friends.”

 

She went on to say that in her experience, people who have left Kosovo hold on to national and ethnic identity even more strongly than those who stay. In doing so, history serves to maintain the homeland connection and sustain their identity in their new homeland, insuring loyalty, and processing moral conflict.

 

"[...] I have the feeling that we, as Albanians living in Switzerland, are constantly trying to maintain the Kosovar culture, heritage, and tradition; maybe even out of a certain sense of guilt for leaving Kosovo, and that in this way we hope to preserve our identity."

 

“[...] It seems to me even sometimes that people in Kosovo are moving on way faster than we are in the diaspora […] we are holding on to this out of fear of losing our roots.”

 

            History is never objective; it is a form of narrative that persists across generations. Education is therefore one of the most important means of building consensus around a common history shared by a particular community. They identify an Other, an Us, and define what constitutes the latter. However, these stories are not limited to borders and can be exported to create a strong and important connection for those who live abroad and want to preserve their roots.