Perspectives

By Alice Noirot

I’m taking over from here. My name is Alice and I’m a third-year student at AUC, studying International Relations. After the first meeting with the Center for Social Group Development, we headed to our second meeting and hopped in 6 taxis, direction the Council of Europe. We listened to Oscar’s presentation, which gave us information on the informal status of the Council in Kosovo, as it is not yet part of it, and on the nature of their projects in Human Rights promotion. Because of the short time between both meetings, it was very striking to see the difference in the nature of both organisations, one being grassroots and local while the other is inter-regional and institutional.

In the meeting room, we discussed Kosovo’s recent efforts to become a member of the Council of Europe. We had a hard time getting answers as to why exactly Kosovo’s accession to the Council of Europe was not put on the agenda in their yearly meeting in May. Moreover, the nature of the activities of the Council in Kosovo was not always clear, which contrasted with the hands-on approach of the Center for Social Group Development which talked about concrete actions they were taking throughout the year. Despite those 2 points which remained unclear, it was interesting to see the institutional support that the Council of Europe was providing to the Government of Kosovo, through cooperation in legal and political fields. 

After the meeting, it was finally time to visit Pristina before eating dinner all together. We separated in smaller groups, some heading for the long-awaited coffee which Anne had told us a lot about, others heading back to the hostel.

Together with Shree, with whom I am doing my project on graffiti in Kosovo, we went on a walk in the city, following graffiti and streets that caught our eye. We saw a few mosques and Orthodox churches, but it was already too late to walk inside them. The exteriors were already very pretty, so I’m looking forward to seeing the insides and gardens. What I loved most about the streets was the perspective you got from one end to the other, seing shops and restaurants leading through the houses on the hills surrounding the center of Pristina. 

We walked through a market, which was quietly closing, in a very peaceful area of the town called Ijjaz Agushi. After 2 hours of walking around, and a dozen graffiti pictures in our phones, we headed down to the restaurant for dinner. Afterwards, we all headed to the hostel to get ready for the next day.