Language as a peacebuilding tool

By Demir Viden

Hello there! This is Demir again.
 
On our flight back to Amsterdam, I slept quite well. Kosovo really took a toll on me. Meetings every day, traveling to other cities, and visiting sights all over the country, working on the project with my group, and of course, exploring Prishtina's social life—it was all so exciting that every time I lay down in bed, I felt like I was missing out on something, making it hard to fall asleep. 

However, being back in the dorms now, I can proudly say that I used all of my energy and time exactly as I wanted. I witnessed Kosovo and Kosovars from different angles—both political and social. The blank space in my mind, filled with preconceived notions shaped by mere voices on TV or news articles, were replaced with a wealth of new information. I saw Kosovo for what it truly is: a country in a historical tug -of-war between different regional and world powers, that resulted in a divided society, much like many other post-Yugoslav republics.

What surprised me the most, I have to say, were the encounters with Kosovar people. On the flight to Prishtina, to my left on the other side of the aisle was a young Kosovar Albanian named Drit. He took an interest in our loud English-speaking group and, driven by curiosity, started a conversation about our agenda here. One thing led to another, and Drit became a friend of the whole Peace Lab, as you have probably already read in other blog entries. We hung out together, and he showed us the city with his best friend Olti, a specialist in Balkan cuisine. My group's project was related to food, so it was a perfect opportunity to learn from the best. They were the best hosts one could ask for. Whenever we needed anything, they were there for us. Warm and welcoming gestures and tones became what I got used to when interacting with people in Kosovo, whether they were Albanian, Serb, or Bosniak. However, as always, there are exceptions.

Kosovo has had a very difficult past, and the wounds from the most recent conflict are still fresh. The tensions between Serbs and Albanians are particularly prominent. The Bosnian language is quite similar to Serbo-Croatian—more so than British and American English. The difference is mostly dialectical. Knowing that the older generations learned Serbo-Croatian in school up until the 90s in Yugoslav times, I approached people in English and asked if they spoke Serbo-Croatian. Some people shrugged their shoulders and turned away, some nodded in disapproval, but most engaged in conversation, asking where I was from and why I am here. 

A particular situation stayed ingrained in my mind. As I was entering a taxi, I spoke in a Yugoslav language (Bosnian, if you ask me) to our guide Enver, who was showing me the destination of a Kosovar traditional food restaurant. The old taxi driver started driving, and I tried to start a conversation in English. Knowing the chances were that he also spoke Serbo-Croatian, I asked in broken English, “Did you live in Yugoslavia? No?, Yugoslavia?” To my surprise, the driver just looked at me in the rearview mirror with a stone-cold face for a couple of seconds and looked away. He did not speak a word for the rest of the trip, nor did I or my friends in the car. It could be that the sentence was not clear enough or that it was just not his day, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise. The people in the car said things like, “That guy really didn’t like you,” which made me even more sure that it must have been the fact that he overheard me speaking a South Slavic language. I realized that I needed to be more cautious about how I approached people and what I said to them. Sometimes I had to forget that I spoke Bosnian or even that I was from the region at all. Or I would pretend to be someone else to create a sense of closeness to the person I was speaking to, masking my real identity.

 
Truth is that here, my identity can sometimes cause issues as well as back home in Bosnia. In the North, this was more prominent. As you know, the Bosnian War saw Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats clashing. The history of the Balkans is its own curse… When we were visiting the NGO in North Mitrovica I was asking around for an ATM to get some money for lunch, and to my surprise, everyone said there was no bank or ATM. Later, I found out that there were three ATMs just across the bridge, a five-minute walk away, on the Albanian side of the city. I asked one young man, about my age,  in Bosnian, where I could find a shop where I could purchase with my card. He just said, “Go down there and look.” There? He didn’t point where “there” was, nor did he look me in the eyes while talking. He went inside a small cafe with a frowned face. I felt unwelcome in that situation, so when I asked the next person, I tried to imitate the Serbian dialect to see how people would react. From then on, if I thought it would be more appropriate to avoid causing trouble for myself or my friends, I would try to speak Serbian to create a more confident situation for the random stranger I probably wouldn’t see again in my life. It worked pretty well, I must say. To Kosovar Albanians I just spoke in English, if the other party could understand me, if not, there were myriad of other people that possibly could. That is how I interviewed most of the people for our project and the way I communicated with people there. As soon as the young man left, I asked the same question in a somewhat Serbian accent a lovely woman passing by. She pointed in the direction. It was just 100 meters away, around the corner on the left. It was the only shop with a card reader on that side of the city. 

In contrast, the Kosovo Albanians I encountered warmly welcomed the fact that I am Bosnian, with the name Demir, which indicates that I am a Bosnian Muslim. It was important to ensure they understood that the language I spoke was Bosnian, not Serbian. I remember crossing the bridge dividing Mitrovica and visiting a restaurant on the Albanian side. I quickly befriended the waiters by introducing myself as “Me Bosnian, Demir.” Keeping the language simple and broken made it easier for them to understand since many who don’t know it well speak it that way. The waiters were old enough to know Serbo-Croatian, so we chatted for a while about various topics, including the best food to eat there. On the way out, two of the waiters who served us shook my hand in farewell, and one of them said, “This one is good, he is one of us.”

That statement made me think. If I am friends with one group, does it mean I can't be friends with another? Will I have to live in this uncertainty of acceptance and rejection, and will it always be like this? Throughout my life, I have tried not to base my friendships on someone's background or name. So, I can proudly say that I have friends who are Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs, Kosovars, Albanians, Slovenians, and Macedonians. I feel at home in every one of these states, although, the reality is that in a wrong place and time this feeling can slowly fade away. At that moment when the waiter said those words, I felt appreciated and welcomed, I felt like home.