Entering Kosovo at dawn

We had flown into Skopje the night before, “we” being myself and a junior foreign service officer I was training, who I’ll just call “D’. We ate a simple latish supper at a street-side café, bought some black market CDs from a nearby vendor, and returned to the Alexander Hotel for an early bedtime. It was 2000, and D and I were going to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, the following day. NATO troops were occupying Kosovo, and by that point in time the ethnic cleansing and fighting had ceased, most of the unexploded roadside bombs had been cleaned up, and daytime travel was generally safe (at night snipers sometimes took potshots at soldiers and passing vehicles). Just the same, there were troops everywhere, and lots of armoured vehicles and military helicopters moving about. We would need to be on the road well before dawn, so that we could reach the border checkpoint before any of the daily troop movements in and out of Kosovo began, for the soldiers always took priority over other travellers. You could easily be stuck there for a few hours if your timing was unlucky.

Sometime between 4 and 5 am we were picked up at the hotel in a black Chevy Suburban with bulletproof glass, which makes it feel as though you’re travelling inside a fishbowl. Our ethnic Albanian driver was over-caffeinated and manic, and shouted more than spoke profanity-laden English. I sat in the front passenger seat, D sat in the more dangerous back seat (bandits or snipers would assume the person sitting in the back was the important passenger; I’m not sure D was aware of this). After about half an hour the driver’s incessant chatter was making my head hurt, so I put in a CD I’d picked up the night before, a bootleg copy of a live Clash album.  The Suburban climbed up into the hills as the sky lightened, the still leafless trees visible but not yet casting shadows.

We arrived at the border in the midst of ‘London Calling’, a fitting soundtrack for the sight that greeted us. The Greek soldiers manning the checkpoint were wearing respirators in addition to their helmets and body armour, looking like storm troopers in a dystopian sci-fi movie. The reason for the respirators was that the border checkpoint was located near a cement factory that had been destroyed by a NATO-fired cruise missile some months earlier. A large stockpile of lime at the factory had been pulverized in the explosion, and there were still elevated concentrations of lime dust in the air.

We cleared the checkpoint quickly, and made our way into Kosovo, following the main road along which tens of thousands of Albanian Kosovars had fled ethnic cleansing for protection in Macedonia. Both sides of the road the whole way to Pristina were lined with empty plastic bags and plastic bottles that the refugees had discarded along the way. At one point we passed a number of mass graves over which stood a pole flying the new flag of Kosovo. As we drew nearer to Pristina we passed large numbers of newly constructed low-rise apartment buildings, their walls the terra cotta colour of unfinished building bricks, each unit with a satellite dish.

The previous year thousands of Kosovo refugees had been airlifted to Canada with our government’s assistance, and granted permanent residence. In the haste to flee their homes, many had become separated from family members and loved ones. Those who had made it to Canada provided the names of those left behind, and with the help of military and humanitarian officials the refugee office at the Canadian Embassy in Vienna had been locating the relatives still in Kosovo. My main reason for going to Pristina was to interview and process the visa paperwork for a list of people who had been located.

There was one other unusual thing I had been instructed to do on my visit. In the New York Times several weeks earlier there had been a story about a twelve year old girl who had been the only survivor when she and her family were gathered up for execution by ethnic Serb paramilitaries. The girl had hidden behind her mother and covered her face with her hands when the shooting began. Her mother’s body had slowed the momentum of the bullets enough that the girl’s fingers were broken and her face was scarred, but she was not killed. Her mother’s body fell on top of her, concealing her from the murderers who would have otherwise finished her off. A wealthy Canadian had read the Times story and offered to fly her to Canada for plastic surgery. A Canadian soldier tracked her down to a relative’s home in a rural village, and the girl would be brought to my hotel in Pristina so I could issue her a visa.

The girl was staying in a sector controlled by the US military. The afternoon of my second day in Kosovo I received a call saying the girl would be arriving soon, and could I please meet her in front of the hotel. D and I stood outside and watched as a half-dozen American armoured vehicles pulled up, the small girl being helped to the ground by a soldier in full battle gear (the American sector being still unsettled at that moment). The girl was indeed scarred as described, though not as awfully as I had been led to believe. She didn’t speak English. She was neither shy nor forthcoming in answering my questions through the interpreter. Considering what she had lived through and the situation she was presently in, she was remarkably composed.

Although I issued the girl a visa, she never did end up making her way to Canada. As it turned out, a wealthy American had also read her story and made a similar offer to come to the US, and she and her guardian decided to go there instead. I often think about that girl, who would be in her late twenties now. In my mind I can still picture clearly her face, and her small figure being helped down to the ground amid all those soldiers and military vehicles. I hope she has had some happiness since then.