Pristina 13 July 1999
Mirdita,

I slept beautifull, no noises off guns or anything, noises of hundreds of cars, no barking dogs, no cocks with lost track of time. Pristina is just quiet. Even here in Sunny Hill which is one of the typical Yugoslavian build new part of the town. The same building you will find in allmost all former yugoslavian towns, there weren't so many different building types in Yugoslavia anyway. It use to be a very rich part of the town in some ways, where a lot of civil servants were living or army members. In the last three years however the area went down a bit. The streetcleaners are not anymore there, most kosovarians didn't want to work for the goverment, or rather were fired by the Serbian authorities since they didn't want to sign the loyalty agreement with the Serbian authorities. So the green park in the area are not taken care of as they used to be. The waste collection and treatment are about the same as in Albania it seems, almost everywhere waste dumps (which give the same smell as in Tirana), broken down waste containers (partly burning as in Tirana, leaving this special smell of burning plastics as we know from there). We wanted to get up early this morning since there was a lot of things and people to visit. So we agreed to have breakfast at 7.30, but when we all waked up we had to find out that somewhere during the night the electricity went out. So we were a bit angry on ourself that we didn't brought the gas cookers with us as planned to be able to make some morning coffee. On the other hand I have to admit that most of us were in fact a bit happy that the electricity wasn't working. Since some how it is what you expect. I went up to the small bar-restaurant just around our block to see if they had electricity and coffee, in the hope we could have our breakfast round there, but no way the whole area was out. Anyway some of us went today to visit UNHCR, UNICEF and others and Janine and I went to see the town a bit and get an idea if what we saw yesterday is near to the true. The heart of Pristina and a lot of other cities is always the "green market", the bazar, the places where most people go and buy there things. Don't worry the green market from Pristina is full with vegetables and everything you need. The prices are even better as in Albania, vegetables are almost half of the price. Wonder where that all comes from. But I will find out today, I hope. After that we tried to find the busstation, it is a long time ago that I was here and things have changed a bit since than. But after walking back to the center of town and we meet up with Rand, Flo and Dan. By the way all of us found out that the story that the Albanian Lek is now the national currency in Kosov@, which stood in Albanian newspapers, is not true. This country goes by German marks and Yugoslav dinars - sure you can pay with dollars and get dinars back. But please no Leks. But by now we were able to change some of our Dollars, the exchange rates are changing from place to place, or from person to person. This all happened in the hall of the big Pristina Hotel (a 200 dollar per person per night hotel) and each of us got different exchange rates. We updated eachother about the morning and later we went looking for the busstation again, now I could find straight away. The place was totally bombed out, the story was that NATO heard that the Jugoslav Army had a base there. Anyway beside that the main building was not really looking as it used to be, it still was looking very much like all the busstation as I know them all over Yugoslavia. The streetsellers took out the not destroyed furniture and they sat in the nice red chairs on the platforms, funny to see how fast the free market takes over. We looked at a couple of Belgium soldeers dangerously armed, with super big machine guns wrapped in camouflage material (maybe you can't see camouflaged gun and people in the forest, but in the cities you can see them very clearly). At the busstation we also watch a konvoy from Albania arriving, six buses and six albanian army truck with the belongings of the refugees. It was nice to see how all the kids had some stuffed animal with them, knowing that they were given to them in Shemri by one of our volunteers. The arrival was kind of chaos. The Belgium soldeers, who actually were there to protect this convoy, unloaded the trucks, the Albanian soldeers just watch them doing it, and made big piles of bags and things in which refugees tried to find back what was theirs. You show how each family found a little spot on the platform where they could collect all their stuff together, so shortly after that you watch how every family sat down around their little piles of things, trying to find out how they would go from here. Taxi driver walked around trying to find people who still had money to drive them home, but hardly nobody did, and the ones who had, only had Leks and nobody takes that here. >From there we walked home to Sunny Hill, the name really fits the reality at this moment, it was hot like hell. We walked through one of the main road of the city, through one of this modern communist shopping galleries and show all the looted shops. Some of them where back working again, some were just looted in the last weeks, since the signs on the broken window obvious made clear that this shop belong before to Serbian owners. In some of these places people started to clean up, obvious sure that the former owners wouldn't come back soon. And all the streets were full with people, for sure a lot more than there were here before. I am sure that Pristina has at this moment more people than before, lots of people moved here, since the villages are heavily destroyed and they can't move back to there houses yet. Janine went to our house and I went with my laptop in the hope to write yesterdays diary to a small bar-restaurant next to the block we are living. I sat down and the owner came up to me, trying to tell me in broken english that he was sorry for this morning that there was no coffee. But that it wasn't his fault, there was no electricity. It is now 4 o'clock and the power is back on the grid. Than he said something in German, with a nice Austrian dialect. I reacted back in German and it showed that he had been working in Vienna for 21 years and spoke the language perfectly. He explained to me that he spend three months with relatives in Macedonia an returned to Pristina before most of the NATO troops. He found his house burned out, his restuarant looted, his small buscompanie, with four busses driving a regular busline Vienna-Pristina destroyed, all his busses and private cars were either stolen (besides those which were out of the country at the time, 2 busses) or burned. And is now trying to get back on his feet. His family luckily had another house and they are now living there, with 24 persons in one apartment. When he came to Pristina most of the houses and shops were empty, there was hardly nobody on the streets and certainly no cars, maybe a 10 or 20 in the whole town. He saw everybody coming, he saw how the shops get working again. All the food and materials he said were imported from Macedonia, Turkey and Bulgaria and for some strange reason, it is cheaper here as in the country of origine. For example tomatos from Macedonia on the green market here are about the half of the price as in Tetevo. Probably the fact that no tax system is yet in place has something to do with it. In the beginning 4 weeks ago there was nothing and if you could find any food in the town it was incredible expensive. He didn't wanted to go back from Macedonia so early, didn't wanted to pay a taxi from Tetovo to Pristina either, knowing that his buses from Vienna to Pristina would start driving later that week. But his wife and children wanted to go back immediately, so what could he do. We talk about politics, allthough he kept saying that he don't know anything about politics or sport, only from working. But I asked him how he saw the future of Kosov@, if he after all this would see Serbs coming back and living in this area. He was clear, ofcourse that would happen, not next week, but soon they had to return back. It wouldn't be easy to forgive them, since it is clear that in the looting also Serbs were involved who use to live here. But they weren't really Serbs from here, they had came in the last 20 years. The ones who lived here all their lives or who were born here they are alright. Before he left in 1979 for Austria he had even good contacts with them. In his restaurant in Vienna all the people from Yugoslavia use to come. The problem started there about 7 years ago, when suddenly only Kosovarians came in his restaurant and the Serbs and Croats stayed away. That why he had to give up and return back to Kosov@. With the money he earned in Austria he builded up his house, which is now destroyed. So he only has his two busses in Austria left, but with that he can make a good living in the future. The small restaurant is more for his sons he told me. Coming to the hard qeustion, what he sees as the role of the UCK he is also very open and clear. That is not an army, they haven't liberated our country, he says. They are just cowboys, running around in their camouflage uniforms, playing the big heroes and they aren't. It is NATO who won the war, isn't it, and he looks at me. And please let the UCK stay out of the future government, none of them really got a good education, it were just cheap labour workers, who now think that they are the most important people in the country. He don't like them, that's for sure. Than he start to ask me qeustions about Albania and if the stories which he have heard are true. He never ever have been them. He heard from his brother, who has been there once that the roads were so bad that the steering wheel was not able to hold. And that the police are as criminal as the criminals, like what would happen if the UCK would be the police here in Kosov@. I tell a bit about what I have seen and soon a group from 5 or 6 people are gather to hear stories about the motherland. From other Kosovarians who were in Albania they already heard some rumours, but to hear it from a foreigner is something different. Most of them had been working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, so the whole conversation went in very good german. Strange to hear stories about what happened to them on the Blace border in such a languages, they all spoke so good german that you would have take them for Austrian, South Germans or Swiss people if you didn't know better. Dan and Flo met some people from Goal Ireland in the restaurant they went to eat tonight, who were with them on the waystation in Gojan, the people from Goal did the medical part there. They didn't knew what happened there after they went, they evacuated the station in 15 minutes after the shooting took place. When they went there were still tents (also from Sunflowers, in one of the tents were still the private things from the two czehs from "People in Need", who worked with us on that way station and just visit their friends working in Kosov@ for three days) and toilets were still there and the containers were still full (especially their container with medicines). They didn't return the next day, sunday, since it was unsafe, and the two Goal people were send to Kosov@ and were told on monday that the waystation would be cleared by CARE and all stuff would be brought to Tirana later in the week. So it is unclear if if CARE managed to get their and our things out in time or that it was completely looted. Pristina is not that quiet as I thought, this evening one nato helicopter after the other is flying over, with there search light going over the houses. They are flying very near over our flat buildings. Like the Serbs use to do before with their mig jets.

wam :-)