Ruairi O'Connell

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Monday 25 February, 2008

A friend's birthday on Friday provided a perfect counterpoint to a busy, and heavily political, week.

With typical creativity, he chose to celebrate it in the Pristina Hammam (a traditional bathhouse - some images on Agron Islami's website at http://www.pbase.com/agroni/kosova), to show support for efforts to protect and restore some of Kosovo's cultural treasures.

The Hammam was built whilst Kosovo was under Ottoman rule. SInce, then, it has fallen on hard times. Under the socialist Yugoslavia, historical heritage suffered at the hands of the modernisers (much of Pristina's old town was cleared to make way, so it seems, for a road junction, and a slightly tatty open space by the Kosovo municipal building) . The hammam now is little more than a shell. However, a project has begun to restore it to former glories, (see chwbkosovo) financed by the Pristina municipality and the Swedish government; good luck to them.

The protection of cultural heritage was a key part of the UN Special Envoy Ahtisaari's plan for Kosovo (see UNOSEK), because cultural heritage, and its protection, gives a real foundation to people's identity in this part of the world. It can be hard to understand from a British perspective. I understand it thus; the presence of churches, mosques, kulla (traditional Albanian fortified farmhouses, essentially) and hammams serves as physical proof that the communities who built these monuments and structures have historical roots and a living presence in Kosovo, in a region where both have, historically, been called into question.

Sadly, this can mean that culture becomes yet another area of political competition - and worse. For example, I talked on Friday to someone claiming that the Decani monastery ( see Decani monastery link), a UNESCO-listed Serbian Orthodox Monastery, was somehow equally Serb and Albanian and that the Serbs had made exclusive claims to it through historical revisionism. It's pretty uncontroversial to acknowledge that in past times Albanians would have visited the monastery, but I've yet to hear a convincing account of how the Albanians in the region built the Church, and I have little doubt that the Monstary was built by Serbian Kings

More worrying, however, are the attacks aimed at removing the physical evidence of the 'other' community's existence. Both Albanians and Serbs suffered; during the war, Albanian Kullas were targetted, as were Mosques across Kosovo, and the house in Prizren where the pan-Albanian autonomy movement met was blown up and bulldozed over by Serbian forces. Kosovo Albanians contrast this with their protection of Churches during the Ottoman times. There is evidence for this, but it rings pretty hollow following the events of March 2004 where Serbian Churches were deliberately targetted by extremists (leaving 35 damaged or destroyed).

From the contacts I have with both communities, it seems clear that, to the mainstream on both sides, this cycle is abhorent. But is is clear that, on the extremist fringes, there are groups who see cultural sites as fair game (and I don't think this is a question of religion - it is, instead, a battle of ethnic identities).

The challenge now is to break this cycle. The Kosovo government has to take the lead on this. The approach that they have taken so far makes sense; "these sites are part of everyone's heritage in Kosovo, and we should protect them". This, however, isn't so far from "these sites are ours, and we should protect them" - a line that, again, raises fears of cultural appropriation and assymilation, and has been used by, for example, the radical 'Self-Determination Movement' (or Vetevendosja in Albanian) to that end.

It will also take a degree of hard work and dedication (and not just positive rhetoric) to put in place the kind of protection foreseen in Ahtisaari when , historically, cultural sites have suffered not only from political competition, but also from simple neglect (as with the hammam). This offers a new way to deal with the problem, in a technical way (the British government has provided a grant to the Kosovo government to establish a system to monitor and protect cultural sites). Most importantly, the Kosovo government, who have funded the repair and reconstruction of the Churches damaged and destroyed in 2004 , need to keep on putting their money where their mouth is.