A vow from 1998
Painter: Frederic William Burton When the terrorists from the so-called “Kosovo Liberation Army” attacked Orahovac in July 1998, many Albanians fled the town to avoid injuries during three days of intense street fighting between the militants and our security forces. After the town had been liberated, the situation improved and the authorities attempted to restore normality by encouraging businesses to reopen. The director of our factory made the same request, ordering us, the local managers, to be lenient with the Albanians who had not yet returned to work, as everyone knew that many of them had fled the town due to the intense fighting. It was announced that employees would be allowed to keep their jobs for a month. However, if an employee failed to appear within this time, he would lose his position, and his information would be reported to the police for further investigation.
These measures were taken because of well-founded suspicions that the cause of the protracted absence of some Albanian employees was their participation in the “Kosovo Liberation Army.” Although some of them did not take part in the fighting “for the Albanian cause,” they helped the militants by digging ditches, trenches, and building fortifications. In addition, it was no secret that many Albanians wore militant uniforms at night, while during the day, dressed in civvies, they would become “ordinary civilians”. It was very hard to prove their involvement in bandit groups. As far as I remember, none of the Albanian employees of our factory were fired on the basis of the decree issued by the authorities. By the way, unlike us, it was not such a big tragedy for Albanians to lose their official jobs; they had their own alternative sources of income and private family businesses. We Serbs have never prevented them from showing such industry and business acumen—we even appreciated that.
Once the decree had come into force, almost all of my Albanian employees returned to the factory within ten days—except H.K. Days went by, but still he was not there. None of the staff knew what was wrong with him; or even if they knew, they didn’t want to tell me. I was certain that he was alive: Orahovac is a small town, and if anything had happened, we would have heard about it at once. I thought that he may have gone abroad—in those days many Albanians used the military operations in Kosovo and Metohija as a pretext to seek asylum in the West.
Gradually, I was even beginning to forget about this man when suddenly one fine morning, when all the deadlines had passed, I saw him at our factory talking with other employees and taking his working clothes out of a locker. Surprised and outraged, I barked:
“Where on earth have you been? Do you understand that all the deadlines have passed, and I’m obliged to fire you? Those are the orders!”
Dejan Baljosevic He looked at me angrily, closed the locker and replied:
“Will you fire me?! Do you know that when our time comes, I’ll cut off your head?”
There was dead silence. Everyone fell silent at once, pretending to be doing their work and looking around, and only the two of us were looking into each other’s eyes. I went outside and closed the door. I understood perfectly well what “their time” meant—it was inevitably approaching with the support of the West. By the other workers’ reaction, I was convinced once again that he enjoyed great authority among them and that for them he was a much bigger boss than I, a mere Serb. I don’t know if he was a member of the terrorist group.
I continued my work without paying much attention to his threat. I thought: “He said it in a fit of rage—perhaps someone from his family has died during the fighting,” which was not uncommon in the town. I consoled myself that there was no place in the world where relations between superiors and subordinates were perfect, and even more so here in Kosovo and Metohija, where the relationships of whole peoples had been tested for centuries, with frequent clashes between the bandits from the “Kosovo Liberation Army” and our security forces.
From that day on, our relationship was not normal, although both we and the Albanians tried—if only at work—to continue to communicate and cooperate, without trusting each other. How could there be any trust? All relations had been destroyed since the attack, albeit unsuccessful, by terrorists from the “Kosovo Liberation Army” on Orahovac, and the deaths of many Albanians and Serbs? There was no reason for reconciliation; very soon the war broke out in Kosovo and Metohija with the NATO aggression against the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
When “Their Time” Came
KFOR. Photo: Reuters
The war ended with our defeat. As the Albanians say, “their time” came. NATO—their ally, or better yet, master—disguised as KFOR (“the international peacekeeping forces for maintaining peace and order in Kosovo”), has dominated Kosovo and Metohija ever since, having driven the remaining Serbs into ghetto enclaves. I found myself in one of these enclaves.
Most of the Serbs left Kosovo and Metohija. My town was no exception. I decided to stay in Orahovac, regardless of the consequences.
Very soon we, the remaining Serbs, became “legitimate” targets for Albanians, inspired by the presence of KFOR and eager for revenge. Overnight we found ourselves completely surrounded by Albanians—in total isolation from the world, and it was easy to come to the conclusion that no one cared about us. As expected, there were mass kidnappings and murders of my fellow citizens, arson attacks and seizures of their homes and property. I just felt in my bones how the Albanian steel hoop was tightening around our enclave and how the threat to the ever-decreasing number of Serbs was growing. I realized that I was in danger when one day I met H.K. in the center of the enclave (he was selling vegetables from a trailer) and remembered his threats. This happened when KFOR decided to remove the barbed wire around the enclave, and Albanians were able to enter our part of the town for the first time after the war. Many Albanians took advantage of this opportunity to earn easy money—they sold food at vastly inflated prices, because you could buy cheaper food only in the Albanian part of Orahovac, inaccessible and forbidden to Serbs.
H.K. saw me: our eyes met. We looked straight into each other’s eyes, as if continuing that conversation at the factory and realizing that the situation had changed, that now it was “their time”. Both of us were troubled, trying not to show our agitation. Coolly, keeping my outward composure, I tried to show him that I was not afraid, but I could clearly see from his facial expression that he was taken aback by my presence in Orahovac—he might have believed that I had fled the region with other Serbs after losing the war. I saw sinister hatred in his glare and realized that I could expect nothing good; in addition to the common danger for all of us, there was also personal deadly hatred, which only he and I knew about. Both realized that day that it would not end so easily, with just scowls.
Unfortunately for me, H.K. lived near the Serbian part of the town, and we often met at the entrance to the enclave. Every time he looked at me menacingly, his face distorted with hatred. It was good for me that we would meet on a crowded street, with unnecessary witnesses. The burden of the anxious unknown weighed on me more and more, but I felt that I myself had become a severe ordeal for H.K. It was obvious how he was tormented by anger. He had vowed to kill a Serb in front of his fellow tribesmen, “his time” had come, but to his shame, he couldn’t take revenge on his “offender”, although no one was stopping him from doing this! Sometimes I thought that he probably regretted having made the vile promise of revenge that he had bound himself with—he had to keep his word, which is highly praised among the Albanians.
The worst thing for both of us was this simple fact: I wasn’t going to fire him in the first place—either then or even if he had come back to work later, because my word meant little at the factory, since I was not a member of the ruling party. So only someone from a higher authority could fire him, but I couldn’t. And he knew it perfectly well, so he chose me as an easy target for revenge, because no one would stand up for me. But what happened, happened; a word spoken is past recalling; there was no turning back, both our lives had been poisoned, and only blood could wash away the “guilt.” The only thing that H.K. didn’t know was that I was a bigger enemy to the former government than he was, and it was keeping a much closer eye on me than on him.
Reflecting on our feud, I recollected an old story told to me by my reposed father (may God give rest to his soul!) about the complicated relationship between the Serbs and Albanians in our region. During the Ottoman yoke, an Albanian would constantly mock an enslaved Serb, causing him great suffering. The Serb endured the taunts, but sometimes he told his enemy that the time would come and he would take revenge on him. When the Serbian army liberated Kosovo and Metohija and drove out the Turks, the Serb’s friends and neighbors asked him:
“Why don’t you kill him now? Have you forgotten the evil he inflicted on you?”
He replied humbly:
“I haven’t forgotten, but it would have been better to take revenge in Turkish times when it took courage to do so. Then I would have been praised as a hero, a man of my word and fearless. But if I do it now, when I can deal with him easily with a single blow, I would be a coward.”
Maybe H.K. had also heard this story. After all, the Communists “for the sake of brotherhood and unity” discarded the faith and ethnicity of the actors from it, so that everyone could say that bravery and honor are inherent in all inhabitants of Kosovo and Metohija at all times.
That’s why I didn’t want to tell our security forces about his act, even though would have been was very easy to do so—there were many Serbian military and police officers, and their post was a stone’s throw from our factory. That would have been cowardly on my part.
I Was Waiting…
View of Orahovac with the Holy Dormition Church
One day, as I was walking down the street, I saw him walking towards me, his dog on a lead. Walking straight at me, he looked around sharply two steps away to see if anyone was nearby. To his disappointment, several passersby appeared. He spat at my feet to humiliate me at least that way, nervously tugged on the lead, and walked past. I realized that he hadn’t given up on revenge, he just didn’t know how he wanted to “punish” me—whether by setting fire to my house, destroying it, or doing something else. After all, he could do anything, because “their time” in Metohija had really come. Every day there were news reports: “In such-and-such a Serbian community so-and-so has died as a result of an attack by unknown assailants.” So my case would have been yet another petty newsworthy event. No one would have been surprised—people wouldn’t even pay attention to it. The Albanians would have lauded the murderer as a hero and “besnik” (a man who keeps his oath, or “besa”) and would not at all have entertained the idea of handing him over to the law-enforcement agencies. KFOR would have formally condemned the murder, but would have justified the murderer by “the incredible suffering of the Albanians inflicted by the Serbian oppressors.” And the government in Belgrade would not have said a word. For order’s sake some apparatchik would probably have sent a formal protest to the International Mission in Kosovo and Metohija, accusing it of ineffectiveness in protecting the Serbs, but choosing words and expressions so as not to offend anyone.
Of course, I was conscious that I was in great danger because of that whole story. I was waiting for my fate, without telling anything to anyone. I didn’t even tell my mother that my life was in danger so as not to scare her, although I felt it was unfair of me not to prepare her in advance for something like that. I am sure she would have implored me to leave Orahovac with the first humanitarian convoy, or at least to file the death threat from the pursuer to KFOR. Either option was out of the question. To escape from Orahovac, save my neck, and abandon my family in the enclave would have been extreme cowardice. To report the villain to KFOR and ask for their protection would have worsened the situation—it would have given H.K. an extra reason to attack me, and besides, I would have attracted unnecessary close attention of KFOR and the police, who—both then and now—have been hunting the area in search of “Serbian war criminals” at the first whim and testimony of Albanians, who had their eye on this or that plot of land. They would have found some “historical guilt before him and his people” in the very fact of me being pursued by an Albanian, and a possible investigation would have been against the applicant—already not the first case in our area, believe me. Realizing that only I, he, and God could solve the problem, I waited quietly for the outcome.
I must say, there were moments when the oppressive despondency of living in a cramped enclave overwhelmed me, throwing me into despair, and I wanted to go up to H.K. and ask him to complete his planned evil deed or leave me alone, because I could no longer bear that ghetto nightmare.
Attempted Murder
That evening I lay on my bed, reading the Lives of the Saints—the book given to me at the monastery library when the monks saw that I had begun to look deeper into the holy mysteries of Orthodoxy. My mother was watching TV in the living-room. Suddenly something crashed down, our house shook, and I found myself covered with plaster. White all over, without waiting for the dust to settle, I dashed into the living-room to see if everything was alright with my mother. I bumped into her in the hallway—she was running towards me to see if I was alive. Thank God, we were both safe. We examined the other rooms in the house: there was no major damage there either. We came to the conclusion that the explosion had probably occurred somewhere near our house, which is why it had shaken. I thought that Albanian extremists had again mined a newly vacated Serbian house. But it was unlikely that these were the houses of our immediate neighbors who had recently left for central Serbia.
I went outside cautiously and looked around. But only at night, when a KFOR patrol arrived, drawn by a new explosion, and when one of the soldiers turned a searchlight on the house, did I see that half of our roof had been destroyed. In the morning, UNMIK Police1 officers arrived to inspect the scene and found a small-diameter hole in a concrete slab of the attic where the mine had fallen, piercing the roof. It was only then that I realized that we were lucky; had the mine hit one of the house walls built of less solid material, either my mother or I would have been injured, depending on which room it would have hit.
A Serbian interpreter who worked with UNMIK Police later told me that the official police notice stated: “The explosion was caused by a shot from an unknown firearm or hand grenade,” which I had allegedly hidden in my attic and which, for unknown reasons, had exploded by itself. A friend from Belgrade informed me that the Politika daily newspaper reported “the throwing of a mine at a Serbian house; fortunately, no one was injured.” It was broadcast by our radio amateurs from Metohija, who, in the environment of total isolation from the rest of the world, were the only link between it and the enclaves.
After this kind of attack by Albanian extremists on a Serb, he (if he survived) usually packed up his belongings and either moved with his family to a safer place inside the ghetto or to central Serbia. Those who threw a mine at my house probably expected this from me, and to be honest, some Serbs did too. My friends advised me to leave my house as soon as possible, because at that time it was the closest to the Albanian part of the town, so the risk was huge. Some believed that it was the last warning of the Albanian extremists, who showed that they were not joking at all.
I ardently endorsed the idea of the Serbs staying in Orahovac at all costs. And now everyone was waiting for an answer from me: whether my views had changed after the attack and whether I had finally understood, like others before me, that we couldn’t live in Kosovo and Metohija anymore. And I knew that if I left, I would endanger my neighbor, because in that case his house would be the closest to the Albanian part. If he fled, it would be his neighbors and relatives’ turn, and so on. This “domino effect” would spread as far as the center of the enclave if it was not countered. I realized that someone had to take the risk if we wanted the Serbian enclave to survive.
A neophyte, I was inspired by the martyrdom of the first Christians from the Lives of the Saints, which I had read for the first time, and, to the others’ amazement, I decided to stay in my home. I repaired the roof, covered it with tiles that a friend had given me, and put a fence of sturdy planks in front of the wall facing the Albanian part of the town—they were supposed to serve as an obstacle for possible subsequent mines. At least they could soften the impact of a mine by causing a detonation.
I never learned if my house was the main target that night or if it was just the random throwing of a mine by our “dear neighbors”, and whether H.K. had anything to do with it.
News from a Minaret
One sunny morning I was sitting at a table in the garden deep in thought, while my wife was doing something around the house and grumbling loudly regarding the hard lot of women. It was probably easier for her to put things in the house in order that way.
To provoke her, I said in response that I had never even thought about taking a break, And the fact that I was sitting with such an intelligent look and meditating on lofty things meant the hardest mental work. I added, “So let each continue their own business; besides, mental work is harder than the physical.” But our “argument” was interrupted by the Hoja2 from a nearby minaret, who was announcing someone’s death to the entire Albanian part of the town.
Before the war, in the daily bustle, I had not paid much attention to the Hoja’s announcements of people’s deaths—I had not known those Albanians anyway. But after the war, either because I had free time in the enclave or because my Albanian peers whom I knew personally, began to die, I started to listen to such news from the minaret attentively and to the end. So it was that time. At the end, the Hoja said that H.K. had passed away. I jumped up in disbelief, asked my wife to be quiet and put my hand to my ear—as a rule, the Hoja repeats the deceased’s name and the time of funeral. The Hoja repeated loudly from the mosque minaret in the lower Albanian part of Orahovac: “H.K. is dead, the funeral is at 14:00.”
I sat down, still unable to believe what I had heard. Was he really dead?! When I came to my senses, I thought: “Maybe it isn’t him, because in a town with 25,000 inhabitants there might be someone else with the same first and last names. Besides, H.K. is quite young and has not reached the age when death is expected.” I had enough doubts, and I decided to be wary and vigilant until I checked everything thoroughly.
A few months later, when we Serbs began to go beyond our enclave cautiously for food, I met N.J. in a shopping center: my former subordinate at the factory and H.K.’s colleague. Kind and modest, N.J. was one of the few Albanians I knew who, after the war, always greeted me amicably wherever we met. After the usual “How’s your health?”, “How’s your family?” and other standard polite questions, I wondered about H.K. I said, “Did you hear the Hoja announce the death of a certain H.K.? Is that ours?” N.J. had been present at that fateful conversation and heard the promise to cut off my head.
“Yes, exactly,” he replied and, coming closer, added softly, “One day he came home suddenly and found his wife with another man. From the shock, he developed brain cancer and died in agony very soon afterwards.”
“Oh, I feel sorry for him,” I replied.
We shook hands and parted.
I came out of the shopping center agitated. It was only when I got into the car, closed the door, took a deep breath, and came to my senses, that I felt a huge sense of relief, as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I was free again—if the Serbs of Kosovo and Metohija know this feeling at all.
I sat motionless for a while, immersed in thought. I saw again the great mercy of God towards me, unworthy as I am. I bitterly remembered my sins: I don’t remember such repentance in my life. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed someone’s intent gaze—stern yet kind. I looked more closely; from the icon attached to the dashboard the holy Protomartyr Archdeacon Stephen, our family’s patron-saint, looked at me sadly. His eyes were saying to me, “You didn’t believe me again. Go on, what are you waiting for? It’s time to move on.” I replied: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I couldn’t say anything else.
