03/02/05
Text: Stu Sherman
Photographers: Stu Sherman
In the winter of 2004–2005, Stu Sherman traveled to Kosovo to photograph the region and interview the young artists and musicians living in the cities there. He arrived nine months after riots reshaped the physical and political landscape of the area, and he worked mainly in the capital, Pristina. As of this writing, the final status of Kosovo is still unsettled. Serbian politicians refuse to recognize the right to an independent, sovereign Kosovo, despite pressure from the U.N. Talks to reconcile the Kosovar and Serbian views have repeatedly failed.
Of Islam and Santa Claus
The predominant religion in Kosovo is Islam. While the region houses many important sites for Serbian Orthodoxy, like the Petrarch (the equivalent of the Vatican), there are also many mosques dating back to Ottoman times. While strongly traditional, the practices and beliefs of the Kosovar Albanians are also very indigenous to the region.
A rapper named Rrusta informed me that Wahhabists were paying people to practice Islam, attend mosque and pray five times a day. A former proponent of violence, he had risen to popularity with a track he released with his group Jericho Walls. Entitled “Don’t Fuck With Albanians,” the 1998 single was an English-language rap recorded in the impassioned style of Rage Against the Machine. It told the story of a Kosovar expat in Europe who had become a criminal in order to support the resistance. Since the war, Rrusta has become a practicing Muslim, though he abhors the foreign Islamists who are trying to impose their version of the religion on Kosovars. “Islam is like water,” he told me. “It has unique properties but takes the shape of the vessel you put it in. Those people are giving it to us in a certain shape and saying, ‘This is Islam.’”
Oddly enough, many Kosovars seem to celebrate Christmas, or at least they had photos of Santa everywhere. It seems to me that they were celebrating it as an imported Western holiday, so they just threw all the commercial aspects of it into one giant, poorly translated jumble. New Year’s was an important holiday, and on the televised New Year’s “spectacular,” they had a Santa figure dancing around, surrounded by people in traditional clothing and women in skimpy, shiny skirts lip-synching pop songs. It was very surreal.
Battles on the Bridge
Children play soccer along the Ibar River in north Mitrovica. Mitrovica was formerly an integrated urban area in North Kosovo. A mining town during the Yugoslav era, it was the location of one of the most vibrant rock scenes in the Soviet bloc. Ibar separates the city into Serbian (north) and Albanian (south). North Mitrovica is the last Serbian urban area in Mitrovica. The Serbs that have not left Kosovo all live in enclaves since riots in 2004 forced their evacuation. The riots were sparked by reports, which were never validated, that three Albanian children had been drowned by Serbs in the Ibar River. U.N. forces heavily guard the bridge, and only a handful of people not working for the U.N. cross the bridge now. I was one of them.
I met a Serbian punk band, Hosenfefer, on the north side of the river. Over rakia, a homemade brandy that ranges in flavor from “sweet” to “lighter fluid,” they told me that you know things are getting dark when rock bands refuse to play outside their own ethnic group. One of Hosenfefer’s former drummers was injured numerous times, incurring a concussion during one of the conflicts that occurred at the bridge. The band members themselves were still scarred from the riots and were vehemently opposed to an independent Kosovo, fearing what the Albanians might do if put in charge.
