This quick overview of my impressions, following a twelve-day stay in Kosovo, does not claim to be a detailed analysis of the situation in this country. I was not in Kosovo for political or journalistic reasons, but as a volunteer for the NGO "The Ideas Partnership". This non-profit organization, founded in 2009, tries to fill the gap in education, health care, and school and social support suffered by the most deprived communities in Kosovo (Roma, Ashkali, and other marginalized communities).

My interest in Kosovo, and my wish to spend time there, goes back a long way. I joined the MAN (Mouvement pour une Alternative Nonviolente - Movement for a Nonviolent Alternative) in 1995, partly because I shared the MAN’s interest at the time in the nonviolent struggle of Kosovo Albanians against the repressive Milosevic regime. I read with great interest the MAN’s mission reports of 1995 and 1997, which documented meetings of MAN activists not only with Ibrahim Rugova’s LDK, the spearhead of this nonviolent struggle, but with other “goodwill-oriented” Serb and Kosovar Albanians groups committed to a peaceful resolution of the conflict there.

The impressions I relay here are based on conversations while visiting Kosovo recently. While there, I spoke with

• about ten Kosovar Albanians, including Tahir Dalipi, a friend of Jean-Yves Carlen and Jean-Marc Muller of the MAN centre Alsace,
• three or four particularly well-informed internationals,
• only two Serbs, a young student from Belgrade who was doing an internship as a guide at the Church of the Virgin of Leviša, in Prizren; and a taxi driver who took me back from Graçanica.

Understanding Kosovo

The first impression that emerges from Kosovo, especially for those like me who only knew it before its independence (2008), is that it is a young and dynamic country. Despite this, Kosovo remains a country with big challenges:

• its exports are low, and unlike neighbouring countries, Kosovo attracts little tourism.
• its youth aspires to go abroad, and failing that goes to Prishtina. As a result, the countryside is emptying.
• the country has many minorities who are marginalized and excluded from what progress the country is experiencing.
• a very particular problem obviously subsists with the Serbian minority.

The conflict with the Serbian minority is absolutely not resolved on the political level. The general picture is well known: the independence of Kosovo is recognized by 115 countries, but is not recognized by significant countries including India, China and Russia, and 5 countries of the European Union (Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia and Rumania). In particular, of course, Kosovo's independence is not recognized by Serbia, which claims Kosovo as Serbian in the name of its status as the "cradle of Serbian civilization".

In a global context where multiple conflicts are burning more ardently, there is little motivation to resolve this problem once and for all. It is in particular a thorn that the European Union is reluctant to pull from the "Balkan flank" of our continent; other issues are perceived as being of higher priority than launching a challenge to the five countries that are resisting recognition.

The maintenance of the Serbian myth, and the very concrete demands of Belgrade, are a significant obstacle to the establishment of peaceful relations. The point of view of all my non-Serb interlocutors is that while this situation is a burden for the whole country, it is the Serbs of Kosovo who pay the greatest price.

Ibrahim Rugova and the nonviolent movement

In view of this observation, it is interesting to revisit history, and to shed a critical light on the hopes that the nonviolent struggle of the Kosovar Albanians had raised, in Kosovo and elsewhere. We can also consider the factors that led to this hope being disappointed: the lack of support given by the international community to Rugova; his own mistakes; the rise of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), towards which the hopes of the Kosovar Albanians ultimately turned as the nonviolent struggle appeared not to be delivering significant results. Finally, we must recall the truncated and ultimately aborted mission by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in the autumn of 1998, in which Pierre Dufour participated. Pierre himself expressed his point of view in his book, which is shared by the people I spoke to about it: this mission had neither the time, nor the means, nor the support that would have allowed it to succeed, and perhaps to avoid the war that followed.

A first observation concerning the traces of history in the Kosovar Albanian collective memory: Rugova is respected, even venerated. Several people have described him to me as the “Father of the Nation”. This is not just a question of rhetoric or a mythical ideal. The Kosovar Albanians recognize that it was Rugova who allowed them, at a time of harsh Serbian repression, to think of themselves as a people with a destiny of their own to forge, while Yugoslavia was in a process of decomposition. Moreover, the nonviolent resistance that Rugova embodied and that was organized around him brought concrete benefits, or at least mitigated real causes of harm, in an extremely practical way. Two Kosovar Albanians told me that without the parallel education system, their education would have been truncated or fragmented. More than one told me of the pride and importance of being employed in the parallel system, through which the LDK countered the suppression of jobs for non-Serbs. And several acknowledged that it was thanks to Rugova and the LDK that a bloodbath comparable to that experienced in Bosnia and Croatia during the wars was avoided.

At the same time, none of the small sample of Kosovar Albanians I spoke to said that they believed that nonviolent struggle could ultimately have succeeded, and that it would have been enough to give it time for it to do so. And, what is harder for us nonviolent activists, none of them challenged or expressed regret about the rise of the KLA.

Monuments to Rugova, streets or establishments bearing his name are plentiful in Kosovo; commemorative signs to the glory of the KLA are no less so. Everyone I spoke to agreed that Rugova and the nonviolent struggle saved lives in the initial phases of the conflict; several told me that the KLA also saved lives when the conflict became violent.

On this point, it is important to let history tell us what it tells us, not what we would like it to say; at the very least, I cannot make my interlocutors say what they did not say, or deny what they told me.

The commemoration of the KLA is only one of the ways in which, quite understandably, Kosovo has been made Albanian. In the vast majority of public spaces, the references, the reading of the country’s history as portrayed, are Kosovar Albanian. The Ethnographic Museum of Prishtina presents the customs and history of an Albanian family. The National Museum of Kosovo commemorates Kosovar Albanian traditions on the one hand, and the struggle of the KLA on the other; the temporary exhibition I saw there consisted of a series of photos, by a British photographer, glorifying the NATO intervention. NATO, the United States, are venerated. Everywhere in the street, in city spaces, tributes to the KLA and American flags flourish….

It is easy to understand and sympathize with this young country as - liberated and independent for the first time in its history - it reclaims and showcases its history. Furthermore, of course, the memory of the trauma, suffering, repression and deaths of Kosovar Albanians during the conflict are still very vivid. All the Kosovar Albanians I spoke to knew, often among their close relatives, victims of Serbian atrocities.

What now?

Faced with this reality, the vast majority of Kosovo Serbs have adopted a position of withdrawal and isolation. In the town of Graçanica, a Serbian enclave a few kilometres from Prishtina, whose beautiful Serbian Orthodox monastery I went to visit, Serbian flags were on display on every street corner. The school systems are completely segregated – Serbs do not learn Albanian, nor, do Kosovar Albanians learn Serbian. In their enclaves, Serbs cling to their version of history, a vision in which they are victims – and to the vain hope of a return to a Serbian Kosovo. They commemorate those who disappeared at the end of the Kosovo war, and lament the exactions actually committed by the Kosovar Albanians who returned to Kosovo with the victorious support of NATO.

There was no equivalent in Kosovo to the "Truth and Reconciliation" commission in South Africa. There is no foreseeable possibility of agreement on a common reading of history, so there can be no shared recognition of the crimes committed by one side or the other, nor request or offer of forgiveness.

In Kosovo, the repression and exactions committed by the Serbs were much more severe, and more spread out over time, than those, certainly not insignificant, of which the Kosovar Albanians were guilty. Several Kosovar Albanians told me that as long as there was no recognition of these crimes, and a request for forgiveness, reconciliation would be impossible.

History is not made of perfect or ideal situations. From the Albanian point of view, NATO intervention and the resulting independence of Kosovo are necessarily experienced as blessings, liberating events that allowed their young country to build itself and forge an existence and an identity. It would be futile to deny this reality – or to deny that, with time, perhaps a future for Kosovo based on appeasement, shared prosperity and integration for all its minorities will be possible.

In the meantime, from the point of view of believers in nonviolence, we can see that a situation put forward as “resolved” is not resolved at all, that serious tensions, hatreds and resentments remain, and that an entire people – the Serbs – consider themselves wronged by history and misunderstood by the international community. It is not impossible that Belgrade will play with fire and fuel the simmering ongoing confrontations, turning these into a “hot” conflict. The grievances of the Serbs feed into broader global conflicts, latent or open, between "the West" and Belgrade's allies in Moscow or Beijing.

Serious mistakes, especially by the international community, but also by Kosovar actors, caused the nonviolent movement ultimately to stall. Its path to success was a difficult one, but if it had succeeded, if it had received the attention and support it deserved, perhaps we would not still be experiencing the tensions that persist today, and the threats of renewed violence that weigh heavily on prospects for the future.