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Rocking the boat
Howard Clark
On 10 June, the fifth anniversaryof UN Resolution 1244 establishing the UN InterimAdministration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), protesters in Prishtinaraised their red cards to tell UNMIK it was time to leave. Throughout thecity their posters proclaimed six principles of nonviolence stated by MartinLuther King.
The demonstration was not very big: ithad been pretty much kept out of the news in advance, and afterwards was to bedownplayed by the powers-that-be--both local and international. Yet perhaps the demonstrators represent an overdue stirring among a popula-tion that has spent too long being grateful to NATO (and later KFOR) and toomuch time learning what to say in order to secure international funding. Theprotest was organised by the Kosova Action Network--a group of predomi-nantly young people who want to find nonviolent ways forms to express thegrievances of the people. Their philosophy is one of popular empowerment--hence the writing of KAN as I CAN-- and nonviolence.
Solidarity and practical action
The international Kosova Action Network has existed for several years, particu-larly campaigning for the release of prisoners. KAN in Kosova came into exis-tence after the international KAN's conference in Kosovo last year. Its first actionwas to organise a petition about those
people still missing since the war. The most widely signed petition for more than a decade, this insists on soli-darity with those who lost loved ones in the war but wants to bring pressure forfurther investigation--knowing that there are more than 800 cadaversexhumed from mass graves in Serbia still awaiting return to Kosovo and believingthat more corpses are still to be found in mass graves in Serbia. (Even during theNATO bombings, Serbian forces were transporting dead bodies from Kosovo toSerbia to cover up war crimes.)
Creating space
KAN's second public action was to take over a shopping mall from 1pm to 1amon Sunday, 8 February (with the agreement of the owners). They covered thewindows with black plastic, converting the whole area into a zone of free expres-sion on the questions "Where have we come from? Where are we now? Whereare we going?" Some 30,000 people took part in that event. Its musical highlightwas the performance of an Ashkali group --the Ashkalis (most easily described asAlbanian-speaking Roma) are one of the most vulnerable minorities. And so they moved on to plan their 10 June protest. However, the violence thatflared up on 17 March--in which 19 people died, nearly 1,000 were injured, per-haps 4,000 Serbs were driven from their homes and several hundred houses wereburnt--cast a shadow over that.
As we go to press, KAN--with the
families of the missing--has been block-ing the main road into Prishtina for eight hours a day. The internationalombudsperson for Kosovo has criticised the heavy-handed policing of theseprotests, even though the protesters in his view have exceeded what is permitted aslegal protest.
Nonviolence and empowerment
The elders of KAN seem to be largely drawn from the movement of nonviolentstudent protests in 1997, and KAN-- just as those student protests--defieswarnings about "not rocking the boat". They see UNMIK as part of a process ofcorruption and disempowerment of their own society. The party politicians and most of the political elite have bought into this cor-ruption. And so now it is time to revive and mobilise a spirit of solidarity and ofvoluntary action almost unseen in post-war Kosovo. The mounting frustration ofyouth, they argue, has to be channelled into active nonviolence, and so they havebegun organising workshops on themes such as "Nonviolence and Empowerment". They are not interested in inter-ethnic dialogue for its own sake, pointing outthat Albanian and Serbian criminals have no difficulties in cooperating. HoweverKAN will happily cooperate with Serbs where they have common cause, and theformer-students of 1997 still have contacts with their Belgrade student col-leagues of that era.
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