Wedding party

FX:  Car horns/music

01.00.00.00

Tony Jones:  In the village of Strellc, it's a fine summer's day for a wedding.

00.32

FX:  Clapping

Jones:  But for the Albanians of Kosovo, even weddings have become occasions for an expression of national feeling.

00.45

Music

Map of Balkans

Bride at wedding

Woman:  From auntie...a ring! From a second auntie...another ring!

01.06

Jones:  While the village women gather to shower the bride with gifts, the men of the two households come together in a nearby field. The groom's relatives are greeted with elaborate hospitality. Even their shoes are turned back in the right direction.

01.12

Jones at wedding with men

We were invited to join the celebrations, as two large local clans were united by the marriage. An important day for a people who consider their very existence is under threat.

01.33

Gasmend:  The prospects of conflict in Kosovo are quite realistic, because a we have Serbian iron fist regime...

01.47

Gasmend

Super:

GASMEND PULA

Helsinki Human Rights Group

...who want to get Albanians to get down on their knees and accept an inferior status. The Serbs want Albanians to be citizens of a second or third degree. Who want Albanians to be subjects of their colonial rule from Belgrade. Of course, Albanians do not and cannot accept that, because that endangers their very existence.

Radmila

Super:

RADMILA MILENTIEVIC

Serbian Minister for Information

Radmila:  I am absolutely convinced that the Albanian people at large will not want a war to satisfy the calls of their leaders for independence.

Men's room at wedding

Jones:  But if anything, Serbian rule has hardened the desire for independence amongst ordinary Albanians. At the wedding, we were taken into the traditional men's room to meet the bridegroom, Adrian Pavataj. These men here are all friends or relatives of his father, who was beaten and killed in Serbian police custody, in 1992.

02.40

Fehrim:  He was brought to the police station. He was there it seems an hour or two...alive. And he died at the police station.

03.03

Jones:  Adrian has been living in exile ever since, and was spirited back into the country for his wedding.

03.18

Fehrim to Adrian

Fehrim:  How do you feel being back with your family and with people who love you?

Adrian:  It's very hard. It's very hard because I miss my father.

03.25

Jones:  We would find that Serbia's secretive repression in Kosovo has created martyrs in many Albanian families.

Women at wedding

Woman at wedding:  One of the neighbours...ten marks! The uncles wife...ten marks. Another neighbour...twenty dinars.

03.46

Jones:  It's hard to imagine war coming here and destroying these communities. But Bosnia was once a place like this - proud of its long traditions.

03.55

For these are the things that bind ethnic communities together.

Here amongst her friends, in their short dresses and make-up - all the trappings of modernity - the bride must wear her bleak expression by long convention.

Her eyes should be cast down. Her attitude must remain submissive.

04.22

Members of groom's family approaches bride

For she is about to be ‘stolen' from her household by old men from the groom's family.

04.29

The tears are probably real since this dutiful Muslim daughter has submitted to an arranged marriage to someone she's met only once.

Guest:  Congratulations! You'll be a mother, God willing.

04.41

Young women in bus

Jones:  None of the modern young women we spoke to here could find fault with the arrangement. They regard marriage and child-rearing as a kind of national duty.

04.59

Brikenda

Brikenda:  I respect my nation, and I'd like my family, my children, to be Albanians. Clear Albanians, not mixed with some other nation.

05.09

Bride in doorway

Jones:  Intermarriage with other ethnic groups is almost unknown. And while in most other societies young people are drifting away from traditions, here the ties are getting stronger.

05.32

And by a supreme irony, the main factor causing that, is Serbian repression.

Portrait of the groom's murdered father

So here the portrait of the groom's murdered father was displayed alongside the new couple, as if the marriage itself were an act of revenge.

05.55

The father, Haki Pavataj, had been the regional director of education. His crime was that he was running schools for Albanians, teaching them in their own language. For that, he was beaten to death.

Family member

Family member:  When we got him home we noticed he'd been hit on the forehead and there were signs of being beaten on the legs and bruises around the kidneys. His head flopped from side to side.

06.22

Jones:  Then, the family say, they realised his neck was broken.

06.48

Gasmend

Gasmend:  Every kind of torture is present in Serbian prisons nowadays, and we've had several Albanians who have died in prison, due to torture.

Man on horse in countryside

FX:  Chanting

Jones:  It was Slobodan Milosevic who aroused the dormant Serbian passions for this landlocked southern province, as a prelude to annexing it.

07.17

Enclosed within these mountains are many of the sacred sites of the Serbian people.

Singing

Interior of church

Jones:  Here are some of the oldest and most beautiful of the Serbian Orthodox churches, like the monastery of the Pec patriarch.

07.50

It was built in the fourteenth century, as one of the furthest outposts of Christianity, at a time when the Ottoman Turks were pressing on the region.

08.00

Many Serbs today think their people are still the last bastion against Islam.

And there are plenty of images in frescos here to remind them of the brutality of the Turks towards Christian martyrs.

08.19

Singing

Radmila:  Historically and emotionally, Kosovo is the cradle of Serbian civilisation.

08.31

Radmila

Super:

RADMILA MILENTIEVIC

Serbian Minister for Information

Kosovo is central to our conscience of what we are today, of our identity as the Serbian nation. We can't imagine the Serbs - and here I am a Serb - I cannot imagine my own definition of what I am as a Serb, without having that reference, and that is Kosovo.

Combine harvesters in countryside

FX:  Combine harvesters

Moma:  Look, all these parts - as far as your eye can see - up to the mountains... all this is Serbian land.

09.11

Moma

There are Serbians living here - Albanians have never lived here.  And even today, Serbs are under pressure to emigrate and leave this land where they have lived for centuries.

Moma with beer bottle, with workers

Jones:  Moma Trjkovic is the manager of this collective farm. And, he told us, no Serbian manager would dare visit his workers, without a case of beer.

09.32

In the late 1980s Trjkovic was the deputy president of Serbia. And now he's the leader of the Serbian Resistance Movement in Kosovo.

09.44

Gracanica church

To demonstrate Serbia's historical claims, he took us to another church, known as Gracanica - built to honour Serb martyrs decapitated on the Field of the Blackbirds in 1389, by the invading Turks.

09.56

Serbia, he was suggesting, remembered its oldest lessons.

10.13

Moma:  The stubborn insistence of Albanians...

10.18

Moma at church

for a new Albanian state on this Serbian territory means nothing else, but leads towards war. For us, we are strong enough at the local level to give the Albanians an answer.

Market in Kosovo

Jones:  There are close to two million Albanians here, most of them Muslim. They make up about 90 per cent of Kosovo's population. The remaining ten per cent are mostly Serbs.

10.38

Until 1990, the majority Albanians ran the government and most of the institutions. Kosovo was autonomous, a de facto republic in the old federal Yugoslavia.

Soldiers in Kosovo

FX:  Gunfire

Jones:  But in 1990, President Milosevic sent in the Yugoslav Army.

11.10

Security forces overran key institutions, like the television and radio stations. And from the Parliament to the schools, Albanians were thrown out of office and out of their jobs. The Albanians have continued to elect their own leaders, who, like Deputy President Agani, are not recognised by Serbia.

DR Fehmi Agani

Agani:  In 1990 Serbia literally annexed Kosovo unconstitutionally and by force she abolished the assembly, government and all institutions in Kosovo and forced a system of compulsory measures.

11.39

Child crying at medical service

Jones:  Up until now, the Albanian leaders have opted for passive resistance. Instead of directly confronting Milosevic, they tried to live outside of Serbian rule. By setting up their own parallel institutions, including a free medical service.

12.03

Dr Demolli with Jones at medical service

Dr Demolli:  In the whole state of Kosovo during 1996 we had one million, two hundred thousand patients.

12.23

Jones:  The director, Dr Gani Demolli, says the shadow health system began as an emergency measure, when Albanians were thrown out of their jobs and lost access to health care.

Dr Demolli:  We were ready for three months but seven years have gone by and how long we are going to last, I can't tell you. I don't know.

Baby at health service

Jones:  None of the staff are paid. In fact, outside of Kosovo, their qualifications are not even recognised.

13.02

Nurse

Nurse:  It's too hard now. It's three years we work here without money. But I don't want to go any place, another place. I want to work here.

13.12

Jones:  Do you think you're doing something for your people?

Nurse:  Yes, of course. We do that all the time, because we are human. We want to help people, my people first.

13.24

Pristina

Jones:  In the suburb of Pristina, Kosovo's largest city, young Albanian law students wait to face their end of year exams. The Albanians run their own university and schools, with classes in these residential houses.

Student in class

Student:  A citizen wants all citizens to be equal.

Teacher:  What do you understand by ‘Pelivan's right?'

Jones:  For seven years Kosovo's Albanians have tried to live inside their imaginary state. But frustrations are growing.

13.59

Gasmend interview

Jones:  So how long do you think the Albanian people will put up with passive resistance.

14.10

Super:

GASMEND PULA

Helsinki Human Rights Group

Gasmend:  If Albanians continue to be kept in an apartheid like system in Kosovo by the Serbian colonial rulers, it is inevitable that the situation will be radicalised.

Dr Agani

Dr Agani:  We will have to return to demonstrations if there is going to be no other solution for Kosovo.

Jones:  But do you really believe that you can have independence for Kosovo, without conflict?

Dr Agani:  Serbia is relatively tired and there is no enthusiasm left in Serbia for people to die for Kosovo.

14.40

View of Pristina from car

Jones:  In the past year, a shadowy new group known as the Kosovo Liberation Army has claimed responsibility for a series of bombings and assassinations. Though some Albanians believe the attacks were organised by Serbian secret police.

14.53

In the outskirts of Pristina, we met two Albanian brothers who'd been accused of being members of the Liberation Army.

15.09

Jones in house with Dulah and Emin

On the 27th of January this year, Dulah Sallahu and his younger brother Emin were dragged from their beds by heavily armed Serb police, and taken off to interrogation cells.

15.24

Dulah

Dulah:  They wanted to know where I had hidden the guns and weapons and they repeated the name of a terrorist organisation which I'd never  heard of, and of which I was never a member.

15.37

Jones:  For both brothers torture began immediately.

Dulah:  They used rubber batons. They hit and kicked us everywhere - even on the genitals, which we were too embarrassed to talk about in court.

15.54

Emin

Emin:  They used electric probes on me -  and they put on my head a special mask that the army uses.  I've never fainted before in my life but I did there. They used steel cables with a special handle to hit me and later they threatened to inject me with poison.

16.12

Jones:  After being brutalised for more than 12 hours, they say they were forced to sign their names to a blank sheet.

16.50

Dulah

Dulah:   It was a question of either die or say something -  for we were in such a state we could not even stand up.

Emin tossing hay

Jones:  Dulah was sentenced to five year's jail, Emin to two and a half, but there's so little evidence against them, they were freed pending an appeal, and took a considerable risk talking to us.

17.14

Dulah

Dulah:  Look, we do participate in the movement for Kosovo's liberation. We did admit that because every Albanian that you meet in the street will say the same thing.

17.26

Radmila

Jones:  What would happen if they did rise up against Serbia? What would happen to them?

Radmila:  What would happen to the people if they rose up against the United States in Harlem.?

The country has to defend itself.

17.48

Wedding

Music

Jones:  The underlying message from Serbia has always been clear. If you dare to resist, you will be crushed.

18.17

But bitter experience in the Balkans tells us that the most dangerous moment arrives when all sides accept the inevitability of conflict.

That moment has not arrived in Kosovo yet.

18.35

But without a radical shift in direction, it is not far off.

ENDS

18.48