On the road in Kosovo - Travel Diary - Day 1
Steffen Seibert, a popular German TV news anchorman, travels through Kosovo with UNICEF to see what the situation there is like less than three months ahead of the pending decision over independence of Kosovo. Seibert's main focus on his travels will be the situation of the children in the UN Administered Province of Kosovo. Steffen Seibert's Travel Diary: On the road in Kosovo with UNICEF - Day 1 Monday, September 24, 2007 – Pristina We take the plane from Germany, via Vienna, to Pristina. The plane is full of KFOR soldiers, mainly Danes and Dutchmen, troops whose duty it is to keep the status quo in Kosovo alive. But maybe they won't be there much longer, and then what? This question will accompany us throughout the next few days. Kosovo from the air: That is farms, fields and mountain ranges. Hard to imagine that this is where the last European war was fought not long ago. Pristina is not a pretty city at first sight, and not at second sight either. There is no picturesque Old Town, no sights at all actually. Socialist buildings from Tito's times and the patchwork buildings built after the war make up the face of the city. But, Pristina is a young city. For us, coming from Germany, a country with an ageing population, it is Safe and sound like a city within a city, the UNMIK (United Nations Mission In Kosovo) Headquarters are situated in the former barracks of the Yugoslav army. Across the street, a multi-storey building, is empty. It has been empty ever since it was hit by a NATO bomb in 1999...
The Deputy Head of UNMIK, an Indian, welcomes us together with two of his staff, a Russian and a Croat. “You come here thinking that you will understand it after a while. But the longer you stay, the more you get confused.“ I keep thinking about this sentence. And yes, I soon realize that a bit of reading and some hearsay about Kosovo and its ethnic minorities doesn't get you anywhere here, where lots of different groups live together on a tiny piece of land. They used to live together in peace, but in times of crisis, there have been unbelievable outbursts of hatred, frustration and violence. And the memories of these live on. It was the special fate of the Roma to be caught in the crossfire of the war. They were seen as supporters of the Serbian occupation by the Albanians and had to suffer for that. In Mitrovica, the complete Roma quarter, the “Roma Mahalla“, was looted and burned down to the ground. Tens of thousands of Roma were turned into internal refugees or fled the country altogether, many of them to neighbouring countries or to Germany. UNMIK and UNICEF are now trying to enable the Roma population a safe return. Sascha, the Croatian coordinator of the Roma projects, gives us an impression of the tremendous difficulties and the set-backs that they continue to experience when it comes to working with the Roma minority. The UNMIK officials have to watch exactly what they are saying these days. But we can sense that even they don't really know what the future of Kosovo looks like. Everybody knows that big decisions are just a few months ahead now. The majority of the population of Kosovo want independence from Serbia, they have lost patience with the current status. But nobody knows whether or not independence will be granted. And if it is, whether or not it would come without any violence. You can almost grasp the tension in the city and the worries that Kosovo could explode despite the presence of the UNMIK. Read the Travel Diary in German
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