Kosovo Century
| 13:48 UK time, Monday, 18 February 2008
In the spring of 1989, I sat at a pavement cafe in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, eating ice cream and watching a policeman in a tin hat stopping cars to search them for weapons.
I had arrived there after the most astonishing road trip in the small red van I had bought to carry my camera equipment, thinking it would be tough enough for most roads in the region. I hadn't factored in the mountains of Kosovo.
As soon as I came over the border from Montenegro, it wasn't really a road at all. For much of the route down to the first major town, Pec or Peje, I was driving along a boulder-strewn river bed, sometimes with flowing water, sometimes not.
Halfway down, I was flagged down by a group of people cradling a boy aged about 7. (In 1989, stopping seemed safe enough - a few years later I would probably have been much more cautious.)
I had no Albanian and they had no English. But it wasn't hard to understand that they wanted me to help get the boy down to the town for treatment. The boy and his father squashed into the passenger seat, bringing with them the not unpleasant smell of sheep - I guessed that most of their lives and luxuries were associated with the sheep on the hillsides.
It was an unusual introduction to a people I always found friendly and genuine. And my favourite Kosovar is Violeta Redzepagic, who once was a punk singer of Eurovision songs and later accompanied me to Baghdad during the 1991 war - but that's a different and much longer story.
Violeta introduced me to historians and writers who told me the story of the Kosovar people. It's complex, sometimes bizarre and rarely shows their neighbours in a good light. In 1913, after Serbia occupied the territory, the Serb parliament debated what to do with it. As , a Serb historian explains,
"...government officials insisted that the inhabitants of those territories were not sufficiently civilised, that they were not sufficiently politically mature, and that the Serbian democratic constitution could not be extended to those lands because their inhabitants would not know what to do with the rights it granted. "
So they sent in the Serb army to run Kosovo.
It wasn't a great start and we have just seen the latest result.
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