The Day of the Pelican (16 page)

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Although it wasn't the end of stares in the hallways and whispers in the cafeteria, things were different at school after that. Perhaps it was because Mehmet was different. He was still the best player, but now he was less arrogant, more sharing. Even the boys who had attacked him were forced to respect him.

Meli still worried about her brother. She wanted the last trace of his bitterness to dissolve. She wanted him to slap the other boys on their backsides and tell stupid jokes, which, knowing Mehmet, was most unlikely to happen. But he was trying to make Baba proud of him; that was clear. On Sunday afternoons he began to coach a soccer team for Isuf and Adil and their many little friends, and when Mehmet talked with the younger boys, she could see something of Baba's gentleness growing in him. Every now and then he spoke of returning home, but only when Kosovo was recognized as a nation, not so long as NATO insisted it was still simply a region of Serbia. "Only when we are a free country," he said.

One day, to her own surprise, she realized that she was no longer thinking of going back home to Kosovo. Not because she thought America was a perfect country. If it were a perfect country, Baba would have a good job by now, and Mama wouldn't have to clean motel rooms. Being Muslim or Christian or Jewish or nothing at all wouldn't matter, and the president wouldn't be talking about going to war in yet another Muslim land. Perhaps, though, there were no perfect countries. America was their new beginning, as Baba said, and she was beginning to like the person she was becoming. She had a real friend now. Rachel was not Zana, but she was Rachel, and Meli liked and trusted her.

Of course, some days she thought of Kosovo and felt a wave of homesickness for the things and people she had loved there. She longed for Granny and her funny old ways. She wished she could put flowers on Granny's grave and have coffee with Uncle Fadil and Auntie Burbuqe and Nexima. The twins were talking now. She wanted to talk to them before she forgot all her Albanian, which she knew was getting all mixed up with English words and no longer pure.

She wished she could know where Zana was. Meli had written more letters. None had been answered. She had asked Uncle Fadil, but the new family living in Zana's house had no idea what had happened to the previous owners. Meli dreamed one night that she was walking along the street in a strange American city, and coming toward her on the sidewalk was Zana, looking just as she had the last time Meli had seen her, when they were both eleven years old and misbehaving in Mr. Uka's school. She felt homesick all the next day.

But the homesickness passed. The family had held together. America was home now.

The history of Kosovo is a long and tangled one, and, as in all historical accounts, everything depends on who is telling the story. Kosovars like to recall their great hero Gjergi Kastrioti, better known as Skanderbeg. Skanderbeg was a fifteenth-century prince who fought the invasion of the Ottoman Turks. After his death, the Ottomans prevailed and completely occupied Albanian lands for 425 years. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when "Turkey in Europe," as the Balkan portion of the Ottoman Empire was sometimes known, began to break up, there was no way to go back to the national boundaries of pre-Ottoman days. Much of the territory had become part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the empire was defeated in World War I, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was formed from the southern Slav territories. Its name was changed in 1929 to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which literally means "South Slav," and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was formed after World War II under the former freedom fighter known as Marshall Tito. In 1963 the country was once again renamed, this time as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or SFRY, and it was made up of six Socialist Republics, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SR Croatia, SR Macedonia, SR Montenegro, SR Slovenia, and SR Serbia, which included the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina, Kosovo, and Metohija (later included as part of Kosovo). Although there were Serbs and other minorities living in Kosovo, under Tito Kosovo's leaders were, by and large, Albanian Kosovars, as they made up the majority of the population.

When Tito died in 1980, there was a struggle for the control in Yugoslavia. In the Republic of Serbia, Slobodan Milosević began to take power, and in 1989 he was able to change the constitution in such a way as to reduce the autonomy of Kosovo and put Serbs in charge. Many Albanians lost their jobs and found their activities restricted.

In 1990 Albanian Kosovars proclaimed the Republic of Kosovo, and in unsanctioned elections chose as president a literary scholar and pacifist, Ibrahim Rugova, who created a shadow government that had no actual power. When Bosnia proclaimed its independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in 1991, a bloody war ensued, in which the better-armed Bosnian Serbs carried out a policy of "ethnic cleansing" designed to eliminate the Muslim population of Bosnia. NATO intervened on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims and brokered a settlement. Eventually, Europe and the United States recognized Bosnia—as well as Slovenia and Croatia, whose declarations of independence had preceded Bosnia's—as an independent nation, but not Kosovo, which was to remain a province of FRY, which by 1992 consisted only of Serbia and Montenegro.

In the early nineties, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) grew out of small groups of nationalistic guerrillas making occasional attacks against Serbian authorities in Kosovo. The Serbs reacted by further acts of repression against Albanian citizens, exemplified by the massacre of the Jashari family in March 1998.

Although the U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright declared on March 7, "We are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with doing in Bosnia," American and European governments did little more than talk and threaten while Serbian atrocities continued. There were counterattacks from the growing KLA resistance, and those were met with more violence from the Serbian police as well as soldiers from Milosević's FRY army. Attempts to negotiate a settlement with President Milosević failed repeatedly, and a NATO bombing campaign, hitting targets in both Kosovo and Serbia proper, commenced in March 1999. FRY military and Serb paramilitary troops then began an attempt to clear Kosovo of all its Albanian citizens, who up until then had made up about 90 percent of the population. During this terrible process of so-called ethnic cleansing, many Albanians were massacred and many Albanian women were raped. Homes and farms were routinely looted and then burned to prevent their Albanian owners from ever returning.

In June 1999 NATO reached an agreement with FRY regarding a withdrawal of Serbian troops from Kosovo, and Albanian Kosovars began to return from the refugee camps to which they had fled or been driven. Tragically, there were many acts of revenge committed against the remaining Serb population, causing a northward flight of Serbs from Kosovo to Serbia. President Milosević was indicted for war crimes in 1999 but was not brought to trial until 2002; he died in prison in 2006 before a verdict was reached.

As part of the June 1999 settlement, a NATO force known as KFOR entered Kosovo to preserve order and provide aid in the devastated country; as of spring 2009 it still maintained a presence in Kosovo. On February 17, 2008, the Assembly of Kosovo's Provisional Institutions of Self-Government declared the Republic of Kosova an independent nation. The Albanian Kosovar double-headed eagle flag was disallowed by the UN, so Kosova's current flag shows a map of the country with six stars—each star representing one of Kosova's major ethnic groups. This is significant, for the new constitution promises to protect the rights of minorities (including Serbs) and provide guaranteed ethnic representation in the government. The Republic of Kosova—or as the UN still calls it, Kosovo—has been recognized by more than forty nations, including the United States, but, at this writing, more than twenty nations, including Serbia and Russia, still refuse recognition.

The Lleshis' story ends in America, but the story of their native land is still being written. We can only hope that those who have survived so much terror and devastation will be able to build a strong and peaceful nation.

This book came out of my acquaintance with the Haxhiu family, who came to Vermont in 1999 under the sponsorship of the First Presbyterian Church of Barre. Among the many actual "welcomers" who did much to help the Haxhius feel at home in this country our pastors, Carl and Gina Hilton-Van Osdall, and Steve and Wendy Dale, deserve particular mention. It was Steve who gave me the idea to write about one Kosovar family's experience, which I did initially in a newspaper breakfast serial titled
Long Road Home.
The person who has made the writing of this book possible is Mark Orfila, who lived for a number of years in Kosovo, both before and after the terrible events of 1998-99.^ and his wife also worked in a Macedonian refugee camp. I cannot thank Mark enough for all his help. And, finally, I must once again thank my chief supporters: my editor, Virginia Buckley, and my husband, John Paterson.