Clubbing into a new Kosovo

By Patrick Jackson
BBC News, Pristina

As Kosovo awaits the UN Security Council's decision on its final status, BBC News asks Pristina's night clubbers if there is a place for Serbs, in a city where inter-ethnic tensions still resonate.

Babuka (on drums) says his club is symbolic of normal life

Where does Europe's youngest population - 50% under the age of 25, according to the UN - go on a Saturday night?

If you have a few euros, and can get past the bouncers, let Pristina's packed clubs entertain you with live rock and jazz.

With pizza lining your stomach - or maybe a Bondsteel burger, named after a US military base - the beer bottles are glinting, the music is good and you could think you are in a club in any EU state.

What places you in the Kosovan capital, other than the male-female imbalance (which grows as the night wears on), is the Albanian being spoken around you.

I cannot forget [the war] but I try not to think of it because we have to go forward - otherwise there is no chance Besim Gashi Babuka jazz club owner

But don't be discouraged if you don't know it - people here have a command of English to put other nations to shame, the product of schooling and kitchen-table private tutoring.

And many older Albanians are no strangers to German or other west European languages, learnt from years of labour or exile abroad.

Only Serbian, the one second language that just about everyone who grew up before 1999 knows as a citizen of the former Yugoslavia, stands outcast in Pristina.

This city of 550,000 is now home to 12,000 Serbs, according to the OSCE, which includes suburban Serb enclaves. Serbs themselves say no more than 50-60 live in the centre of a city where they officially made up 13% of the population in Yugoslav times.

Could they come back? This Saturday night some Albanians, at least, genuinely seem to be keeping the door ajar to a life together in Kosovo's capital.

Trying to forget

"We want to have a real good life here like young people have in Europe and everywhere else," says locksmith Jener Lleshi.

[My message to Serbs is] be Kosovans! And come and live in Pristina like you used to Jener Lleshi Pristina clubber

There was a time, he continues, when Serbs should "maybe have been afraid but not anymore".

His message to them is that if they embrace Kosovo as a nation, they will be welcomed in and can enjoy the fruits of a euro-fuelled economy.

"Accept that this is Kosovo and reject disintegration and separation because nowadays in Pristina you can travel, you can go about freely," he says.

"Be Kosovans! And come and live in Pristina like you used to."

Besim Gashi Babuka is the owner of the jazz club where we are trying to talk above the music. Speaking in between sessions with the band, the man everyone knows as Babuka clearly has no illusions about the gulf between the two communities.

He himself "lost everything during the war".

"We [Albanians] were a million driven out of our homes, we had women and children killed, the anger was very strong," he says.

"I cannot forget it but I try not to think of it because we have to go forward - otherwise there is no chance."

Serbs, Babuka says, should try to understand that Albanians were hit hard during the war.

There is intolerance on both sides and Albanians should also try to understand Serbs, he adds, but that "is much harder".

As for the political situation, he argues that Kosovo's statehood will soon be a reality and he looks to the EU for examples of a multi-ethnic society.

"I have just come from London and I studied in Amsterdam and I have seen all those millions of people from different places, of different nationalities and different religions, successfully living together."

Many Serbs still living in the Pristina area avoid the city, some commuting to the Serb stronghold of Mitrovica on a train specially organised by the UN.

Pristina's Serb population fell from an estimated 40,000 to a couple of thousand in the space of a few months in 1999, the UN refugee agency reported at the time. Expulsions by ethnic Albanians, it said, appeared to be "systematic" with entire blocks of flats reportedly emptied by militants using threats or actual violence.

Given the chance...

As the night winds down in Babuka's club, journalist Dukagjin Gorani offers his own view of Kosovo's future.

Kosovo will become a state but not a nation-state Dukagjin Gorani journalist

"It's not much of a country, just a small and extremely modest entity which I believe is very ambitious, ambitious in its idea that it does belong to the wider family of democracies, and it has certainly made up its mind that its road to wellbeing lies to the West," he says.

Kosovo, he predicts, will "become a state but not a nation-state" if the Serbs accept democratic values and come aboard.

By democracy, he means not just "the will of the majority but... but respect for minorities".

And Dukagjin asks for the world to give Kosovo a chance:

"Considering the way we have been governing ourselves for the past seven years, I cannot say I am much proud of anything but I sort of expect myself to become proud, hopefully with the serious reforms and changes which Kosovo will inevitably have to undergo."

As for Babuka, his club is a symbol of the kind of place Kosovo should be.

"Through my jazz club, something which is very European, I like to show that we are normal," he says.

After this story was published, we received this e-mail from Serb musician Ivan Ivanov in Pirot, Serbia: "I recently (7 March) played in Babuka's club with my band from Bulgaria. Everyone knew I was from Serbia. I had an amazing time. Of course, there were a couple of benign jokes, and a few friendly shouts ("Hey, Serb, come over here"), but I can definitely say that people from Pristina, or at least the crowd that hangs out in Babuka's place, have moved on, and are looking forward to things getting back to normal. It will take time, it will take effort and compromise, it will take a lot of good will, but it will happen. Cheers to that!