July 23, 1999--Postcard from Kosovo
Through words and pictures, World Bank media officer Phil Hay provides a first hand account of KosovoWorld Bank President James D. Wolfensohn wrapped up a visit to three Balkan countries on Wednesday with a call for international donors to support Kosovo's reconstruction. Bank media officer Phil Hay, who was along for the Kosovo leg of the trip, describes conditions in the region in this first-hand account sent from Pristina. Hay's account does not represent the Bank's view as an institution.
From the window of a NATO helicopter flying low over Kosovo, the imprint of war is unmistakable.
Clustered among fields of maize and wild flowers are small hamlets and villages burned or else dynamited into mounds of brick chips and blackened metal spars and blown to rubble. Some 75,000 homes across Kosovo are in a similar state, with another 35,000 damaged, which means that with the bitter Balkan winter soon approaching, half the province's private homes will need extensive repairs. Those that were simply turned into dust will have to built from scratch while the families live in tents in their backyards.
After all the harrowing pictures of the conflict, the stories of personal tragedy and ordeal, and some figures putting the cost of reconstruction higher, Jim Wolfensohn and the Bank's Kosovo team came to see the situation for themselves, and see how the Bank might help get the battered province back on its feet.
The overall aim is to move Kosovo and its neighbours in Southeast Europe eventually into the economic and political mainstream of a bustling Europe. But as Wolfensohn and the Bank group walked this week through the devastated main street of Dzakovica, a once thriving city to the west of Pristina, that task seemed utterly remote.
Along with local shops razed to the ground, one of Kosovo's most exquisite mosques had also been attacked and badly damaged. Its Muslim cleric explained to Wolfensohn how distressed he and his parishioners were at how even this holy place had not been immune to the activities of the Serb paramilitaries. (It's worth noting that now the Kosovar Alabanians have returned en masse, the boot is on the other foot, and it's Serbian Orthodox churches that are now being bombed or firebombed in retaliation. On the road from Pec to Pristina, a once beautiful orthodox church stands precariously after being dynamited, its gilded cupolas somehow still miraculously in shape.)
As badly damaged as Dzakovica is, something remarkable is happening here, and elsewhere in cities like Pec, and in Mitrovica to the north. Kosovar Albanians, who've mostly returned from their refugee camps in Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro, have started rebuilding their homes and their businesses without waiting for money from the international community. Some businesses that somehow escaped the torch are open for business again, with their owners standing in the doorway, chatting with friends and neighbours.
"They're an extraordinary people," Rory O'Sullivan, the World Bank Group's special representative to Southeast Europe, tells Wolfensohn as they survey a crowded outdoor market with dozens of vegetable and food stalls, sheltered from the hot sun by colorful beach umbrellas. "Their entreprenurial instincts are alive and well." For the last four years, O'Sullivan has been the Bank's resident representative in Sarajevo, and by now, is an authority on Balkan reconstruction.
A short walk away from the mosque, a school has re-opened with its young charges being taught by unpaid teachers. The principal tells Wolfensohn about how he's trying to get his students back into the normal school year, and how against all the odds, they're managing to do the job quite well.
"We have to help pay the wages of people like these teachers and other civil servants," Wolfensohn told a press conference later in Pristina with UN Mission in Kosovo Special Representative of the Secretary General Bernard Kouchner. "We in the international donor community need to help to pay local essential workers because there's no money coming into the country. There's no such thing as a budget to pay them from because there are no customs revenues coming in at the border, and no income taxes being paid."
His other heartfelt worry is the psychological toll of conflict on a people, forced at gunpoint to pack up in the middle of the night and flee to neighbouring countries which were not at all welcoming in the beginning of the mass exodus. He especially worries about the mental well-being of the children, who, although on the surface seem their noisy, exuberant selves playing in the streets or riding their bikes in and out of the traffic, have nonetheless had their tender lives disrupted by conflict.
Since about half the population is under the age of 18, the worries are well-founded. We need to make sure people get psychological counseling, Wolfensohn says, and getting the kids back into school so they can talk about their ordeal and be nurtured within a caring system will be crucial. "Yes, these people have terrible memories to deal with," agrees General "Mike" Jackson, KFOR's (Kosovo Force) Commander as he and Wolfensohn meet up at KFOR Headquarters on a dusty hilltop overlooking Pristina.
Jackson says that Kosovo is struggling to get back to some kind of normalcy. You have to be impressed he says at the sight of shops open again, and people fixing up their homes with do-it-yourself repair kits from the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). "I've even seen a couple of bridal shops open, so people are clearly back to getting married and thinking about the future," the General says. "My biggest worry is how to get people into jobs so they stop shooting each other."
"We can help you there," Wolfensohn replies. "We'll get the money for you, and light a fire under international donors to make sure they realize what's at stake."
"It's good to have some doers in town," the General responds. "We've got more than enough consultants and agency types here, so it's marvelous to know you in the World Bank will be acting on your concern and doing something concrete for Kosovo."
A while later, together with Johannes Linn, the Bank's vice-president for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Wolfensohn climbs back into his NATO helicopter, complete with a soldier manning a machine gun through a port in the starboard fuselage. He takes off for Skopje in Macedonia for his onwards trip to the Gaza strip to meet with Yasser Arafat.
For the rest of us who've helped prepare his trip, it's time to pack up as well and go our respective ways. Rory O'Sullivan with Harold Rosen from the IFC drives back to Sarejavo. Xavier Devictor, the Bank's French point man and Kosovo authority and I drive back along the tiny two-lane highway from Pristina to Skopje.
Along the way, the road is jammed with trucks bringing in shipping containers full of food and building materials, electronic goods, a commercial caravanserai on the move. Along the way, through gaps in the hedges we see the freshly dug graves of Kosovars who died in the last several months, simple wooden markers at head and toe of the raised earth, wilted flowers strewn on some of them. Yellow markers along the roadside indicate minefields left behind by the Serbs as they withdrew, a trap for unwary travellers.
At the border with Macedonia, huge lines of cars and trucks, and ordinary people clog the small border crossing which until several months ago had been a sleepy, uneventful place, but like the rest of Southeast Europe, has now changed inexorably for as long as anyone can predict.
Kosovo has turned everything in this region on its head. The challenge now for Kosovars, their neighbours, and the rest of the international community is to make sure that a new and vastly hopeful future arises out of the rubble of the war, and that the troubled and tormented Balkans can finally put the past behind them.This story appeared in the World Bank’s "Today" magazine—July 23, 1999
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