A handful of Serbs have returned to live in Prizren in Kosovo after fleeing at the end of the war in 1999 – but while there is no more threat of violence, the returnees have found themselves struggling to survive economically.
When Ljubisa Jevtic travels from Serbia to his home in the Kosovo city of Prizren, he has to convince people that the city is a safe place for him as a Serb.
“When I say I’m heading to Prizren, they say goodbye to me as if we will never see each other ever again, as if I will never return,” Jevtic said.
Jevtic thinks these widespread fears are kept alive by the Serbian media.
“It’s a psychosis that’s remained in some people from 1999,” he said. “The press fills people’s heads with this stuff to say Kosovo is such-and-such a place, and then people are scared to come. I’ve been here in Prizren a hundred times and up until now I’ve never had any sort of problem!”
But in the recent past, Prizren has not always been such a problem-free place for Serbs. Out of a pre-war population of around 10,000 Serbs, Jevtic is one of only about 20 who returned after the conflict to live in the city today.
Across the former Yugoslavia, programmes to assist returns for minorities displaced by war have had middling success. The case of Prizren’s Serbs demonstrates the hurdles facing these programmes.
In Prizren, even with massive investments and donations for housing from the international community, the cooperation of the local municipality, and a city renowned for its diversity and trilingual culture (Turkish, Albanian and Serbian/Bosnian), Kosovo’s failing economy prevents otherwise willing Serbs from returning.
During the 1999 war in Kosovo, the Yugoslav Army and affiliated Serb paramilitary forces violently expelled over 800,000 Kosovo Albanians into neighbouring Albania and Macedonia, and killed more than 10,000. In the immediate aftermath of the war, when Yugoslav forces pulled out, Serb civilians fled Kosovo, fearing retaliatory attacks.
Almost every Serb still in Prizren at the end of the war evacuated in a hastily organised column in June 1999.
Fred Cocozzelli, associate professor of government and politics at St. John’s University in New York City, arrived in Prizren that summer to work for an international humanitarian NGO and witnessed what happened next.
Much of Potkaljaja, the old Serb neighbourhood along the hillside in the centre of town, was looted and burned to the ground. In the uncertainty and chaos following the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo, an overly cautious approach by German troops from NATO’s Kosovo force KFOR failed to prevent violence against local Serbs and Roma.
“Just about every night another house on the hillside would light up in flames,” said Cocozzelli.
In March 2004, anti-Serb violence broke out again across Kosovo. In Prizren, according to a Human Rights Watch report, all remaining Serb-owned houses in Potkaljaja, including some which had recently been rebuilt following attacks in 1999, were burned down.
Rioters also burned down the Bogoslovija, a Serbian Orthodox seminary in the centre of town, and a number of churches, some dating back to the 14th century. All 36 Serbs who had returned to Prizren since the war were left homeless. One Serb man was found burned to death in the rubble and a number received serious beatings, including Ljubisa Jevtic’s parents.
After the violence his parents took refuge in German KFOR troops’ barracks before Jevtic brought them to Kraljevo in Serbia, where his father died a year later due to the lingering effects of his injuries. His mother was left traumatised and disabled and died some years later, never having recovered from the shock.
“It hits me hard when I speak about their fate,” said Jevtic. “When my father decided to go back to Prizren after the war he told me: ‘I made it through World War Two there. We don’t have any other belongings, this is our place too.’”
‘Time has shown we can live together’
Violence has not always been Prizren’s story. Jevtic believes it is a historical aberration in a city that has long been a symbol of multiethnicity and multilingualism.
“Look, within 200 metres you have the Sinan Pasha Mosque, the [Serbian Orthodox] Church of Saint George, and the Catholic Cathedral,” he said. “Old Prizren Serbs, they used to speak Turkish better than Serbian. Time has shown that we can all live together.”
At his wedding, half the guests were Serbs, while the rest were Albanians and Turks. “We all sang Serbian, Albanian, and Turkish songs,” he said. “I thought we were all happy.”
Vlade, who returned to Prizren in 2015 with his mother, remembers how his father spoke Turkish perfectly. Albanians and Turks, he said, “would speak to you in Serbian, and you would respond in Turkish. That was understanding. That was respect.”
Suncica Cvetkovic, who together with her husband Slavisa was one of the first returnees, was in a Serbian folk group in Prizren for 35 years and fondly remembered attending the Albanian, Turkish, and Roma folk events in town.
“Everyone in those four groups attended each other’s events,” she said. “Just last month I spoke with an Albanian woman who lives in Pristina and who danced in those groups. We were remembering how we all used to hang out together before the war, when we were still young.”
They learned each other’s songs and each other’s languages, in school and on the streets. After spending years in Italy after the war, Cvetkovic’s Albanian is rusty, but she pointed at Slavisa across the room and said: “But he speaks both Albanian and Turkish.”
She paused before adding: “It really was Brotherhood and Unity”, a reference to the Tito-era slogan promoting inter-ethnic harmony in Yugoslavia.
‘The welcome in Prizren encouraged us’
The torched houses of Potkaljaja remained for years as a reminder of the 2004 violence, sitting empty and gutted looking out over Prizren until 2011 when the British government and the Danish Refugee Council, with the assistance of the Sveti Spas association, a Serbian organisation for displaced people from Kosovo, began to rebuild the neighborhood.
They reached out to displaced Serbs like Jevtic. “We had to show that we were owners of property from before the war, that there had been a house there, and everyone who decided to return, they rebuilt houses for them,” he said.
After a lengthy process of meetings with international community representatives and local municipal officials, some Serbs decided to return, assured that their personal safety would not be at risk.
When Jevtic was preparing to move into his family’s rebuilt home around 2015, his new neighbour, an Albanian man, welcomed him and swore to personally ensure his safety. “That sort of welcome, it really encouraged us, it showed there could still be good relations,” he said. Although there was fear in the early days, Jevtic hasn’t had any ugly incidents since returning.
Serb returnees started coming back to Prizren around 2012 in a process that is still ongoing. Dozens of reconstructed Serb houses built by the international community now sit gleaming along the Potkaljaja hillside, designed in a picturesque traditional style. But most of these houses, built to facilitate Serbs’ return to the city, sit empty most of the year or have been sold or rented out to local non-Serbs.
According to Cvetkovic, the estimate of 20 Serb returnees is wishful thinking. “People come down here for a month or so in the summer,” she said, “but as far as people who are here non-stop? People who live here all year like us?”
She listed about ten returnees in the neighborhood and asked her husband Slavisa: “Who else is there?” He clicked his tongue and shook his head.
Kosovo’s high unemployment and all-round weak economy is a central concern for Serbs considering return. “After the reconstruction of the houses, what are you going to live on? After that you still have to eat. It isn’t just about having a roof over your head,” said Jevtic.
Cvetkovic voiced similar concerns: “All these walls, these houses built from donations, they don’t mean anything, because you can’t eat walls.” When she and Slavisa first returned, they faced extreme poverty and occasional hunger.
‘We never considered that we left’
Vlade’s brother Bane faced the same considerations when deciding whether to join his brother and mother. The poor prospects for employment and the desire to not rely on donations were decisive.
“If we come down here, we would need something to live from. We’re not livestock waiting to be given something to eat,” Bane said. “We need to participate in society, in jobs, in work.”
Vlade, who has struggled to find work since returning, added that potential returnees have concerns about the lack of Serbian language education. “They asked Bane, including his wife and young children, if they wanted to return, and Bane said, ‘Hey wait now, my children are in school. Is there here in Prizren somewhere to enroll my kids in school in their own language? No, there isn’t,” Bane said. He decided to stay in Serbia, though he visits Prizren often.
For Ljubisa, a real return would mean that whole families can come back, that there are Serbian children in the community and that they can go to Serbian-language schools. For now, the majority of returnees aren’t actually fully living in the city, or are retirees who rely on Serbian state pensions.
Despite the difficult economic situation, the loneliness of being a tiny representative of a once thriving community, and traumatic memories, these returnees are drawn back to Prizren out of a deep love for the city’s beauty, nostalgia for the pre-war period, and a sense that they are Prizrenci as much as anything else.
Prizren is simply where Ljubisa’s roots are. “If a tree is growing for 40 years somewhere and you scoop it out and replant it in Belgrade, it’s not going to be able to grow anymore, isn’t that right?” he said of his decision to return.
He also noted the mistreatment and prejudice that Kosovo Serbs receive in Serbia. “They laugh at our dialect,” he said, “but I tell them, this is how my mother taught me to speak. No one can tell me to speak differently.”
He often wonders whether Kosovo Serbs don’t have more in common with Albanian and Turkish citizens of Kosovo than with Serbs from Serbia.
When Vlade talks about Prizren, he sounds like any other resident with deep roots in the city. He worries about jobs and the economy and about how the growth of the city and ceaseless construction affects the city’s soul. And don’t ask him about his “return” to Prizren.
“We are one family who never considered that we returned, because we never considered that we left,” he said. Even though he was outside Prizren for almost 16 years after fleeing in 1999, he explained: “We carry Prizren with us wherever we go.”
‘Time has finished things off’
These Serb returnees who have not yet reached retirement age are managing in a difficult economic situation. Slavisa Cvetkovic works as a silversmith, a trade Prizren is famous for, and sells what filigree work he can, while Suncica Cvetkovic has been working for the last two years in the kitchen of a fine dining restaurant in the centre of town with Albanian co-workers.
Ljubisa is trying to turn the many newly built but empty Serbian houses on Potkaljaja into a hostel network to serve Prizren’s growing tourist trade, and perhaps to convince one of his sons to come back to help run it.
Though they are managing to get by, they are pessimistic about the prospects for a meaningful return process. Many potential returnees have died from old age or established whole lives elsewhere. Those who left as youth have no memories of the old urban culture of multilingualism and common life and thus have nothing to be nostalgic of.
“Twenty years have passed,” said Ljubisa, “I personally think time has finished things off. We can talk some sort of fairy tale about return, but the reality is that this isn’t any sort of return.”
While a significant return of Serbs is perhaps unlikely, tensions have continued to calm down, allowing for the re-establishment of Serbian Orthodox institutions and an increase in Serbian visitors, with or without Prizren connections, to come and visit the city’s old Serbian landmarks.
Saint George’s Church and the Bogoslovija in the centre of town now regularly hold events which draw visitors from Serbia and from the nearby Serb enclaves of Novak, Strpce and Velika Hoca.
Cvetkovic has noticed an increase in acceptance of Serbs and Serbian language since she and Slavisa moved back to the city. Many people from the city’s Bosnian and Gorani communities, whose language is easily mistaken for the local Serbian dialect and who feared being taken for Serbs during the post-war violence, confirm Cvetkovic’s observation.
Ljubisa has since become friends with his Albanian neighbour who welcomed him back to the city. They have even travelled together in Serbia.
The neighbour, who works in the city centre and requested anonymity, said that he has never hesitated to travel in Serbia because he knows he holds no prejudice against Serbs and added that he will gladly welcome to Prizren any Serbs, returnees or otherwise, who feel the same way towards Albanians.
As he spoke, a Serbian Orthodox Priest walked by on his way from the Bogoslovija to the Church of Saint George with six bouncy children in tow, chattering away in Serbian. It seemed like no one even noticed them. It was a normal day in Prizren.