Serbs and bilberry juice

Today I was back in Mitrovica. It is a sad place. At each end of the famous bridge that divides the city between its Albanian south and mainly Serb north there is coiled-up barbed wire, ready to be pulled across at a moment’s notice, should there be trouble. Two NATO armoured personnel carriers sit at the northern end, with their big machine guns on top. Walking along the main road in the north, I pass a patrol of ten or so French soldiers, rifles in hand, who drop into a café on their route.

The bridge, Mitrovica

I’ve come to meet Oliver Ivanovic. He became famous in 1999 when he organised the Serb bridge watchers responsible for dividing the town. After that his image was transformed. Urbane, charming, fluent in English and Albanian, he came to be seen as a leading Kosovo Serb moderate, the favourite interlocutor for the internationals. Now a state secretary in Belgrade’s Ministry for Kosovo, he spends much of his time in the Serbian capital. He’s a busy man nowadays – I had been trying to get a meeting for weeks. Now his main battle is with the hard-line criminal elements that ran the north for years before the present government took over in mid-2008. He promises to root out corruption among the Kosovo Serbs.

Oliver is friendly, gregarious, an open smile ready on his lips. He knows who I am, and who I represent. He knows I argued for Kosovo independence years before it was declared. But he doesn’t seem to hold it against me. This is something I find strange about the Kosovo Serbs. I would expect them to hate us westerners, especially Brits and Americans. Did we not bomb them and support their Albanian enemies? Do they not see us as responsible for their misfortunes, for the loss of the territory at the centre of Serbian history and mythology? I would expect them to. Probably they do. And yet they are almost invariably friendly and hospitable towards us, welcoming us as their guests. How would I feel in their place?

I ate Prebranac (a spicy bean stew) in the restaurant I usually go to in Mitrovica. Quite tasty. I also enjoyed the homemade bilberry juice.

In a way the Kosovo Serbs’ situation is a bit like that of the whites in South Africa. Outnumbered, losing ground, a sense of siege, defensive, aware that they are widely vilified, and probably fighting a losing battle. Yet I’ve almost never found them aggressive. No doubt it would be different if I were an Albanian trying to return to north Mitrovica to reclaim my house.