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| I'm not sure if this grafitti is protesting EU presence in Kosovo, or, since it is Xed out maybe someone else is praising the EU.
I expected to find Kosovo a primitive, mini-Albania with peasants in scarves tending pigs and geese. Instead I found Switzerland. Or what I imagine Switzerland looks like. Up in the mountains but prosperous, industrial, Western. When you enter the new nation of Kosovo, created, according to the locals by Bill Clinton and the USA, your passport is inspected by someone who looks like he just left his job in Brussels or Hamburg to come here to be a cop. The EU is here longterm as best I can divine. The 7% Serb minority is either 1)in danger of being killed off by the 88% Albanian majority if the EU wasn't in the way; or 2)ready to call their kin (and their tanks) from across the border to take back this key ancestral land that once was mostly Serbs.
We passed many military vehicles on the way into the country, those little mini tanks that peacekeepers use because they are fast and light and sufficiently armored to put down a rabble.
Yet this new country seems to be thriving. The host of my guest house, when he saw my American passport, thanked me effusively. "We were under foreign domination for 700 years," he said. "First the Turks then the Serbs." Now, since Bill Clinton, we have our independence." And they seem to be making use of it. The farms look well tended. The cities are neat and modern---though there are a surprising number of weedy vacant lots for some reason. Just in the past year or two, despite the world wide recession, Pristina seems to be spending lots of bucks on prettifying the city. They've just about finished a nice central promenade in the center of the city.
I've only been here a few hours and I have one full day here tomorrow so I'll see what I can discover. But I had to put this in for Melody: you should show Eugene this:  |
I think that Kosovo has prosperity because was inside Yugoslavia, and then Serbia and not, because has albanian muslims population inside, and it is absurd, what Albania pretend, to take this land, in reference Kosovo to have muslims.
ReplyDeleteThe Islam was introduced in those regions by the turks in order of conquer balkans, it is no original, of these regions. Kosovo was part of Roman Empire and were they who introduced the christian religion and then configured as Ortodoxa.