Holding out for a Hero

"Yes, that man is a hero. He is a hero to everyone here. You must be very proud."

This sentence alone, spoken by a taxi driver as we crawled through traffic-clogged streets towards the bus station, would probably have been enough to take us to Pristina, newly-crowned capital of the newly-independent Republic of Kosovo. As it was, we arrived there from Skopje with only the sketchiest idea of what awaited us in this small city so scarred after generations of vicious scapegoating, repression and bloody conflict.

Trying to find the only budget accommodation in town, Guesthouse Velania, is an impossibility without jumping in a local minicab, so we did just that. The short journey put some more meat on the bones of the sights and sounds we'd soaked up on the bus journey into the city. Scrap yards and petrol stations are oddly ubiquitous, roads and pavements in sorry repair, and everywhere the sights of local people hustling bravely to earn a living in obviously testing circumstances.

As we wound our way through the city itself, it soon became apparent that we were in a place unlike any we had visited before. We passed the delightfully bizarre "Hotel Victory", complete with a model of the Statue of Liberty sitting incongruously atop, and a few minutes later the President's Official Residence, located in a shady suburban side street, the only clue to its occupant the battery of armed police smoking outside. And we passed people - lots of them.

Young children playing in EU-funded playgrounds, oases of calm in chaotic streets; cabbies with maps of sadness etched on their faces stood next to hundreds of taxis that line the streets of the city waiting for fares that rarely seem to come; military men and women from across the world, on foot and in trucks, doing whatever it is that they do to help keep this newborn state safe and stable; young, trendy students bustling along the road chatting animatedly to each other and into their mobile phones; and women, young and old, some with their heads covered and many not, carrying out the same daily chores that we had seen across Europe, though with a strange, quiet defiance that you could feel even from a distance, through a dirty taxi window.

After meeting the owner of our rooms for the night (who is, despite the arch-romanticisation of the Lonely Planet not an avuncular Professor, but an elderly man with failing faculties but a keen sense of cold, hard cash), we dumped our bags and headed to town for a bite to eat. Our restaurant of choice, Pishat, was indeed full of locals and canny NGO-types, and watching Pristina's political elite striking deals and smoking furiously over veal kebabs and homemade bread was a sight to behold. But each time you lost yourself in the sumptuous food, free fruit-infused Rakija or the drama unfolding around us, the spell was broken by a child appearing at the table begging for coins, or a young amputee hawking fags from a cardboard crate. The tragedy of Kosovo's past and the unimaginable challenges of its future are never far away.

As we only had one full day here, we crammed as much into the next day as we possibly could, covering almost all of the central city on foot. Though Kosovans are more than used to having workers and military from all over the world living and working amongst them, the sight of tourists is still very much a novelty. It was heartening in the extreme to find that this novelty excited interested, if a little bemused, smiles and offers of help everywhere we went.

We started in the Velania suburb, near our guesthouse, with a stroll through the slightly eerie Martyrs Monument. Typically brutal and very Soviet in its design, graffiti now covers almost every part, and broken bottles litter the centre. With a scattering of KLA graves in the near distance and half a dozen crows swooping about, though, the place is satisfyingly unsettling, and passes on to the visitor a sense of foreboding and unease that carries the whiff of war, albeit in a different way than the architects no doubt intended.

Adjacent to this, and in stark contrast to the litter-strewn park, is a beautifully maintained boulevard of flowers and benches leading up to the grave of former President and national hero Ibrahim Rugova. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovans turned out to mourn his death in 2006, and the monument is a fitting final resting place for the writer-turned-President who opposed the horrors of the Milosevic era before becoming leader.

We then walked from South of the town, past the university to the Bus station, passing on the way a slew of billboards, placards and fly-posters of Tony Blair, each one carrying the legend “A leader, a friend, a hero.” I won’t wax lyrical on how genuinely proud they made both Louise and I, but just note that on the day that we were walking through Pristina, Blair had cancelled a book signing after egg and shoe attacks from a handful of Stop The War campaigners. The cancellation, according to a Stop the War spokesperson, was a “victory against a warmonger who should be tried for waging a unilateral war for oil and power.” I'd be interested to see that particular individual stand up in a busy Pristina boozer and start pontificating on the issue.

Strolling back into the city centre, up Bill Clinton Boulevard, past his portrait, statue, and plaque, we hit the Government and ‘international’ area. A feeling of pride in their new-found democratic institutions is as palpable here as the sense of gratitude is to Messrs Clinton and Blair elsewhere. Though chaotic in so many ways, the sense of a society being built from the ground up, whether in the form of democratic institutions or new roads and buildings, can be seen around every corner. But though the kids clambering over the Skenderburg monument were smiling and laughing loudly, and the Kosovans from out of town leaving their signatures on the New Born monument outside the central shopping area bursting with pride, there are also terrible reminders of the horrors of history.

The Wall of the Remembered is made all the more poignant by the newly added flowers, poems and photographs. Farr less visceral though tragic in its own way is a visit to the National Museum. The number of ancient exhibits is far outnumbered by posters and info boards demanding that Serbia returns thousands of artifacts borrowed for display in Belgrade before Kosovo’s declaration of independence. You can’t help but feel that the huge empty space downstairs will be empty for some time yet.

And so it was we found ourselves in a taxi back to the bus station, after collecting our bags and a lost watch from the delightful ladies who staff the Valenia Guesthouse during the day. Any visitor here would feel the pride and sense of shared endeavour that Independence, however disputed, has brought. Similarly, the most basic knowledge of history here makes it tough to dispute Kosovo’s right to break away from a neighbour whose leaders have meted out such misery here. But I also couldn’t help but feel that, without care and concerted efforts, another splintering could occur at some point in the future. And as a friend from the region had remarked to me before, this rarely ends well.

It was during this journey that our taxi driver pointed out the new Presidential residence, and told us about his sister who lives in the UK and “is very happy and proud to do so.” He also wanted to tell us how much people here loved Tony Blair.

And off we went to Montenegro, having been dazzled by Kosovan people, appalled by its recent history, uplifted by its current rebirth, but perhaps most of all, amazed that any cabbie anywhere in the world would say this about our Tony:

"Yes, that man is a hero. He is a hero to everyone here. You must be very proud."