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Jay Truesdale
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AS HANGING CHADS and
dimpled ballots
were about to enter the
American lexicon, four Stanford alums traveled to
Southeastern Europe for the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor Kosovo's first
postwar elections. Two of them share entries from journals
they kept while in the former Yugoslavia.
October 21, Lake Ohrid,
Macedonia--Jay Truesdale, '96
Our bus arrived just as the sun was setting behind the
Albanian mountains. osce clearly chose this resort because
of security concerns (it is nowhere near Kosovo) and because
its well-equipped hotels afford off-season accommodations
for hundreds of supervisors. While waiting to receive my
identification card, I noticed Hamish Nixon, '96, striding
across the conference hall. After we'd completed our senior
honors theses together, Hamish predicted that our mutual
research interests in democratization would someday bring us
together in a place like this. To our amazement, we are not
the only Stanford alumni here. Earlier I spotted a
Cardinal-red luggage tag at the airport and introduced
myself to a distinguished-looking Stanford sports booster,
Jack Scharfen, '49. And while we were dining on fried lake
fish, another native English-speaker pulled up a chair and
told us something of his background. Not only was he--like
Hamish--a graduate student at Oxford, Matt Spence also went
to college on the Farm.
October 22--Matt Spence, '00
This morning we had "mine awareness training," conducted
by Slovenian troops in nato's Kosovo Force (kfor). A
PowerPoint presentation&emdash;strangely similar to that
used by management consultants and investment bank
recruiters at Tresidder&emdash;showed us the types of
anti-personnel and anti-tank mines found in Kosovo. Slides
highlighted gruesome pictures of victims with arms and legs
blown off. We're told to stay on paved roads in
Kosovo.
October 24--M.S.
Under U.N. and kfor supervision, Kosovo is a growth
industry for international organizations. It is only the
size of Connecticut, yet 46,000 kfor troops, 4,000 U.N.
officials, 1,800 permanent osce staffers, 1,200 elections
supervisors and thousands more humanitarian workers serve 2
million Kosovars. The Americans here are an interesting
community. A bartender from Denver greets a retired air
traffic controller from Missouri he met two years ago
monitoring elections in Bosnia. A police officer from Baton
Rouge, La., conducts the U.N. security briefing this
morning. One couple spends their two-week vacation every
year overseeing elections.
October 25, Entering
Kosovo--J.T.
Just before we crossed the border into southwestern
Kosovo, the bus stopped for a roadside break. Pointing to a
vast expanse behind the green portable toilets, a U.S.
federal judge who had been here last year noted that the
site was Stenkovic II, the refugee camp so often the
backdrop to cable news reports in 1998-99. Even though a
winter's snow had fallen and the grass no longer looked
brown or matted, the guerrilla battles and nato air-strikes
seemed suddenly immediate. I had felt removed from the
reality of war because our training was outside Kosovo. Now
I could envision the tents and recall footage of the
displaced masses.
Marshaled through the international checkpoint,
our bus was met by a kfor armored vehicle that carried Greek soldiers
outfitted with rifles, dark goggles and radio headsets. To bypass a destroyed
bridge, they led us along a mountainside detour blasted and paved by nato
engineers. On a bluff, there was an official-looking, flower-laden monument—the
site, I later learned, of a mass grave. We passed a cement plant that
had been shelled but was still in operation, spewing pollution into the
air. The haze from this and other nearby factories gave me a throat malady
known here as "the Kosovo crud." Upon arriving in Rahovec, I ordered a
bottle of the local white wine. It wasn't a recent vintage&emdash;the
winery had been partially destroyed&emdash;but it washed away the crud
as well as the fatigue of a day's travel.
October 26, Rahovec,
Kosovo--M.S.
Over dinner I asked Xhihad, my 19-year-old Kosovar
translator, how he remembered life under Tito's Communist
regime. Tito once said that Yugoslavia was a nation of six
states, five cultures, four languages, three religions, two
alphabets, but one political party. Some believe it was the
only recipe for stability. "Life was much better then,"
Xhihad said. "There were no wars, Albanians could go to
school, people had jobs and weren't hungry." As if to
illustrate his point, the power went off for the third time
that night.
October 27--M.S.
Rahovec was once Yugoslavia's Napa Valley. It produces
no wine now. Unemployment is 80 percent, and international
organizations provide most of the available jobs. Destroyed
brick homes and burned cars serve as scattered reminders of
war, and the roads are falling apart because too many tanks
have driven over them. But Rahovec, like much of Kosovo, is
naturally beautiful; its tranquil farmland and rolling hills
remind me of the stretch of I-280 from Stanford to San
Francisco.
The Kosovars are warmly welcoming.
Americans seem to be particularly popular. Xhihad invited me
home for lunch using a blend of slang and New
Jersey-accented English he said he learned from satellite
tv. (Many apartments still have blown-out windows, but
almost all have satellite dishes.) Basketball is his "second
life." In his room hangs a Michael Jordan poster with a
bullet hole in it. Xhihad is reading Henry Kissinger's
Diplomacy, a book I also happen to be reading for my seminar
in international relations. I don't know many American
teenagers who read Kissinger for fun. Xhihad wants to study
in the United States--computer science at Long Beach State.
I ask him to also consider Stanford.
October 28, Election
Day--J.T.
During training, osce officials had worried aloud that
their ban on Albanian flag displays might cause riots among
ardent nationalists. We had been instructed not to take
flags down were they to be illegally raised. Yesterday,
however, we were told that this policy had been revised.
Predictably, the ban's revocation was a top news story this
morning as voters prepared to go to the polls. osce's press
release was interpreted in Rahovec as a signal to raise the
red and black double-headed eagle, the flag that was already
flying by the time I arrived at the polling center.
There are about 2,500 Serbs in
Rahovec, in two enclaves surrounded by concertina wire and
protected by kfor patrols. Just as ethnic Albanians
boycotted the election that led to the ouster of Milosevic
last month, none of the ethnic Serbs registered in advance
to vote today.
At the school where the polling
took place, there was little tension among voters. Many were
old and illiterate. They seemed content to wait in four-hour
lines--no matter the election's outcome. This was their
first time voting in a democratic contest, and they were
choosing ethnic-Albanian municipal governors after years
under the tyranny of local Serbian strongmen. By midnight I
submitted our polling center's final hand-count to the osce
field office. Ibrahim Rugova's moderate Liberal Democratic
Party won by a 3-1 margin over more hardline opponents. Some
say his victory will ease negotiations to establish a
national legislative assembly and help achieve "substantial
autonomy" for the province.
Sunday, October 29, Departing
Kosovo--M.S.
I got four hours of sleep last night, as we finished
counting ballots at 2 a.m. Up at 4:30 the previous morning,
our team convoyed to Bellanica with an armed U.N. escort. In
the darkness, we passed through German and Russian kfor
checkpoints, where machine guns were pointed at me for the
first time in my life. In this village, 80 percent of
eligible voters registered and nearly all came to vote--more
than 1,500. It could have been the scene at a refugee camp.
Cigarette smoke choked the school's packed halls, babies
slept on mothers' laps, while U.N. civilian police vainly
tried to keep the crowd of 200 waiting outside from
overwhelming the building.
This evening I left for the Skopje
airport. Just as I started to relax, thinking how strangely
safe I had felt the whole time in Kosovo, my driver's van
broke down in the middle of a political rally. I remembered
that some past rallies had turned into riots and recalled my
mother's pleas not to come here. Next to honking cars
speeding around like circled wagons, I walked to a local
police station and hired an ex-Kosovo Liberation Army
soldier to drive me to the border. He had an assault rifle.
On the two-hour drive, in a halting mix of English and
Russian, we talked about the reality of war and death.
Around midnight, I dragged my suitcase across 100 meters of
no-man's-land into Macedonia without even having my passport
stamped. Back in Oxford tomorrow, I will have nothing on
paper to show that I have just left another world.
Jay Truesdale, '96, is a Harvard graduate student researching the
role of religion in ethnic conflict. Matt Spence, '00, a Marshall
scholar at New College, Oxford, is doing graduate work in international
relations. |
