Music Fest Marks Start of Return to Normalcy in Kosovo

In any other European city, listening to an Italian jazz band romp through a Dixieland tune at a city-center music festival would be just another way to pass a late-summer weekend.

But here in Kosovo’s capital, where summer began amid war and the streets remain filled with international peacekeepers, an evening of music under the Balkan stars stands as a symbol for the end of what local ethnic Albanians describe as a decade of apartheid.

“I feel like a human being for the first time,” said Anita Baraku, who at age 16 was attending her first outdoor concert Saturday after growing up under a de facto ban on ethnic Albanian public assemblies. “Before, we couldn’t have this. It’s a new feeling.”

In reality, the weekend festival--dubbed “The Return” to symbolize both the repatriation of refugees and a resumption of Albanian cultural life--was a momentary diversion from the momentous rebuilding project Kosovars face.

While Pristina went through NATO’s 11-week air war against Yugoslavia relatively unscathed, entire villages in the province’s outlying areas were razed, mostly by retreating Serbian forces. Electric power and water still cut out sporadically in Pristina, phone service is available only through an overtaxed mobile network, and breezes carry the dank smell of burning garbage, which has stacked up in the absence of trash pickups.

Meanwhile, a flood of homeless rural ethnic Albanians has strained housing supplies in Pristina and outlying cities.

Britain’s Prince Charles is scheduled to get a firsthand view of life in Pristina today during a planned six-hour visit with British and Canadian troops.

The weekend cultural festival was organized from the outside, at the instigation of British actress and activist Vanessa Redgrave, with financial backing from the Canadian government and support from a handful of international artists and the United Nations.

“We thought the event would provide an important diversion and uplift during this difficult time,” said Dennis McNamara, a U.N. official.

Redgrave said she began planning the event in November, intending then to draw international attention to the plight of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo while reassuring Albanian artists--”a cultural community that existed on an underground basis”--that they had an audience.

Planned to take place earlier this year in Skopje, the Macedonian capital, about 40 miles to the south, the festival initially was called Thjesht Kosova, or “Simple Kosovo.” When Serbian paramilitary groups began purging and killing ethnic Albanians in Kosovo--a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic--the event was postponed. After North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops moved in, organizers revised the program and moved it to Pristina.

“We certainly hope this will give a lift of joy and a lift of soul,” Redgrave said before the festival.

Most of the program was dedicated to music, including Canadian singer-songwriter and humanitarian activist Bruce Cockburn, who performed twice Sunday, the first time in connection with a mine-awareness program for children.

“There’s so much pain and anger, and I’m no stranger to either,” said Cockburn, who over the past 20 years has been involved in humanitarian campaigns from Central America to Mozambique. “I wanted to do something to mitigate that.”

The centerpiece of the festival was to be the performance Friday evening of a play written by Enver Petrovci--an ethnic Albanian playwright, director and actor--featuring himself and Redgrave.

That plan fell through, though, after Redgrave became ill with a respiratory infection.

Petrovci spent most of the last decade acting in movies outside Yugoslavia after being fired by Serbian officials from his position as director of Dodona, Pristina’s children’s theater.

He continued to teach at the University of Pristina’s Arts Academy, though, until two days before NATO bombing began in March. Petrovci said he was celebrating with graduating theater students in a local bar when two men opened fire with automatic weapons. He was wounded in the stomach, leg and hand. One of the student actors with him was killed.

As Petrovci spoke, a British regimental band arranged itself atop the theater steps to play. The performance concluded with a trumpet solo of “Last Post” before the crowd of more than 1,000 fell silent for a moment of remembrance that was broken by shouts of “Lavdi!”--”Honor to the martyrs!”

The band then moved to the street at the head of a parade of ethnic Albanians and international aid workers, many laughing and clapping to the march music.

“It is a pleasure which I cannot describe,” said theater student Mehmet Shukolli, 22. “Until now, this kind of event I could only hear on the radio or see on TV. I cannot believe this is a reality. Despite all of this [war], thank you, God.”