As hanging chads and dimpled ballotswere 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.
