Balushe is back! With a quiet smile on her pleasant face, she stands under a blue UN tarpaulin in a makeshift wooden hut. They found her wandering nearby, bemused, hungry, but otherwise unharmed. Balushe is the Latifaj family cow, and her return is a small sign of what has gone right in the place we should now, realistically, call Kosova. The Latifajs used to live in a large house next to the mosque in the village of Prilep, at the foot of the Cursed Mountains that separate Kosova from Albania.
A year ago I found the whole family cowering in their yard. Serb forces had just beaten them up after a KLA ambush of Serb police outside the mosque.
She was trying to heat some water in a bucket by placing it in the sun. Today, half the family have returned. Like so many Kosovars, they are helped out financially by family members working in Germany. They hope their fields will be cleared of land mines in time for the spring sowing. Meanwhile, with international aid and family help, they have just enough to eat. The children go to a rudimentary school, with the same teacher who used to teach them illegally before the war. Most people in the village have come back and, yes, they finally feel free.
The main street of every town looks like a do-it-yourself exhibition. Small shops contain everything you need to rebuild a house, from bricks and timber, through electrical cables and drainpipes, to the all-important rugs and coffee cups. The father cautiously estimates his profit at DM a day. He hopes to rebuild his own house on the earnings from selling reconstruction materials to others. Young girls stand in the mud, distributing calendars for Ramadan. In sum, most of the Kosovars who were expelled have come home; they are surviving and will eventually rebuild.
Here, however, the good news ends. For Kosova today is an almighty mess. The province for which NATO fought the first war in its history is now the most ambitious project of truly international administration in the whole history of the United Nations. The experiment is not going well. Thanks to us, Kosova ends with an a—the Albanian as opposed to the Serbian spelling. A stands for Albanian. It also, at the moment, stands for Anarchy.
