The youngest nation of Europe has a fundamentally flawed understanding of what makes heroes and ordinary criminals. Many people confuse the two, granting them equal reverence.
One day in March 1999, I was loitering with friends in front of a grocery store in the village of Bardh i Vogel in Kosovo, smoking, gossiping, and trying to kill time when four young men in their early twenties came from a nearby village and told us one heck of a story. These youngsters, dressed in Kosovo Liberation Army uniforms, were armed with rifles, Kalashnikovs and grenades. They were about to launch a massive attack on a huge Serbian military base situated not far from where Prishtina International Airport is today. The base was barely two kilometers from where we stood.
Thousands of people lived in villages and towns around the base, and we were basically a stone’s throw away from there. At the time, the whole country was gripped in fear and the security situation was extremely dangerous as NATO prepared to go to war with Serbia. There was fighting between KLA and Serbian security forces on several fronts around Kosovo, but the war hadn’t reached us yet. We knew these four gallant soldiers who, before slipping into the KLA uniform, were nothing more than hoodlums best known for petty crime, stealing, robbery, and violence and for causing mayhem in the streets, squabbling with other thugs. But today they were different. They had a strategic plan about how to take over the base.
First they would take out the guards in their posts and then other KLA members would join them and destroy the base. That was the plan. Bored as we were, the plan alarmed us and we called on more responsible adults to prevent this madness, so as not and draw the fury of an entire army on to a group of innocent, unarmed civilians. During the lawless 1990s in Kosovo, ordinary thugs thrived in collusion with Serbian cops and formed gangs whose
main business was to terrorize women and engage in petty theft, racketeering, and violence. Their preferred victims were young women or men who could not protect themselves and who had nowhere to turn for help. The hoodlums would go absolutely berserk when women rejected them. As a teenager, I was once knocked down and kicked in front of my girlfriend by a group of three young thugs who I think called themselves “Black Thunder.” One was obsessed with my girlfriend and couldn’t stand the fact that she was dating another person – me. Another time, I was pushed against the wall with a knife to my throat and was told to break up with my girlfriend or they would stab me and twist my testicles with a pair of pliers. When the war engulfed Kosovo, a lot of these hoodlums disappeared from the streets and joined the armed resistance to the Serbian forces.
Soon after, they were transformed into freedom fighters and heroes like the ones who came that evening and wanted to overrun the military base with its hundreds of soldiers, tanks and deadly military equipment. My father and a group of older adults told them to go back where they had come from, but they threatened us in their familiar style. Eventually, they backed off, but, seeing those people masquerade as freedom fighters made me depressed once I realized that the freedom they were bringing was going to be as grotesque and crooked as their sense of right and wrong.
The public in Kosovo still has a hard time accepting that some low-life criminals often slipped into KLA uniforms and joined the ranks of other patriots who fought for freedom. Many genuine, good-hearted people went off to fight out of sheer frustration, patriotism, or whatever the case, but each of us knew petty criminals who had nothing else to do. The KLA uniform became their mask, allowing them to hide and escape from a miserable reality. The tragedy of it all was that they were the most undisciplined soldiers, without any structure, who believed in vigilante justice and who all too often put civilians like us in real danger. Many of them gave themselves military grades—generals as young as 20—and went on to terrorize people in the fog of war. Now, as then, Kosovars are not accustomed to criticize those who died fighting the Serbian police or soldiers. That same presumption extends to the men, most of whom were Kosovars, who died in the fighting with the Macedonian police in Kumanovo in May.
But what was the cause that sent those young people to die in Kumanovo in the first place? It’s the wrong question because whoever sacrifices their lives fighting uniformed Serbs or Macedonians becomes a national hero, regardless of what drove them to cause so much mayhem. They could have been deluded sociopaths, street thugs, or confused, impoverished and isolated people who lived on the margins, seeking some relevancy in life, some redemption, adventure, anything to rescue them from misery. But, for ordinary Kosovar Albanians, such questions are pointless or unpatriotic if not treasonous. In the wake of the Kumanovo tragedy, those who have the courage to question are traitors, have sold themselves to foreign causes, or, even worse, are collaborators with the people who killed those young men. Unfortunately, the youngest nation of Europe has a fundamentally flawed understanding of what makes heroes and ordinary criminals. Many people confuse the two, granting them equal reverence. Just witness the commotion, the mudslinging, nasty accusations and protests regarding the Drenica Group, the former KLA commanders convicted of war crimes last week.
This is a misguided belief because it dishonors the real victims of the war and the innocent civilians who perished during and after it. Heroes and hoodlums are millions of kilometers apart both in character and in their love for the country. Stop confusing the two