Prisoner in Kosovo.

• Author: Lippman, Peter
• Position: American activist; member of Peaceworkers

In March, I became a prisoner in Kosovo, along with a group of activists from Peaceworkers, a California-based organization that monitors human-rights abuses and promotes nonviolent conflict resolution. I arrived in Kosovo as part of the Peaceworkers' delegation, at the invitation of the Independent Student Union there.

We witnessed the brutality of the Serbian government in this Albanian-populated province. And we noted the remarkable efforts of Kosovo's Albanian citizenry to stave off disaster by engaging in creative nonviolence.

In Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, we met the people who are holding together the infrastructure of Albanian society--professors, doctors, journalists, and human-rights workers.

The dean of philology at Pristina's underground university told us how, in 1991, the Belgrade regime had imposed an exclusively Serbian-language curriculum. When the Albanian professors refused to teach the curriculum, they were fired. The same thing happened in the high schools. Teachers and professors soon set up a parallel educational system in private rooms, basements, and storefronts.

We visited an English class in an unheated, empty store. The students sat on makeshift wooden benches, wearing their coats, hats, and gloves. The young teacher shivered as she gave a lesson in prefixes: neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism, pan-Hellenic, pan-Balkan.

All of the college-educated people we spoke with said they were convinced that their conflict with the Serbian regime must be resolved peacefully. One of our young translators was the most eloquent. Asked how she felt about the Kosovo Liberation Army, she responded, "Did anyone ever win a war? You can take territory, but everyone still loses."

At the same time, many people are at the end of their patience. A journalist said to me, "Each night I go to bed knowing that the police can break into my apartment and do whatever they want to my family. This is psychological terrorism. Every parent is a potential fighter." One student in the English class told us, "If the police hurt my father or my brother, I will have to fight."

At the student union office, I looked at pictures of the victims from Drenica, the region west of Pristina where Serbian police and paramilitary units surrounded more than a dozen villages in late February and massacred at least ninety people. I saw photos of the bodies of old people, men, women, and children. Many had been shot at close range. Half of one woman's face was gone.

Later I watched the Serbian television coverage. Only the male victims, that is, "terrorists," showed up on TV.

We met a former Serbian politician who was forced out of his job after he spoke against the regime when it took away Kosovo's autonomy. We asked what would happen to him if he protested now against massacres of Albanian...