John Donne was right. No man is an island.
Since I believe in putting words to action, I spent part of my vacation in the Balkans. Tired of watching on television people driven from their homes to camps (or worse) and wanting to do something, anything, I tried first to work in a refugee camp. Not being a doctor, though, I hit a wall. However, that was just as well, since the camps were largely disbanded by the time I got to Macedonia.
Next I found myself being told that I could be helpful interviewing refugees about war crimes for the international tribunal. Given my background as a lawyer who has written extensively in this field, I was delighted. The “assignment” changed prior to departure, though.
I was instead asked to help with the Albanian universities in Macedonia and Kosovo. For a college president, the work was certainly relevant; for an American, it turned out to be deja vu all over again.
Why? Because the Serbs in 1990 purged Kosovars of Albanian descent from the ranks of the University of Pristina. Combined with the fact that Albanians in Macedonia comprise officially twenty-three percent of the population (they feel that the real number is forty percent) and had but 435 graduates from Macedonia's two universities in the preceding fifty years, the picture is clear. Jim Crow is alive and well in the Balkans. A case in point: A young woman of Albanian descent, who is in her first year at Macedonia's university, was given a failing mark by her professor. The professor, who had campaigned against Albanians attending the university in Macedonia, flunked her even though she answered all the questions correctly because “she did not understand the final exam.”
Albanians are persistent. In Kosovo, they continued “their” University of Pristina in private homes, with each of the ten faculties taking up residence throughout the city; in Macedonia, Albanians founded a university, also located in donated residencies, in Tetova, but only after the rector and head of the faculty senate served ten- and six-month jail terms, respectively.
Degrees from Macedonia's Albanian university are not recognized by the government, which affects career possibilities, although there is hope for change among Albanians with the formation of a new government. There is also hope for change in Kosovo with NATO firmly entrenched and the Serb forces having pulled out of the province.
For the time being though, Kosovo Albanians wait. Yes, there are immediate issues that the United Nations must address from food to water to electrical and phone service. But the university, untouched by the war, remains sealed to all. Why?
When the Kosovo Parliament created the University of Pristina in 1970, it clearly had the legal right to do so. When the Serbian Parliament forced Albanians out of the university in 1990 – although some argue that Albanians boycotted the university together with other Serbian-controlled institutions –it did so without any more legal basis than the U.S. Congress would have in overthrowing a local or state initiative. And when the Serbs pulled out of the province, the university's legal status reverted to the Kosovars — all of the Kosovars.
At a meeting with Tejnel Kelmenli, rector of the University of Pristina, I was given a wish list, not unlike the one I received from the rector of the University of Tetova. I was also asked plaintively what I could do to help get him back into the sealed facilities of the university that he and other Albanians had been forced from two decades ago. Opening the university would give a major morale boost to the people in the province, because it would signal a return to the pre-1990 situation and provide the intellectual and economic stimulus that any viable community requires. With the law so clear, why not put politics aside and move the situation forward?
I will do what I can with the wish lists, and I will try to bring back some students who will benefit from a college education in the United States. As for getting the United Nations to reopen the university, I can't answer his question or produce the result that the rector wants. But the law is clear, and so should the results be.
No, no man is an island. We are all a part of the continent, a piece of the main, and we should all do what we can, since everyone's death diminishes us all.