Now, could you explain a little about the conflict in Kosovo — its origins and what it represents today.
JE: The conflict is centuries old, and its origins are really shrouded by national myth and revisionist history. The history of the region is so contentious and so hotly debated that we have to be very careful in describing it.
We know for sure that ethnic Albanians and Serbs have always lived in Kosovo, though their numbers and proportions have changed over the years. And we know that Kosovo was a very important part of the Serbian heartland at the height of the medieval Serbian Kingdom around the 13th and 14th centuries. Serbs see it as the cradle of their civilization; they often describe it as their "Jerusalem."
Many of the important religious sites of the Serbian Orthodox Church are in Kosovo as well. When the Ottoman Empire overran Kosovo starting around the late 14th Century, part of the population slowly converted to Islam. Over time, Albanians converted in greater numbers than Serbs, so most Albanians today are Muslim, while most Serbs are Christian.
There were outbreaks of violence between the groups over the years, but after World War II Marshall Josip Broz Tito’s autocratic central rule of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) kept things relatively quiet — and relatively prosperous. Under the last constitution of the FRY, drafted in the ’70s, Kosovo was not a republic but an "autonomous province" that had its own government but still was part of Serbia. Though this may seem to be a fine distinction, it is really the seed of the current debate on Kosovo’s status. The Yugoslav republics (like Bosnia and Croatia) had a constitutional right to decide their own status (i.e., had the right of self-determination) if and when the FRY ever dissolved, while, technically speaking, an autonomous province like Kosovo did not.
Slobodan Milosevic took power in the late ’80s, and during his rule he effectively revoked the autonomous status of Kosovo and, by all accounts, subjected Kosovar Albanians to myriad kinds of political, physical, and economic repression. Kosovar Albanians lost their jobs, weren’t allowed to go to university, were subject to special taxes, etc. (For instance, there was a fee that people in Kosovo had to pay to register with the government and get their IDs. The Serbian government kept changing street names so the Albanians in Kosovo would have to pay this fee over and over again. The street names changed so often they lost meaning. To this day, there are only two streets in the capital city of Pristina that have names anyone knows: one is Mother Theresa Blvd, and the other is Bill Clinton Blvd.)
By the time of Milosevic’ rule, the population of Kosovo was about 80% Albanian. (Exact figures are really hard to come by.) The political leadership of Kosovo actually adopted a pacifist stance — hoping to be rewarded by the international community for keeping violence at bay — while ethnic violence tore apart Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia. But by 1998, an Albanian guerilla group called the Kosovo Liberation Army was formed and started engaging the Serb forces in Kosovo. The Serb army cracked down quite brutally, and a massive wave of Albanian refugees fled many reported atrocities. Fearing a humanitarian catastrophe, NATO bombed Serbian forces in Kosovo and Serbia proper for 78 days in 1999 to stop the ethnic violence.
The UN has administered Kosovo since then, so the province has kind of been in a political limbo. If you live there you get a passport that says "UNMIK – United Nations Mission in Kosovo." Technically, it’s still part of Serbia, but Serbia really has very little administrative control over the area, though it does have a great deal of influence in northern Kosovo. Recently, a former KLA commander, Hasim Thaci, was elected prime minister, and he has pledged to declare Kosovo a fully independent state within the near future.
LB: To some extent, Kosovo has now become a kind of political football between the US and the EU on one side and Russia on the other. Many are trying to project what happens in Kosovo as a template for other "breakaway" regions like Chechnya in Russia and Abkhazia in Georgia. So there’s been a lot of attention worldwide on the final status talks on Kosovo.
Did you plan beforehand how you’d approach the subject of ethnic violence — or did you develop new insights while shooting the documentary?
JE: Our plan was really quite simple. We wanted to let the people of Kosovo speak for themselves. We didn’t want to have commentators, historians, or politicians speak on their behalf.
LB: We knew that both sides were really quite isolated; they had totally divergent views on the conflict, and neither side really wanted to admit that they had done anything wrong. So we felt that even though Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo weren’t communicating, we could at least juxtapose their viewpoints, and in that juxtaposition, create a good sense of the place. In a way, our idea was to create a dialogue in the film that didn’t exist in the place itself.
JE: The metaphor we went into the film with was a stained glass window. We knew we could collect distinctive and sharply disparate facets of Kosovo, and that it we carefully organized them, we could create a powerful simulacrum — or at least a beautiful sketch — of what Kosovo was really like.