JURIST: Could you begin by telling us about your University and its relationship with the Albanian community in Kosovo?

Professor Basri Capriqi: The University of Prishtina is the only Albanian University in Kosova. Since 1970 - when it was officially established - studies were organized in both languages, Serbian and Albanian. Its birth and development resemble utterly the fate of Kosova after World War II and indeed the fate of the Albanian nation in Yugoslavia itself. It was established only after the bloody demonstrations in 1968 when Albanians demanded their national rights, among other things a university which would allow them to study in their own language. So, the University soon was to become an intellectual and cultural center and the heart of national consciousness for all the Albanians living in Kosova, Macedonia, Montenegro and Southern Serbia.

The University of Pristina was just like other national universities in any of the big cities of all the former republics of ex-Yugoslavia. But from the very beginning, the Serbs thought it posed a great threat for Serbia. The most distinguished academicians of that time severely criticized the central goverenment and Tito for allowing the Albanians to gain 'a very powerful sword'. Till its final closing by Milosevic's regime, in 1991, the University of Prishtina was a target for all the poisonous arrows of the Serb academicians, writers, historians, politicians, artists and all the priests of the Serb Orthodox Church, etc.

I have never heard of any other university in Europe being attacked by professors and intellectuals belonging to another nationality as much as the University of Pristina. As a result of a constant campaign that never stopped since its establishment, many professors of this university ended in prison or vanished forever. Whatever the intellectual Serbs demanded through their accusation, because educated Albanians posed a threat to Serbia, was immediately carried out by UDB (the ministry of internal affairs- present MUP) in various forms: imprisonment, prosecution etc., of the Albanian intellectuals from the university.

Since 1991, when the Serb government fired all the Albanian teaching personnel (high school and university), Albanians decided to organize classes in private houses, totally independent from the state. These houses were donated by the locals who were often persecuted by the Serbian police for helping the Albanian school system. All the teachers took the risk and got involved in this initiative which for nine years was carried out a heavy burden of violence, humiliations, imprisonment and traceless disapearances... It is astonishing that all the Serb political spectrum, especially Serb intellectuals and academicians, have approved of these barbaric measures.

JURIST: How were Albanian faculty and students at the University treated by local authorities?

Professor Basri Capriqi: Albanian faculties and Albanian students were considered as a great threat for Serbia, while the uneducated Albanians were declared to be honest and honorable. It was awful to start a new class never knowing which students will be missing - there were so many cases of disappearances - if they were lucky they would be in prison.

JURIST: What circumstances prompted you to leave the University, and Kosovo, in March?

Professor Basri Capriqi: For eight years my colleagues and I have been working in extreme conditions, under constant police pressure and the permanent danger of being arrested because of illegal work one did. My wife, a teacher at the same university as well, and I had worked till the day the Serb policemen knocked on our door; and, at gun point, gave us 15 minutes to leave our home. The same happened to all our neighbors. After robbing all the money, threatening to kill family members and after taking all the jewelry from our women we were forced to leave our homes. "Go to Albania and never dare to come back here. This is Serbia"- these were the words by which they wished Albanians a 'bon voyage'. Hundreds and hundreds of written texts and scientific work, done during many, many years by both of us stored on our computer's hard disk is left on the mercy of the iron boot. Everything we had seen or read about the Holocaust of the W.W.II, we have experienced on our skin at the beginning of the new millennium. The same dreadful trains as the ones from the W.W.II carrying deported Jews, were deporting Albanians who were told to never come back. This is a deep wound which will stay in Europe's consciousness for the next fifty years. The scenes from the 'Schindler's List', unfortunately with no Serb Schindler. Because, here, violence is ethic, it is a collective moral of a nation who cherishes it generation after generation and exercises it without any punishment in the four horrible wars of this decade.

JURIST: How did you leave? Was leaving easy, or difficult?

Professor Basri Capriqi: Leaving was abrupt, very horrible; it was a nightmare. We had to disguise my wife's broken hand (which was broken just few days before during a faculty meeting when the police entered the building and had bitten all the professors who happened to be there) to hide any signs showing that you have already been through their 'treatment', to avoid being executed at the spot. It was a long journey of an endless column of people; nobody knew where we were headed and where would this trip end. Fate took us towards Montenegrin border, so, today, here we are.

It was a horrible journey, filled with anguish, which forces you to leave your friends, colleagues, everything you have created in your life-time and all those little things that remind you of your past and give you hope that you will return.

JURIST: Have you been in touch with your colleagues at all since you left? Where are they now and how are they doing?

Professor Basri Capriqi: I have only been able to locate and contact my friend, Ali Podrimja, a well known writer, who has informed me which of my colleagues are in Macedonia, Albanian, European States; but I haven't managed to contact any of them.

I have heard from many refugees who had witnessed the execution of my friend, Din Mehmeti, another well known writer. He was separated from his family and was executed in the street on his way to Montenegro. I have also heard that Ymer Elshani, one of children's favorite authors had been executed too. I have lost any direct contact with my colleagues.

JURIST: Do you expect to return to Kosovo?

Professor Basri Capriqi: Absolutely! It has been part of my life, myself, a part which becomes very attractive, almost inseparable when you are forced out.

JURIST: How do you think the territory of Kosovo should be governed after the war? Do you think it should become autonomous within Yugoslavia, partitioned, or completely independent?

Professor Basri Capriqi: Until the day Serb police and army started the massive deportations of the Albanians, it was thought that Albanians might be convinced to live inside a notorious federation for the sake of solving a ten year long crisis. Nowadays, such a pressure would be unfair and inhuman. One must find a way to separate these two nations forever; there is so much blood, violence and murder between them that anyone would find it hard to believe that it is possible for them to live together and in peace anymore. The first step towards this would be an international protectorate that would enable to clear minds, to heal wounds and to open visions. All the present opinions may be inconsistent. People must return to those places where they were deported from. They must be given peace of mind to heal their souls. And, with no doubt, those who did such a horrendous crimes must be punished. It may be a rushed conclusion to think that as soon as Milosevic's regime crashes, the two nations can live together as if nothing had never happened. A project of deporting Albanians which is intimately approved by a great majority of Serbs, had been nourished for hundreds of years. This is why Milosevic found a prepared ground to carry out this project with most barbaric means.

JURIST: In light of both "ethnic cleansing" and the diaspora of many Kosovar refugees to NATO countries, do you think it is still possible to "save" Kosovo, or has the Kosovo society you knew and lived in been destroyed? If so, who is to blame, and what, if anything, should be done to save what is left of the society?

Professor Basri Capriqi: The society I knew, the one I lived in, where I invested my great effort and indeed gave part of my soul is totally destroyed. 98% of the Albanians have been displaced from their homes where they have lived for centuries. 80% of them crossing the border of Kosova - for the first time in their life - in the most barbaric manner. Everything must start from the beginning with the great pain of loss for everything created in centuries and destroyed and thrown in the abyss. Those who undertook such a big deportation of so many people have thought of every detail. They have destroyed all the documents people had. Passports, identification cards, driving licenses, anything that can prove identity of people. I really do hope that people will go back even in that burned land and I hope that all the criminals will get the punishment they deserve. Hope is something that never dies.

The Balkan region produces more history than it can consume (Churchill), and as was recently said, produces more geography than it can endure. So many new borders added to its map which look like the leopard's skin. As a result of its too much history and geography, it has finally produced in the midst of the heart of the old continent, biological cataclysm of biblical size which is difficult to stop even by the big power of the whole continent.

According to this scheme de-Balkanisation means preventing the Balkans from producing too much history, from producing new borders or putting too much pressure on the existing ones it has created before; and, finally, preventing the Balkans from causing human cataclysms and burials of the Balkan ecology.

Considering these three categories, we all agree that de-Balkanisation of the Balkans must be done. The question is: who must do it and really by whom it can be done?

Too much production of history - or its falsification, to name it more directly - starts at the same place where it can be stopped 5 centuries later: Fushe Kosove (Kosovo Polje). The place where the ominous battle took place in 1389. It is the place where the Balkan coalition fighting the Ottoman Empire was defeated. The Serb myth of Kosova that is fed by a destructive energy against its neighbors (as a compensation for the great defeat from the Sublime Porte) has for centuries built up an abyss where it can bury all the successors of this unfortunate and defeated coalition. The Serb myth of Kosova may be the fundament of which the ethnic cleansing is built. Ethnic cleansing of Kosova battle during 5 centuries, out of an aggressive passion to eliminate all the other 'little losers' and to be glorified as the main great looser, has created the fundament of a factual cleansing which at the end of the millennium would once again bring to the world the most horrible sights of colossal expulsions The medieval Chivalrous imagination codified in the Serb myth of Kosova as a passion for expulsion and falsification of the history would be exceeded by the fantastic scene of reality which rounds up this highly ominous Balkan cycle at the beginning of the 21st century.

Found under the frustrating burden of the myth an entire Serb national consciousness is codified to a level of unimagined compatibility with its expulsion frames. During times of spectacular phases this consciousness was represented by the most noticeable minds of the Serb people.

In 1937 in front of the Serb Cultural Club, the academic Cubrilovic lectured: "At the times when Germany can expel tens of thousands of Jews and Russia can displace millions of people from one side of the continent to the other, the displacement of few hundred thousands of Albanians would not stir a WORLD WAR." The same academic accused the government for taking very "western-like" measures in the process of displacing the Albanians; and, suggested that they should learn from the brutality of the experience and practice of Turkey.

It is believed that the Serb myth of Kosova lighted the sparkle for the first World War started in Sarajevo.The assassins of the Prince Franc Ferdinand were more carried by a pathos of the Kosova Battle than they were driven by motives of liberation from the Habsburg Dynasty (please check!).

The complex of defeat carried subconsciously since the battle of Kosova has all the times limited the targets of this mythical consciousness on the major national planning of creating a Greater Serbia and brutal cleansing of all the territories proclaimed as a Holy Serb Land. Serb national scholars who carried this myth from generation to generation have measured the steps in the war against their neighbors with the amount of punishment they may get from the big powers the same way they tried to identify the crimes against humanity with the most hideous examples that a sick man's mind has produced. This consciousness codified on the myth of a lost battle leads the Serb interest along a very dangerous edge that warns not to practice western soft methods and on the other hand not to cross the limits of the crimes of earlier times. Crimes that in a way were permitted and one must not step beyond not out of ethical reasons but because of punishment.

In the pan-Serb meeting, in Gracanica, the biggest and the last one, Vojvoda Seselj gave instructions as to what one must do if the NATO bombing on the Serb land starts. "We will undertake a heavy storm to expel the Albanians and the job will be done by the time everything is explained". Out of all the political spectrum, democrats or liberals not a single voice against was heard. Another ominous approval that will dig up a Balkan abyss at the end of this century.

There has been some time now that the Balkans have become a reservation of myths that preserves a provincial and immobile mentality which communicates with great processes and movements of the continent- in as much as it is allowed to do so by the carriers of those processes- towards a full development of big ideas born some centuries ago. Carried away by the ecstasy of those big ideas of The Nation and The Land, Serb scholars have proclaimed their culture as highly precious; they have proclaimed their inheritance and national values as self-sufficient, and their sacred objects as political targets, emblems of which justify the most barbaric means.

The fact that Balkan people and their states have had stability in the region only at times when they were under the occupation of big empires; and, very rarely when they were left to govern themselves out of the influence of great tutors of continental dimensions- including the period of cold war- makes one believe that de-Ballkanisation of the Balkans can be done only by putting the disturbed region on the frames of the actual world global plan.

Big national ideas are not simple issues of usual democratization under Balkan conditions. The Serb opposition does not have any real remarks against the dictator on the big plan of ethnic cleansing Kosova On the contrary, the dictator can be forgiven many of the sins of his politics if he can bring this capital Serb project of cleansing Kosova from the Albanians to a good final solution.

Balkan nations and all the states of the region, without exception need a Marshal Plan that will help them to get out of their economic and civil backwardness. The idea of a protectorate for the Balkan is something that nobody thinks is absurd. The people of Balkans themselves are convinced every day, more and more, that they should be governed by somebody outside to help them get out from the moral, economic, political and civil pit they have fallen in at the end of this century.

Peace and democratic rules should be imposed on the Balkans. But if the merited punishment is not enforced and if the real price for the violence carried out - in the process of expulsion of an entire nation at the beginning of the new millenium - is not paid, a fatal precedent will follow this peninsula during the next century as well. Because the philosophy to measure all steps in the relation with the world according to the amount of punishment and the limits that such an act allows, is part of this mentality. All the other parameters: human, democratic, civilized, serve only for pure propaganda for external use.

Basri Capriqi
Professor of Albanian Language and Literature
University of Prishtina-Kosova
[now in Montenegro]

In an even more cynical way, the humiliations against the Kosovar Albanians are attributed the NATO aggression, and not to the genocidal bellifercious aims of the Serbian State. This flagrant change of the subject is tied to the demand that the bombing stop and political negotiations leads to a dangerous situation.

It is forgotten that the bombing begun because the Serbian State was not in favor of serious negotiations and a political solution, but was planning a war of annihilation of every single Albanian in Kosova. It is forgotten that the Albanian delegation to the peace conference in France signed an accord for a political compromise solution and the Serbian side used to make obstructions without offering any serious alternative for solution. It is also forgotten that before the start of NATO bombardments the Serbian military forces have realized a 'scorched earth' policy including the systematic destruction of towns,plundering, expulsion of hundred thousands of Albanians. Also forgotten are the killings, pogroms, massacres, wrappings, masse deportations, destruction of documents and all signs of cultural and religious identity of Albanians.

We, the deported Albanian intellectuals would , once again, want to protest against these propagandistic manipulations, which in essence provide an alibi to Serbia,s genocidal policies. We want to tell world democratic opinion that we are without any doubt in favor of punishing Serbia. The Serbian military machine, which has caused all the wars in former Yugoslavia, should be broken and annihilated by all means . We hope that the imminent defeat of the Serbian military forces will make possible the return of the deported people to Kosova, the normalization of the life, and the creation of a milieu for development of a democratic system.

Academician Rexhep Ismajli, linguist
Academician Ali Podrimja, writer
Academician Ali Aliu, writer
Academician Hivzi Islami, demographer
Ramiz Kelmendi, writer
Shkëlzen Maliqi, publicist
Astrit Salihu, philosopher
Kim Mehmeti, writer
Mufail Limani, publicist
[now in Shkup [Skopje] / Tetova/ Gostivar, Macedonia]