Part Five
Erëmirë Krasniqi: How were you guys identifying what should be done? Were people coming to you, or were you reaching out? Or how were you making sense of your mission here?
Mark Baskin: Oh my. Well, you have an agenda. The agenda’s determined by Pristina, and then you have things that you want to do, and then there’s, you know… and then there’s crises. So like the assassination of Ekrem, Commandant Drini. It was a crisis. All of a sudden, that’s what you do. We had a whole weekly plan (chuckles), and then all of sudden that gets thrown out the window for this. Or when the, you know, there’s a… so that’s how it happened. And there were lots of organizations at the time I remember, so there were these… there’s a confusion.
So here was a confusion that took place: The Germans set up somewhere in Korisha, which is this village near, sort of on the way in near Prizren. They had set up a shooting range for their military. And so… you know, because the military has to continue to train and they do have this right, so they have a shooting range. It’s what you do. The military does things like that. And so, all of a sudden one day, Flaka Surroi is there. She was working for the World Bank community development program at the time, and she was angry too, because she said, you know, we… because the World Bank, this community development program, like USAID, had this rapid response program, they would go into villages and they’d say… they’d meet, have several meetings with people, and they’d say, “What kinds of things do you need, and how can we help restore kind of normal life?”
And so what they were going to do in Korisha at the place where the Germans had the… put the firing range, they were going to have a garbage dump, and there was a tremendous need for garbage dumps. There was… I remember she drove into Prizren from Pristina. There’s this… you’d see these plastic bags floating up. It was really unpleasant, and, you know, no one’s taking care of this stuff, right, especially from March 23, ‘99 to June 10, there’s nothing. And then when we came in, there was still nothing, because there’s no one yet, and it took us quite a while to build up. And so I went to many hours of meetings on garbage, for example (chuckles). And so they wanted to put up a garbage dump, but it was there in the shooting range, so that led to a week or two of talks between the Germans and the World Bank and all this.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: An international affair (laughs).
Mark Baskin: Yeah, it was really. Well, it’s…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: You had to figure out what to do with the garbage. And how… what did you do next, or maybe do you want to still stay in this period?
Mark Baskin: Well, this was the end of my UN time, and this was the end of my time here. And there were many things that we did. We brought in… one of the things that Commandant Drini did with us was, I have a friend, a Canadian, and I later went to work for them, for the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Nova Scotia in Canada, and they had really tremendous programs, where they would have these kind of executive-level training programs and did stuff… and they were trying to do stuff in the field. So this friend of mine said, “Well, we’re getting into DDR.” And it was this… disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs, and they’re developing this whole program on DDR. I said, “Fantastic.” And they said… I said, “Would they want to come to Prizren?” I’m talking to my friend there, he goes, “We can’t pay for them. But if they came to Prizren, we would do everything, lots of in-kind support.”
So, you know, PPC paid for them to come. We met them in Skopje. You know, I… and then they came and spent two to three weeks working with Commandant Drini, or Ekrem Rexha, with demobilized KLA guys, and then things to do. So we did stuff like that. That was really a cool thing. And so, I don’t know… But a lot of it was just trying to keep balls in the air while these broader systems were in place. And then the UN then did its things, some of it really good, some of it not so good, you know, in different places. And…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: When did you leave? And where did you go from there?
Mark Baskin: So I left in November 2000, and I went to Canada. That’s when I went to work for the PPC. Because after we did that, they invited me to do a course on civil-military cooperation, and so I did a course. And then they were looking for someone to be a research director. I am an academic by training, so it all kind of worked, and I went there. And so…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: How long did you stay there?
Mark Baskin: I was there for two years. I had other options that I might have done, and you sometimes wonder whether you make the right choice. And so, you know, I could have gone down to Washington and done stuff there too. But at the time, it’s up… well, so you were up in Dartmouth, right?
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Yeah.
Mark Baskin: So Nova Scotia’s just further up.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Yeah.
Mark Baskin: And it was kind of… for someone who had been working in a war for several years, it seemed to be really like this idyllic place that turned out to be… you know, I kind of wish I were in a city. I’m basically a city boy, but it was okay. It was nice.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Was it cold?
Mark Baskin: No, because they have the Gulf Stream that comes up. So the line in Nova Scotia is “If you don’t like the weather, then wait for 10 minutes.” So the winter’s not too cold. The winter’s, you know… although we’d do these trainings and we’d bring in all these officers from Africa and Latin America right near the Equator in the middle of the winter time, and they didn’t have warm jackets, so we would have to do stuff like that.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Was your family following you, or they were based in the U.S.?
Mark Baskin: My family, they came to Zagreb and then we moved to Osijek. They were with me in Osijek and then in Sarajevo. And then one of the reasons I left is that there was really no place to bring them here. It wasn’t really ready to bring them, and Suzanne didn’t want to… she… I could have… a lot of people had their families in Skopje, and that meant every Friday afternoon, they would go to Skopje. But I was the kind of person, when I worked, I worked 14 hours a day. And my idea of… and I often worked on weekends.
And so what I did for a while in the fall of ‘99 is that every Sunday, a group of us would go out to different village, and we’d go meet the people, and I would ask them, “What was it like here during the war?,” and they would explain to me. Then, I would tell them about what we were doing. This was all informal. I just did this because I was interested in doing it and trying to kind of promote the UN program. I deeply believed we could succeed against all… you know, like a second marriage, they say it’s the triumph of hope over experience, you know. I really believed that we could make it work, and so I was doing all that. And…
And so I didn’t want to have my family in Skopje. They didn’t want to go. So they were in the States. And then, when I got the job in Canada, we reunited. That was about… we were… so I would go back to the States every, I don’t know, six weeks or so for 10 days.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: What happened with you between this period, since 2002 up to when… 2013, you said, is when you came again to Kosovo?
Mark Baskin: Yeah, yeah, well, actually, I was in Kosovo between then too.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Oh.
Mark Baskin: I did various things.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Really?
Mark Baskin: Yeah.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Can you tell us more about them?
Mark Baskin: I did an assessment of the judiciary in 2001. I was giving you some of the stuff. I have that… for the Canadian government that’s been published on the World Bank Rule of Law website. I did a USAID… I was part of a team that did an assessment on the return of minorities to Kosovo. And on that, because the people that you work with… Enver Hoxhaj was part of that team, so I got to know him. I worked very closely with Enver for about three weeks on that in… that must have been 2003. And then…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: There were a lot of shortages in electricity. How did you even manage that while you were municipal administrator?
Mark Baskin: Oh we had a… yeah, that’s a good point. There was a… we had generators. In our headquarters, we had generators. I didn’t in my house. I mean, I lived… the winter of ‘99-2000, which was a cold winter, I had no heat, no hot water. I took cold showers. I took colder showers for the winter in a house with no heat. I had blankets this thick {holds hands far apart}, and I would come home… so I would only come home to sleep. And I had a beautiful house. Early on, I rented this really beautiful house. I had a roommate, you know, also from the UN. And then I would get into the covers and it would take about two minutes and then my body heat would keep me warm. And I’d get up, and I would take a shower every other day because it was incredibly painful, and I didn’t really need it. And so it was cold. It was a really cold winter. But all the electricity we had in our headquarters, in our offices. And there was nothing…
And other people I would visit, and they would invite me over and stuff, they had made all kinds of accommodations with stoves and things like that, but I didn’t do it because I wasn’t there to be at home. I mean, so I would get into work at 7:30-8:00 in the morning and I would go home at 9:00-10:00 at night, so that was my daily routine. And then I would… I had these little flashlights, and I would go to bed trying to read and I’d fall asleep quickly after a good evening with Syla, you know. Syla would force me to drink scotch (laughs}, and…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: There were many accidents at the time also because of the electricity shortage, you know, because of the whole…
Mark Baskin: Yeah, there was stuff. There’s a lot of things that went on, and over time I forget some of the stuff. I know we had… you know, it was difficult… it was a difficult time. Early on in the mission, we were all like one family, because there weren’t that many expats. We had a large national staff. And there was still the sense in which everyone was… we believed we could be successful and so that… we all lived our lives all together, but over time, the expats kind of wanted to separate themselves off, and that’s around the time I left. I… yeah, anyways, that’s around the time I left. I wasn’t particularly supportive of that, and I did believe that, if you could identify the right kind of people to work with… and it didn’t really matter… the right kind of people were the people who demonstrated that they were interested in doing the right things, that you really could do really good things. But there were lots of ways in which… Prizren was just a small… was just one little place, and the larger flow of events was being determined in Pristina.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Were you traveling to Pristina often?
Mark Baskin: Yeah, weekly. We would go to a weekly meeting. And at the time, it would sometimes take two- two-and-a-half hours because, you know, you’d drive through the Dulje Pass, you know, and the roads were terrible, really bad. And then you would get behind these German military convoys, so you’d be going 10-15 kilometers per hour. And then when you get to Shtime, it’s just holes, rivers, lakes in the roads. Suva Reka had terrible roads at the time too, so it was just…
Yeah, we’d go to Pristina, we’d meet with the… you know.. .but I became a real Prizrenac, you know. My friends would say, you know, “I worked in Pristina for 20 years. I never once slept there,” you know, stuff like that. And I didn’t, I felt at home in Prizren, and I didn’t, you know, particularly like Pristina. And in Prizren, I’m, everyone, you know, you couldn’t, you know, I speak Serbo-Croatian, and I would never go up to someone I didn’t know and speak. And I would never go into a store and speak it. But, you know, when you meet someone, etcetera, and you realize, well, that’s the language you can communicate, you could do that really easily. But I would never do that in Pristina. I mean…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Were you afraid that you could endanger somebody, even in Prizren, if you talk to them in Serbo-Croatian?
Mark Baskin: I was threatened by some people who’d say,… well, I mean, “God, you’re really brave to speak that language,” people would say to me sometimes, people who wanted me to think that I was their friend, or they wanted… You know, there’s a lot of trauma, which is understandable. And, you know, I’ve learned this especially since I’ve returned. You know, you talk to people who were political prisoners and then you… we met people there would do that as well.
But just coming back, you know, I met these guys at Martini one night, folk singers, and they began singing for us. And we’re talking, so we could speak in Croatian, so we’re speaking Croatian, and we spent the night… this was entirely by chance. And they began telling me about what would happen to them in the ‘90s, and they’d go out and the policemen would see them and just say, “What are you doing out?” “Oh, I’m just going here.” Okay, well, you know, they’d get beaten up, or they were taken to jail because they were breaking their curfew. It was all sorts of stuff like that, and I assume that that was not a unique case that that happened.
You know, I talked to someone who is influential now, told me when he was a kid in the ‘80s, late ‘80s,… this was even before then… he defaced something, you know, “Tito socializëm i mirë” or something like that, you know. Four years in jail for defacing. I mean, you know, it’s not… he should have been fined somehow or made to do some whatever. But so, you know, there’s stuff like that. And so there are these traumas. And then you hear what happened in Krusha or what happened in Orahovec after the, you know… and so there’s all these things. And so I don’t, you know… And I know I went back, I organized the visit of the Iowa National Guard to the states. I did this for the last two years. And Ukshin Hoti’s daughter was my student. And so, when I did this, I wanted to take them to Krusha to meet… there’s this amazing… you know this story, that woman-led business where they make ajvar. It’s fantastic. It’s a tremendous story on so many levels.
And so I hadn’t been in Krusha since 2000, ‘99-2000, and I went, and Brisilda arranged for me to meet her uncle, who was someone, and then I met the guy who’s now the head of the village. And they came up to me, they say, you know, “Mr. Baskin,” they go, “I remember I talked to you in 1999.” And, you know, I remember going there, and there was still really early on, when ICDI was here doing investigations about these kinds of massacres and stuff. So that… and so, and people remember that… so these people that remember me remember that I was this sort of sense of stability and kind of positive thing, so that’s kind of nice. But the sense of trauma was really great, so in that sense, it was a difficult time. It was a difficult time, you know, for them and for you all, in particular, because… and, anyway…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: I mean, was it difficult to present certain ideas that were more inclusive and kind of imagined others as well? Others, non-Albanians. Or you weren’t doing that at the time? You were just…
Mark Baskin: We tried to do it. I mean, I had a guy… I mean, in the Municipality of Prizren… so I was the municipal administrator. I had three vice presidents: one was Albanian… well, just you know, to give that, it was very Titoist (chuckles). I had an Albanian, I had a Turk, and I had a Bosniak. And the Albanian and the Turk had known each other for a long time. And you know, they were both part of… active… my Turkish guy, you know, he was a political prisoner in the ‘90s and all this. And this guy, Shazir Shaipi is his name. He was a great guy.
And… and we… I needed to… I wanted to find a Bosniak. And so I had… you know, I had these two contending political parties. They wanted to be the one (chuckles), and I decided I didn’t want either of them (chuckles) because we’re going to be apolitical. So I asked the people I was working with, I said, “We need to find somebody who is a Bosniak who gets along well with everybody. And if they could speak Albanian, it would be fantastic,” and they found someone, some guy who had worked at “Balkan”. He was from Župa valley, and he was great. He was really good.
And so, you know, that’s the kind of the way we tried to get stuff done. And you can kind of see in Prizren the way in which Yugoslavia sort of worked.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: How so?
Mark Baskin: Well, so I had friends who would say… there were three of us. Two were Albanian and one was a Turk. And they were all the same generation. And they said one of them went to the Turkish high school, one of them went to the Albanian high school, and one of them went to the Serbian high school. And… one of them went to university in Zagreb, one of them went to university in Belgrade, I think…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: In Zagreb?
Mark Baskin: Two of them went to Zagreb. Not sure where Vučko went. Vučko’s brother went to Belgrade. And, you know, I mean, they were all citizens. They were all kind of urb-city people, and so they were part of that kind of elite group. But there was a real sense of civic pride. There was a real sense that… and they were open in many ways. And… so I just thought that. I don’t know…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: When did you come back to really move in?
Mark Baskin: 2014.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Like, since then you’ve been here constantly?
Mark Baskin: Well, I leave, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, I’ve been living here since 2014. And…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: How did you decide?
Mark Baskin: I got a job.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Okay.
Mark Baskin: I mean, I was at a point in… I was… so I spent… After I left, just quickly from my biography, after I left Canada, I went to work in… my ex-wife’s from Upstate New York, around Schenectady-Albany region, and so we just bought a house. And I got a job at the State University of New York at Albany, where I worked for about… so I don’t know, until I left, doing international development stuff, and I was also teaching in the political science department. And with state universities, budgeting is always an exciting thing (chuckles). And so I’m not sure how much longer I could have stayed on doing that. But I, you know, was like… and the job… so I began looking around for work, and I got this job where I met you {gestures at Erëmirë Krasniqi} originally, and then I moved over to AUK.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: I mean, when you’re doing these teaching jobs, do they… does this experience inform the way you design courses? How do you integrate it into your teaching?
Mark Baskin: So when I came back… you know, I was a full-time academic before I went to work for the UN. And what I teach is completely different now. The only course that I continue to teach… and I didn’t do this at Albany. They didn’t want me to teach this course. That was a bit, you know… was comparative politics, introduction to comparative politics. But when I was at Albany, I was teaching courses on post-conflict reconstruction. I was teaching courses on war and peace. I did stuff on ethnic conflict, which I had never really taught before. Whereas, before I would teach courses on… because I was trained to do Soviet studies, I would teach courses on Soviet foreign… Russian foreign policy, Russian-American relations, comparative politics, and, you know…
And then I was teaching at this really small school where you could do whatever you want, so I taught a course… and they wouldn’t let me teach it at Albany… a course on political film, which I love teaching the course on political film. And… so, you know… So then, when I’ve been here, I taught what they needed. So I’ve taught a course on global political economy, comparative politics, public policy, which I’d taught in the old days as well. And I teach a course on Balkan history. I, we, it didn’t work out. I wanted to bring you [Erëmirë Krasniqi] in, maybe this year, if I teach it again, to do, because they did oral history. They did, I gave them a little… it turned out to be a really good assignment. You know, some of the kids, they don’t get interested in anything, but some of the kids really got off on it. You know, they… I asked them to study, to ask people over a certain age their memories of socialism.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Okay.
Mark Baskin: And some kids really got into it. It’s really quite interesting how you can really look into the social backgrounds of your students when you read this assignment, so…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Did you continue with your, so how was this USAID project where you were giving scholarships?
Mark Baskin: Yeah, we were giving scholarships. And it was okay. It was fine, you know, but in the end, I left that. And…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: It was quite open as a program as I recall. It wasn’t just…
Mark Baskin: It was. But the problem as a whole… this gets into a whole different conversation about the nature of development and the nature of development assistance. And “We’ve given you so many billions of dollars,” and you think about the billions of dollars that the EU and different governments have given, how much of that money goes to salaries of people like me? How much of that money actually goes to programming? And when it turns out… I mean, I worked on USAID projects for many years… it turns out that like 10-20 percent actually goes to projects, to programs. The rest of it goes to all sorts of other kinds of stuff. And you can say it’s good, it’s fine, but is it?
And (chuckles) so this program ended up sending you… and you’re a great example {pointing at Erëmirë Krasniqi} because you went and you did that, so you’re now doing something that’s really cool and that’s useful and that’s important here. And that ought to in some ways… in some other country, it [Oral History Initiative] could be part of the University of Prishtina. I mean, depending on… maybe it still could depending on how things evolve in the sense that, because… you know, there are all these things, and I’m sure you know about this in the United States: National Public Radio has these various archives. People tell their stories. I mean, it’s a similar kind of thing, and so it’s a really tremendous resource.
But a lot of people come, they… we send people off. This was supposed to be a practical program, so we sent people off to study things that weren’t necessarily so practical. And then people then go study one thing and they come back and they don’t really… so it’s really hard to say and… On the other hand, I think it’s always a good idea that people can go… you know, I think the programs that we send people to are pretty good programs, and people did well, so that it’s always good to enhance that capacity of people. I’m thinking of, for example, someone like… and, you know, I’m thinking of someone in your cohort who then went to work for the Foreign Minister, Besart.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Ah.
Mark Baskin: Yeah. But he’s not the only one that went. You know, he did a master’s degree at Denver, which is a great school, and now he’s… now he’s privatizing. Or he’s not working for the Government anymore, and it’s unfortunate, someone of his capacity. That’s just one case. And I just… because I know him a little bit. And so that’s how I know that. So you try to feed it back. And, by the way, the program that we ran, it’s similar… all the universities. I sent a student this year, who’s now up in Brussels studying, getting a master’s degree at Leuven. Actually, Leuven. And when he comes back, he’s going to have to work, you know… supposedly, he’s going to have work for the Government for two or three years.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Three years, all three, yeah, I know that. That scheme, you know.
Chester Eng: Young Cell Scheme.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Yeah, yeah.
Mark Baskin: That’s a good scheme. Although, in his case, we want to send him to the States to do a doctorate in history because he would like to, but we’ll see. He’s still young.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: What… how do you make sense of your life in this last chapter?
Mark Baskin: So, for me, it’s my own personal thing, it’s that, you know, it was that serendipity brought me to the Balkans in 1975. And I never really… I didn’t know anything really about Yugoslavia at the time or anything like that. And yet I have sort of become very… I feel very local in a way, even though I’m not. I know I’m not. And I… so, for me, I feel it’s… I can’t imagine doing anything that’s more personally fulfilling than what I’m doing now, both teaching and whatever consulting I do, work I do. And so…
And I think that this isn’t the only place that has been wrecked and destroyed by war and conflict and all this. There’s plenty of places all over the world that’s… where things are really horrible, and so… but this happens to be the place, and I have this desire to kind of try, you know, to improve the world I live in. And so this is the place that I’m at, and I’m trying to make whatever small contribution… I mean, it’s pretty small (chuckles)…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: How’s your work with students here? Anything in particular? Is it any different than the U.S.?
Mark Baskin: Yes. I used to say no, but it is different. I mean, starting off is that, because we teach in English, and people here are poor, and I give my kids several hundred dollars a semester to buy books. I mean, you can spend 200 dollars for books on one course in the States. And so you can spend as much as 700-800 dollars on a course. We can’t do that here. And then, of course, and it’s not a trend… I haven’t taught in the U.S. now for a few years… but people don’t read much anymore. And so getting students… and, at the end of the day, it’s important to read. I mean, there’s different ways of bringing in information, and reading is a very effective way of one aspect of learning. And so that’s a difficult challenge.
And I have some students who are as good, are among the very best students I have ever taught, since the 1980s. It’s really true. I’m not just saying that. But then I have the master’s students that sort of are not among the very best students I’ve taught. And so there’s that. And… but, overall, I mean… and then you see things, I see things here that, I guess in the States we had it like at AUK, you see that you have, like, friends. There’s a couple of boys that take all their classes together, or a couple of girls who take all their classes together, and so then you have this sort of thing. You know, then there’s this kind of … there’s a whole social dimension, which a good anthropologist, a good ethnographer can really get into in a way. And so… yeah.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: How would you describe maybe… not the background because that’s not something short. But how do you make sense of 2000 and 2020 now? Does it make sense where we’re at, in your view? For this time we live, and you started off, and where you’re…
Mark Baskin: So, in 2000, when I came in here, everyone was hopeful. Everyone, except… yeah, everyone was hopeful. I didn’t deal with the Serb community, but they were not very hopeful I would say, 2000. But everyone else I dealt with was hopeful and believed that things would be a lot better. And now, I would say everyone’s not hopeful, that there are still some… there’s still some hopeful. The amount of hope has gone down, that people are a little more jaded.
And I would say this, and I would say in part, it would be a mistake to expect Kosovo to have developed at the maximum level of its potential, because no place does. And you look at the evolution of European societies, or America, or the United States, it took several hundred years for us to become democratic. And it wasn’t only because we had never figured it out, but it’s just because, over generations… it takes sometimes a whole generation for people to change how they do things, and it’s just a question of a cultural change. And so that takes a long time. And so I don’t see any reason why we should expect everyone here to be so much better than we were (chuckles), and that’s kind of what we’re expecting of you when we say that.
And so then I look at… you know, and I know a lot of people here, and people who are in all the political parties and different governments and stuff, so some people feel that they’re more virtuous than others, that they’re criminals, and we’re not. And I think that… I look at the United States, and I look at the kind of legislation that was passed in the 1780s and ‘90s. And then you look at the various financial scandals in the United States throughout our history, and you look at the way in which the Rockefeller Brothers, what a virtuous organization. How did the Rockefellers make their money? They were called robber barons. So why should we expect people here to be somehow… to avoid the mistakes that others have made? And so to me, I’m… and so that, in some broader sense, I remain incredibly optimistic.
And I think that at each moment, we need to act. And there are traditions here that are not necessarily conducive to the development of British-American style liberal democracy. I mean, this was part of the Ottoman Empire, you know, etcetera. You look at… I went back and read all this medieval history when I began teaching the Balkan studies class. And then you go back to the Byzantian, you look at just the administrative units going back to Byzantine times to the present, very little has changed. You changed the names of them, but, you know, they used to have these things, you know, the vilayets evolved out of the Byzantine form of organization. And so why should things be so much different now?
And so that, to the extent I do believe that democracy, liberal democracy, if it can work, is a pretty good system, because it allows individuals to rise and fall and all this, and that we’ve… but, you know, when we see the challenges in my country right now, and it’s difficult to maintain those organizations, you know, those institutions, and those ways. And so, as I look at the track record here, it’s easy to say… there’s this blame game that goes on, that people here blame the EU, and the UN for all this terrible stuff. But the UN and the EU had tremendous success. We had tremendous failures too, but there were many things that we did that were successful. And it’s easy to point to all the things that we did wrong. It’s easy to point to ways in which we formed relationships that might not have been all that well. But, you know, virtue is not necessarily so virtuous. Robespierre, he was acting in the name of virtue, so it’s important to, we don’t want to kill everybody (smiles).
But I think things here are okay. I think, over the long run, I think things, I mean, I think that, and so much of what happens here will depend on forces that are entirely out of the control of people here: the Eurozone, what relations with China, Russia, U.S., all those certain broader things require a certain context, and I think that… I’m hopeful that… that will continue to be moving up and that the new Government will do some… will have some success…
[The video interview was edited here]
Yeah, so what happened was, we’re there and then sometime in the late summer of ‘99, this guy who worked for the American Jewish [Joint] Distribution Committee… oh, I forgot his name now. Darn it. I can remember it and tell you… he came to Prizren, and they wanted to celebrate, they wanted to have a Rosh Hashanah dinner. And he had known somehow that I was Jewish, and he had known about Votim Demiri who’s now president of the [Jewish Community of Kosovo]. And, you know, Votim’s a prominent personality in Prizren even before.
And… Eli Eliezri was his name. He was an Israeli, Eli Eliezri. And so Eli said, “Come on.” He was one of these kind of really upbeat Israelis, you know, just total energy. And we had this dinner where we had Votim and I think Votim’s family and then a few others. And it turned out there were two to three bigger Jewish kind of families in Prizren. And there’s a bunch who had made aliyah in ‘47-‘48 from Prizren, so there was a sort of kibbutz or something. There were the Bosnian Jews in Israel and I think there were some Kosovo Jews as well. And I know some Croatian Jews through a friend of mine who told me, this really good friend. So…
And so we had this dinner, and to me it was totally bizarre. And all of a sudden, he calls, Eli calls this guy who had been an Israeli Minister of Education who was involved in something, I think some Geneva Convention process or something. And he says, “Here, you should talk with him!” And so we’re talking, we’re talking about Kosovo and all this. And so, and then Eli was telling me that he thought it was important that they wanted to be there, and they wanted to be there in part to show, you know… because there was a Jewish community… and that they wanted to give them support. But they also wanted to work… one of the many things that the American Jewish Distribution Committee did, something… they’re all over… is they were putting computers in schools.
And then he told me that they were helping to rebuild a mosque, or they wanted to. And the idea was that what we want to do is create a multiethnic, you know, kind of thing, that we want to… and so… and he did it for explicit political reasons. It was this idea that in places like that a minority is protected. So that was kind of cool. And then for Passover the next year. Did you ever go to a Passover Seder {point at Erëmirë Krasniqi}?
Erëmirë Krasniqi: I think I did.
Mark Baskin: That’s great because they always end up next year in Jerusalem and stuff. And so Passover Seder, which tells the story of the Jews’, you know, escape from Egypt. So for Passover we had a much bigger thing. And again, all of our friends, you know, all the people I was friends with, we brought in, and Eli would always get all the expat Jews to come to these events (chuckles). And so we did it at some restaurant or something in Prizren. And he had some Albanian Jew, a Jewish woman from Albania who had moved to Israel, and then we did a small little Seder. And then she talked about what it was like being Jewish in Albania, etcetera, etcetera, and all that. So that’s kind of what we did at the end. And I know that Eli very much… and so Votim saw that, in the end, that would be his way of working, and his daughter Ines who, you know, works in the Kosovo consulate in New York, and she’s now very active. So one time, about a year or so ago, I was in Liburnia, and Ines then came in with Teuta Sahatqija and these kind of Jews from New York and Israel, and so we reconnected (laughs). And…
And I know they want to build a Jewish community center in Prizren. And, in a way, I think it’s… there are very few Jews left in Kosovo. And so I think I mentioned this the other day, I go to Torah study when I’m back in the States. And I was thinking… when I went to… I was done with this event [International Holocaust Remembrance Day tribute in Prizren on January 27, 2020], I wanted to say, “Well, we should have Torah study.” You know, it’s really an incredibly engaging thing intellectually. And… but I don’t think there’s much interest in that.
The thing about creating a Jewish community center here is that it would commemorate a community that existed, and it would demonstrate the way in which Kosovo is home to all communities here. And that there is that cemetery up, you know, Taukbahçe or wherever that is near that area. And… and so I think a Jewish community center can be a place where there can be… you know, it can be a kind of temple of tolerance. But who knows what will really happen.
I mean, I know that in places like Zagreb… I used to go to these things in Zagreb for Rosh Hashanah and stuff. And the Zagreb Jewish community and the Belgrade Jewish community have both split (chuckles). You know, you say, “If you have two Jews, three political parties,” (chuckles), you know, and so there’s… But I actually think that it… I think it wouldn’t be… it would be… it’s a nice idea, and having in Prizren rather than Pristina is also a nice idea because it brings people there. And then Prizren, at least a marker of its identity and very explicitly as a multiethnic community and all that, so I think that’s…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Do you have any insight into how they cultivated this sense of Jewishness? How did they reconnect to that heritage?
Mark Baskin: I think that there’s been some financing from international Jewish organizations to have some… I know when I was in the States, and I wasn’t able to travel, they had a big event that they invited me to and I never went to. There was some big three-day conference. And they’re rekindling it now. And, you know, because to be Jewish is a matrilineal thing. And I know a lot of people who are active in the Zagreb Jewish communities whose fathers were Jewish and mothers weren’t, but they were still active. And the Orthodox rabbis in Israel would not accept them, but that we… the name Sternberg would say that they are Jewish and all that. And so I don’t know.
I do think that if there’s going to be a vital community that there would need to be some slight… you know, in Sarajevo, we used to go to services where there’d be real Rosh Hashanah, there’d be a Seder, where you’re doing it in the proper way, you know, where at least the ritual is done. You know, there’s a wide variety of how a ritual can be done for each of these, but they should do it in some way. In fact, I’m going to be in touch with Votim. It’s about… because Passover’s coming up in another month, so we’ll see. We’ll do a Seder together (smiles).
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Mark, I think we should wrap up here.
Mark Baskin: Thanks for coming.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Thank you, thank you for your time.
Mark Baskin: Yeah, my pleasure, it’s been nice to reconnect (smiles).