Part Four
[This part of the interview was conducted on February 29, 2020]
Mark Baskin: Yeah, so, yeah, it was different in different places. I mean, when I lived in Petrinja, for example… this was in the so-called Republika Srpska Krajina… and the people there were… they were sort of 95 percent Serbs. There were these Croats left in villages in the region and I would go visit them. And they lived kind of not… they lived pretty miserably. But the Serbs there lived pretty miserably too. There wasn’t any kind of public life. And, whenever I’d go to Zagreb, I would occasionally ask neighbors, “What do you want? Do you need anything?,” which shocked them. You know, I would smuggle through, and they always asked for Vegeta[1] (laughs)… was the thing that they always missed, so I’d be smuggling big things of Vegeta and various kinds of pizza ketchup and stuff like that, because people were living on those sorts of things. And then so it was difficult during the war. But then I went to Zagreb. And so, in Zagreb, I was just living in Zagreb. And there was… everyone was kind of normal for the most part.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Can you maybe tell us more about how people started separating, how the separation between ethnicities became clearer, sharper? Can you…
Mark Baskin: Oh, it was just… I mean, the war defined ethnicity as the only kind of thing. And everybody knew who the Croats were in the sector. Because, you know, these small villages where everybody knew everybody. Everybody knew who they were. 30 years, 20 years earlier, they’d all gotten along more or less, and everyone knew who they were. And, if you were a Croat in the sector… what we called the sector in the Republika Srpska Krajina, then it was very difficult for you. And one of the things that I did as a UN official was we’d get requests from the Croatian Red Cross that so-and-so is ill and needs medical treatment that can only be provided in Croatia.
So I would… I did a number of these, and then one of my people that worked with me did them, because I would do these medical evacuations, and there was a lot of kind of bureaucratic stuff and approvals that needed to be signed and all this. And then you would go to their house and you would take them out. And, you know, you would have to do a visit first, and, you know, you’d be… I remember going to a house that the windows probably hadn’t been opened in 20 years. It has this you-know (holds up hands close to face). And so they opened the windows for us, so there’d be fresh air. And they apologized for the propuh[2] as we say in Zagreb. What do they say here?
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Promaja.
Mark Baskin: Yeah, promaja. But in Croatian, it’s propuh (chuckles). They apologized for the propuh. And my interpreter said, “Oh, no, no, no, we love propuh” (laughs). I remember this really clearly. And so, you know, they lived pretty badly and they… ordinary people lived badly. It was this domination. There’s a movie Cold Mountain, which I think there’s an Academy Award or two for acting that went to it.
Chester Eng: Yes, that was in 2003.
Mark Baskin: That’s a movie about the [American] South and the [American] Civil War during the Civil War that just shows the way in which these kind of local bands controlled these cities, terrorized them, and it was sort of a bit like that. So that, you know, where things really… the place where I was in, Goražde, in 1994. And it’s a kind of well-known case. There’s this great graphic novel, or graphic book, written about Goražde by Sacco. I can’t remember his first name. And this was right after there’d been this siege for about a month or so, and then in which the Serbs were trying to… because Goražde is right on the Drina River… and the Serbs wanted… their strategic interests were to make it a Serb place, and the Bosniaks were holding out, effectively pretty much.
And, in the end, there was a deal that was cut, and then I went in with a group of… I don’t know… this was Sérgio, you know, de Mello[3] and General Soubirou, who was the French general who was in charge of Sector Sarajevo, and a whole bunch of civil affairs officers and other military guys and police and stuff. And we went in and I ended up staying there for a month leading negotiations. And it’s a very complicated agreement that, I don’t know, would take me ten minutes to describe, so I won’t do it.
But you were asking about the people, and the people had lived for… you know, you they’d been for like two months or something in basements and things. And you know that when we came in, all of sudden they were free, and people are walking out. And it’s like seeing these photographs after World War II. They were… I remember really distinctly, in the midst of this rubble, because there had been some bombing and stuff, there was a woman who dressed beautifully (chuckles), you know, with lipstick and everything. And you wonder where she got it or where she preserved it from and just walking through these things. And then in storefronts, in stores, families were living, they had goats and things. I mean, it was really amazing at the very beginning, the situation there.
And so, you know, and then the thing about the war is that, later after the war, it’s like you meet people from these places. So I met Serb refugees from Goražde, you know, people who grew up in Serbia, in Užice, someone who was from Goražde, so you know that… it’s like it affected everybody horribly. Ordinary people suffered tremendously, and so they were dependent on their leaders and things. So…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: How long did you stay?
Mark Baskin: In Goražde, I was there for about two or three months.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: No, entirely, your mission in that region.
Mark Baskin: In the…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Did you…
Mark Baskin: I worked for the UN from April…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Yeah, yeah, were you going back and forth, or?
Mark Baskin: No, no, for me, headquarters was always somewhere: Zagreb, Vukovar, Sarajevo, and Pristina. Those were the kind of the mission headquarters. Those were the four missions I worked for, but I spent time in… I was the FYROM, as we called it, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the official name at the time. I was the FYROM desk officer, so I would go down to… I remember in ‘94 when there was this threat of a conflict, so I went down. We had an office, we had a mission down there, and I remember meeting with Arben Xheferi. There was another Xheferi who led one of the other parties, and then I met with guys from the Macedonians parties, and we were trying to figure out… this was when they were trying to establish the University of Tetovo, which was seen as dangerously radical stuff and all that. And so… and I recall cab drivers telling me, “There’s going to be war (chuckles). There’s going to be war.” And so… and of course, there was a war in Macedonia.
So I spent my time going in lots of different places. And so I was basically based in Zagreb from ‘93 to ‘96. Then I was in Vukovar from ‘96 to ‘97. Then I was in Sarajevo from ‘97 to ‘99. And I was in Prizren from ‘99 to 2000, through the end of 2000.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Oh wow. When did you come to Prizren?
Mark Baskin: In June of ‘99.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: That’s the very beginning.
Mark Baskin: Yeah, well, I mentioned that Sérgio Vieira de Mello, and he is the UN official who was killed in Iraq in 2003. And Sergio had been the head of civil affairs in the old days, and I worked very closely with him in Goražde. I was, he was there for a week, and I was his notetaker and stuff. And then I was on the phone with him every day as we were trying to move these negotiations forward. And so… and he knew that I had… I think I sent you the article last… this article I published, “Crisis in Kosovo.” And I… he knew I knew Kosovo. And so when he came to [Kosovo], he was named the ad interim Special Representative of the Secretary General. He wanted to put together a team, and it was a great team and he wanted me on the team. And so my boss in Sarajevo didn’t want me to come.
And so… this is true: She told me… Kofi Annan’s Chef de Cabinet called her at dinner and said, “You got to let Baskin go.” So the next day… I went the next day, and I saw Sérgio and some others. And then he sent me to Prizren, and some of the people on that mission, the guy who organized my trip to Prizren and then later worked for Kouchner[4] as a political advisor my whole time there was a German diplomat named Axel Dittmann who… Axel was most recently the Ambassador to Serbia. He left about a year ago, and now he’s back in Berlin. And I ran into Axel later. So some of the people that came through the Mission were really very gifted, talented people. Axel was an excellent political officer.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: How was Prizren then? Can you tell us about those first days when you were settling in?
Mark Baskin: Yeah, well, there’d been reports that Prizren had been destroyed, or there had been a lot of bombing there. There had been in places like Zhur and Krusha e Madhe[5] and Krusha e Vogël.[6] But in Prizren itself, there really wasn’t that much. The Germans [peacekeeping forces] were already there. There were all these journalists I’d known from the old days, American journalists. Roy Gutman, who was the guy who discovered the camps in Bosnia in 1992. Roy was there. This other guy who… they made a movie about his reporting in Afghanistan, Jonathan Landay. He was there, and I know Jon. He’s a good friend of mine.
And it was really anarchic at the time. And people were coming in, and the UN or the… I guess it was the UN who’d announced this, but I don’t know… we had tried to create a situation where the refugees wouldn’t return for a month or two while we sorted things out, you know, while we established ourselves. They, of course, came back immediately. So while I was going in, we’d see these columns of, I assume, Serbs leaving. There were Albanians coming in from Kukës and from Skopje. And… and the first days were really really rough.
I was brought in by some guys from OSCE,[7] and we stayed… so they kind of hooked us up and, you know, set up some meetings for us. And, you know, so I ended up staying there for about a month with this one family whose son… you probably know {gesturing at Erëmirë Krasniqi} his son. Shporta. Ares Shporta. I stayed in Ares Shporta’s house for my first month that I was there. And his mother, who I ran into the other day, she now works in Sudan or Somalia for the UN. And so it’s kind of sort of amazing, you know.
And then, you know, and pretty quickly, because some of these OSCE people knew, and people knew that we were there, so I met sort of key figures in town. The Orthodox Church men were still there, and I remember having meetings with them. And the Germans who were setting up. And there was also Dutch KFOR.[8] Those are the two contingents I remember. The Austrians were there as well. I think Swiss. You always can feel confident when you have the Swiss Army defending you [chuckles]. You know, they did a lot of great civil affairs work, I think actually. And so…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: You mention the OSCE because they were better acquainted with the place?
Mark Baskin: They were already there.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Because they were there, yeah.
Mark Baskin: And the guy who brought me in, I wish he had been the head of the office. I mean, he was a great guy. It was this British policeman who brought me in. But, uou know, it was fine. But, you know, when he came in, you know, we’re walking down the street with this guy… because I’d worked with policemen. The mission I was in in Bosnia was a policing mission. What we did is that we helped advise and we helped develop training systems and all this for police. And so I worked closely with British police, so I got along with these guys well.
And as we’re walking down, he points to this young woman, and he says, “You should hire her. She’s great.” So I hired her and she became my assistant. And now she’s rather senior within the EUSR.[9] So I have to say, a lot of these people I hired back in 1999, everyone… some people have stayed within the international community. Others have… there’s a guy I just ran into… I walked into Soma[10] about a month ago, and he says, “Mark, you don’t remember, do you?” He says, “I used to do your IT.” And I go, “Oh, it’s great to see you.” And then he goes… I said, “So what are you doing now?” He says, “Well, I own Gjirafa,”[11] (laughs). And then he told me his story, it’s an amazing story, how he worked for the UN for a number of years, he had an option to either stay with the UN and go off to Africa, I think it was. Or he could have done a degree in the U.S., and he chose the latter path. And this led him… oh, this is amazing what happens so that… and there are all these kind of young bright people, and I was really kind of amazed at, really impressed by just how cool they were.
And, you know, at the same time the… so I went there for… so what I did is I went there for a few days, about four or five days, and I went and I reported to the headquarters the situation, and then they said, “Well, where do you want to go?” And I wanted to be the regional administrator, but those were political positions that governments owned, and I couldn’t. So they said, “You could be deputy wherever you want,” and I had a choice between going to Mitrovica and Prizren. And I chose Prizren because it was just really nice (laughs). And…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Can you describe what deputy meant?
Mark Baskin: That meant… so I was the second-most sort of… I was the second-highest ranking UN official in the region. And in the Prizren region, we covered Prizren, Suva Reka, Dragaš, Orahovac. And then some people from Malishevë came. Malishevë was not yet a municipality, and they had told me that they had been in… in the ‘80s, they were about to create a municipality when the Serbs kind of came in and took over and changed everything. And would we support them in that? And so I then went to the kind of influential… the people we took to be influential in Rahovec, Prizren, and Suva Reka because it would have taken land from all those, and I said, “What do you think? Should we? Would you mind?” And they said, “Of course not,” so we then created Malishevë, and so… or it was then created.
And so my responsibilities there. And then I was there alone for the first month or so before Leonard came, before the regional administrator came. He was a Swede. And in this time early on, I was the only expat from the UN, especially early on. There was a UNHCR[12] guy who was there briefly, and then he left and someone else came in. And OSCE was there, but they only had a few people at the time because they had all evacuated during the bombing.
And at the time, every day in Prizren, anywhere from four to ten houses were being burned… and on Kalaja, you know, that area behind the river, you know… areas where Serbs had lived before. And the head of the military comes to me and says, “Well, this is your job. I mean, this is civilian, burning houses. It’s not a military thing.” And I said, “Well, I’m the only one one that’s here.” And they said, “Well, when are you going to get your police here?” (chuckles). And it took a while to… because these kinds of missions, you don’t… we don’t have… it’s not like the U.S. Army, you know, you can just send in, go to Fort Bragg[13] or whatever and you can in 1,000, 2,000 people. You just can’t do that. We don’t…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: So you didn’t have any police with you?
Mark Baskin: We didn’t. I had a couple of policemen from Bosnia, but the mission… but the mandate… and this gets into really complicated issues of public administration in a way: The mandate was completely different. Our mandate in Kosovo, in UNMIK, was we were the government. The mandate in Bosnia was that we were not the government. We were advising, so the policemen were not trained to do that. They had no… so, then in the end, I only had a couple of policemen. I remember I had an Indian, some kind of senior Indian police commander, who, you know… there was not much he could do.
So we tried to do things. Right, we tried to do stuff while the houses were still burning, and…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: When did it become stable-stable? Did you also have curfews, right?
Mark Baskin: We did have curfews in Prizren, yeah. I think we had the curfew pretty much the whole time I was there. I’m not… I mean, that’s a detail that I can probably look up and see, but we had it for a long time. And once we began by August-September, we were able to do things a little better. And because the Germans, you know, in their defense, it was my feeling, you have 6,000 troops here, maybe you can do something. “Oh, we have other things to do.” And they did, in fact, have other things to do. There’s a lot of stuff that they had to do.
And they also were going out and doing the civil affairs stuff in the field, providing meals to people, doing that kind of thing, and then they were setting up and building up their camp, all of the things that you need to get done if you’re going to have an effective operation. So it’s not that they were just sitting around and making fun of us. I mean, they were… you know, they were doing their things. And so it was just a difficult time.
And early on, we worked very closely together with the military, OSCE, UNHCR. We’d have daily meetings. You know, what’s going on? And there were… it was a very difficult situation. And so, about three weeks in, the German general says… this is right around the time Leonard came, just before Leonard came… the German general says to me, “I’ve got 75 people in jail,” because our… his military police were working as police, but they’re not really policemen. And he says,… and these aren’t… “This is serious stuff.” I mean, “They were arrested for serious things. What are going to do with them?,” because that really was a civilian thing. So I asked my friends in the headquarters, lawyers, what do you… “What should we do?” They were creating an emergency judiciary in Pristina, and they said, “Why don’t you create an emergency judiciary?”
And so he, this one UN lawyer, told me what I needed to do in terms of stuff and, with my assistants, we called all the lawyers and all the judges and prosecutors from Prizren. We met with them. And then we worked with OSCE. They filled out an application. OSCE, I think, vetted it. I also had to, you know, {waves his hand as if he were signing documents} a number of us. This is like the scholarships that you went on, you know. We did this vetting process. And then we had interviews and then we created this emergency judiciary. And, you know, there were some issues and problems with it, which I won’t go into, but it was a… I also conducted what I believe is the first wedding in postwar Kosovo.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Really?
Mark Baskin: Yes, I did. This is…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: For whom?
Mark Baskin: So this is what happened.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Were you endowed with such power?
Mark Baskin: Well, we had a… Edita Tahiri, who was then part of the LDK[14] presidency and very influential,[15] she brought… she wanted to introduce us to Eqrem Kryeziu, who was head of LDK.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Eqrem Kryeziu?
Mark Baskin: Yes, Eqrem Kryeziu, who was head of LDK in Prizren. So we met, and Eqrem was very nice. We had a nice meeting. Edita was very tough at this meeting, saying, you know, “You guys are the government. You have to establish order. You have to make sure that our people are protected,” blah, blah, blah, all of this kind of stuff. And it was a very… she was very tough.
And then, you know, at the end of the meeting, she then takes me aside and she goes… and I didn’t know her, although I did know of her… and she said, “Mark,” she says, “my niece is engaged to get married, and there is no,” (laughs) … “and there is no…” “There are no established norms for any of this. And so… and you guys are the government, so would you conduct the wedding?” So, again, I checked with Pristina just to make sure that everything was fine, and it turned out that this was… it was interesting.
So we had to create all these documents. We had to create a, you know, marriage certificate. So they said you have to do this, this, and this because, you know, Serbs took a lot of the documentation away, and they weren’t going to… we weren’t going to follow on from what they had been doing anyways. So we created this document, and then we began… so we were the first in Prizren. We were kind of pioneers in creating all these new documents, including birth certificates and all this kind of stuff.
And so then it came down to the ceremony. And so one of my friends who sadly just passed away, Bashkim, Bashkim Nevzati, just died a few months ago, and he was a lawyer. And Bashkim… I turned to Bashkim and said, “Listen, can you help me? Come up.” So he went, and we looked at the Yugoslav marriage law, code, and then we drafted something that was based on that but for the new circumstance. And then we did it. And I was really enthusiastic. I thought I’d be able to learn Albanian at the time. So we wrote it all out in Albanian, and so we conducted this wedding service. And, you know, Edita was there, and me, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
And this was in our headquarters, which was in the old Bankkos right on the river. And we didn’t control the whole building. In fact, I think, Agron Shporta,[16] he had an office in that building from the old days. And so there’s this piped-in music and, all of a sudden, as I’m conducting the wedding and I’m reading this speech I had in Albanian, I hear the song in the piped-in music “Listen to Your Heart” from Roxette (laughs). It totally freaked me out. So now, whenever I think of… the lead singer of Roxette just died, it made me think of the wedding in Prizren (chuckles).
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Why was it important to be legal? I mean, we’re just asking this since it’s a very cultural question for us. It’s not like we always marry legally (laughs). We also do it…
Mark Baskin: Yeah, common law.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Yeah.
Mark Baskin: Well, I don’t know. I mean, you should ask…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: When was this?
Mark Baskin: What?
Erëmirë Krasniqi: When was this?
Mark Baskin: It was…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Right after?
Mark Baskin: It must have been early July.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Oh god.
Mark Baskin: Early to mid-July ‘99.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Okay.
Mark Baskin: Something like that. It wasn’t much later. And, you know, I think… you know, I think that there was this sense… it came from LDK, but it also came from the sense that, you know, we have this new government, that they were working closely with the UN, and that we need to establish something that is ours, that isn’t… does not come from the earlier system that was discriminatory and all that kind of stuff. And so…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Did you conduct more weddings after that time?
Mark Baskin: No, no, that’s the only one I did. Although I did later, in September of 2000, as, in the run-up to the first election, where there were these municipal elections in October 2000, Bernard Kouchner, his intention was to visit every municipality. I was at that time the municipal administrator in Prizren, so I was working with his guys.
And so we arranged to have a whole visit where he met with the municipal council, the administrative board. He had a town hall meeting. He walked. We had him visit the League of Prizren. And Bernard knew very well the guy who had been my interpreter at the very beginning of the mission, because there were these issues having to do with sort of legal issues, and Hasan would go… and he was the interpreter, so he would go to Pristina with these judges from Prizren, and so he knew Bernard pretty well. And Hasan was getting married. And so we arranged, now with this whole thing, that… I said, “So, Bernard, you could marry Hasan, because, you know, you’re the head of state theoretically.” And he did (laughs).
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Really?
Mark Baskin: Yeah, so we, the day went. He had these meetings with us, we brought him to the League of Prizren,[17] we walked along the river, we went to Te Syla[18] for this big lunch. And Syla really outdid himself with all these tavë,[19] etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And then we walked to our headquarters. He had a town hall meeting during this and walked to our headquarters. And then he married Hasan and Nazmie, and it was fantastic. It was really funny. It was great though. And Kouchner turns to me right before the ceremony, and he goes, “Can I really do this?” (laughs). I said, “Of course.”
Erëmirë Krasniqi: You’re also describing this moment in time which necessitated… it asked from you to start stuff from scratch. Can you describe it?
Mark Baskin: Yeah.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Because you just told us how you conceptualized the law to two bring two people together basically. But what about other fields? You have to basically consult the older law. The current, what was the current law to be able to create something that would fit this new society that you were here to set up.
Mark Baskin: So, at the broadest levels, I was not involved in that.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Okay (laughs).
Mark Baskin: I mean, it wasn’t that. We brought in guys, we brought in through lawyers who had experience in international operations or whatever. And that they were trying to… and they were rewriting the law code, etcetera. The criminal code, and then there’s the civil code. And we did our best. And when I look back at what we did in ‘99-2000, it was all sort of like a bandaid. It was a stopgap while something better, I mean, something more enduring could be created. Because nothing really enduring could actually begin to be created until January of 2000, when they created the PISG, the Provisional Institutions of Self-Governance.
And so everything that we did before was sort of… and we did. We did do some stuff. I mean, I created a municipal council in Prizren, but there were some difficulties. And one of the things that I did with the division of labor between me and the regional administrator was that he was the senior administrative guy from Sweden, and so he knew how to run big organizations. And I established municipal councils in all those municipalities: in Suva Reka, Rahovec, Malishevë, and Dragaš, and so I would go visit. And we would… you know, we met people there, and we would see who are the various political parties and others who are the business people and people who had worked in the administration before 1990. And we tried to set things up.
My approach was… to me, what had happened from the period of 1989 to 1999 was a period of irregular… I refer to it as a kind of system of “socialist apartheid,” or whatever you want to call it. But it was… you know, when all of the ethnically Albanian people were fired and other people were brought in, I thought that what we should do to start the new system is to return to the status quo ante and to go back to where it was before. So what we tried… what I tried to do is to get all of the managers and directors to return to Perlonka, and to Termokos and to Printeks and all those. The big… .
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Did you have, at the time, a vision for these corporate, socially-owned corporations? I mean, as an administrator, was it part of your job to think about the economy as well?
Mark Baskin: Yeah. It wasn’t… yes, but we ended up… over time, people came in who were theoretically experts in those kinds of areas, but early on, you know, you did everything. And we were trying to reestablish, you know, we were trying to get things going. I mean, we organized, we negotiated the sale of wine, because there was all this wine in the area. Leonard, my Swedish boss, he brought in a Swedish wine vinter who came. This is one of the best afternoons I spent because we went to all the vineyards in the area from Suva Reka to… we didn’t go to Rahovec, because… oh no, [we did go to] Rahovec. We didn’t go to Gjakovë because that was not our region. And we went wine tasting. And we all got really lit drunk, while this wine taster would drink the wine and, you know, spit it out (chuckles).
And we determined the wine was quite good and then we began… and then there were these traditional markets for this wine in Germany and other places, and so then there were efforts to… you know, we were the government and we were in charge of that. And my feeling was that the people that were in positions of authority before 1989 should return, and then whatever was going to happen would happen. I also knew when it came to businesses, having seen what happened in other places in Yugoslavia and in Eastern Europe, that most of the socialist businesses were not very profitable, etcetera. So there would need to be that kind of transition as well. But I felt that the people who should be at least there initially were the ones who had been there before.
And so my whole approach to the government… this was my own thing, I mean. I told my various people that that was what I was trying to do, but, you know, different people in different regions, they found different ways of doing it, I suppose. But, you know, we tried to bring in the old team, and I don’t know how well it worked, but that’s what we tried to do.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: What was your relationship with the provisional government in 2000 and onward? Like, was there a…
Mark Baskin: Actually, it was from June ‘99 onwards. You’re thinking about the provisional government led by Prime Minister [Hashim] Thaçi?
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Yeah, it was like a parallel institution like local, and then there was UNMIK. About it? So how did that…
Mark Baskin: This is one of those areas where I don’t want to go into too much detail.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Okay.
Mark Baskin: Just to say, it was clear under Security Council Resolution 1244 that was supported by the full range of powerful governments and the Security Council and everyone, that the authority was had by the UN, and that we were to establish an interim administration, and that we were to help train them. And so when people presented themselves to us to say, “Well, we’re the guys that are in power. But thank you. You know, we want to work with you, but, in fact, we’re the ones.” And so we tried to integrate with them as much as possible, but it was a difficult time. And sometimes people were… there were others that were not, you know… and so we wanted to bring everyone in.
And early on, one of the things that I did was… so everyone meant… there were all these really small little parties that don’t exist anymore that I can’t remember the names of. Some of them are really radical parties. Some are some Enverist parties of some sort. And then there was… you know, LDK was a big party. PDK didn’t exist yet. AAK[20] didn’t exist yet. Ramush [Haradinaj] was for a while head of the TMK, or the KPC,[21] in Prizren, and he used to meet with us weekly before he left and then, you know, began to pursue his career in politics. So we tried to integrate them all. We would have liked to have integrated the Serb structures, those who remained, and there were a few Serbs who remained, and as long as they remained in Prizren, they were part of our team too.
Early on, we had two or three of what we called roundtables symbolically modeled after what they had done in Poland. The idea is that you bring everybody and try to get what you need to do. You know, what should we do? And early on, we had everybody. We even had some Serb, we had Orthodox Church people there. We had… in Prizren, it was pretty diverse ethnically. We had Bosniaks and, you know, Gorani, and…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Turkish.
Mark Baskin: Obviously, Turkish. And, you know, so…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Was it easier? Do you have a comparative perspective to say whether it was easier than in other places to bring these people to the same table?
Mark Baskin: Well, what happened is that over time some of the people left. I mean, the Orthodox Church men left, for example. And so they were no longer there, but the Turks remained. And there were, and you know, there were two contending Bosniak parties at the time, and this was before Vakat was created, but there were these other guys. And so, as long as I was there, I went out of my way to try to bring in, to keep it as diverse as possible ethnically and to make sure that the people that have had, to make sure that Prizren remained Prizren (smiles). You know, and I don’t know how successful I was at that, but… or we were. It’s not just me.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Were there killings at the time? Like, I recall this Commander Drini killed at home. I’m wondering were you there at that time, or whether this happened later?
Mark Baskin: No, that happened when I was there.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Oh.
Mark Baskin: I knew him quite well.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: How did you guys handle that? Did your mission permit you to act in those situations? How did you manage?
Mark Baskin: They still have not…
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Huh?
Mark Baskin: There’s been a couple of trials over the murder of Ekrem Rexha, who was Commandant Drini, but they still haven’t concluded the case. And he was someone who worked very closely with us. He was an amazing, I thought an amazingly gifted guy. And I don’t know what to say. I mean, I know a lot about this. And I remember the day that he was shot. I was the acting regional administrator at the time, Leonard was away. And after the morning meeting, we had “morning prayers,” as we’d call them. We had morning meetings every day: What’s going on, who’s doing what, blah, blah, blah. And at the end of the morning meeting, my interpreter came, translator came and said, “Ekrem’s been shot. And he’s at the German medical facility.”
So I went, and he was dead. And he… his brother was there, who’d just come from Sarajevo, so that was the first time I met him. Ruzhdi. And then I went to visit the family. And for me, it was one of the most depressing moments of my entire UN mission because he was someone whose English, which was like yours {gestures at Erëmirë Krasniqi}. His English was almost perfect.
You know, his mother was from Drenica. His father was Slavic Muslim. So he spoke, he was a JNA[22] officer from former [Yugoslavia]. He had served in Croatia, so we used to joke, you know, speaking, Zagrebačka šatra and stuff. We would speak all this slang. And he was very creative. He was really kind of an impressive guy. And who knows what would have happened had he stayed alive because lots of things have happened.
But I had wanted… I was looking into trying to send him to Harvard to go to this mid-career [master’s]… I mean, he was the kind of guy who could have… you know, who would have done well. Shpend Ahmeti[23] later went to that. I think he would have done very well there. And so, you know, I was writing off to my academic friends in the States to see what we could do because I knew that there was [potential]. So it’s a really sad moment.
Erëmirë Krasniqi: Were there more of these?
Mark Baskin: Not too many. There were some. There were some cases of Bosniaks in Tusus, in the Tusus area. And that’s another case that hasn’t been solved, I think in January 2000. The Skënderi family. I was looking at this recently again. There were three people killed. No one’s ever found who did it. And, you know, the Tusus area of Prizren is the kind of area that was a bit wild towards the construction and all that, and it was ethnically mixed. So, at the time, you know, we tried to do things. When you take an event like this… and they came and met with me, the Bosniaks. And so I would try to set up kind of neighborhood policing things.
And then I met with the kind of arm… I was still… I was not yet the municipal administrator, so I was doing this from the region. And so I met with the guys from the Municipality, and they said, “Are you willing to, you know {brings hands together} some common projects? You know, fixing the school, cleaning up a park, you know, trying to have some things where they’d work together.” And they said they would do it, and then I’m not sure what happened, you know, because I was quite senior. And so I would get something going and then I would give it to them and then who knows what would happen. And, in the end, a lot of these initiatives that I thought… didn’t get fully realized.
[The story continues in part five]
[1] A seasoning made of dried vegetables and spices popular in the Balkans.
[2] Croation: propuh, means draft. A term for a cold air current drawn in from an open window or door.
[3] The Brazilian UN diplomat who was the political affairs director for the UNPROFOR at the time.
[4] Bernard Kouchner (1939-) is a physician and politician, the founder of Médecins sans Frontières. While he was France’s Health Minister, Kouchner had made a statement recognizing that Albanian students in Kosovo had been poisoned. After the war, in 1999, he was appointed the UN Special Representative in Kosovo.
[5] Krusha e Madhe is a village in the area of Rahovec, where more than ninety men were killed in the massacre on March 27, 1999. The massacre of Krusha e Madhe is documented in many news reports but also in the Human Rights Watch report, Under Orders (2001).
[6] Krusha e Vogël is a village in the area of Rahovec, where in March 1999 Serbian troops disappeared and killed the entire male population. The massacre of Krusha e Vogël of March 26, 1999 is documented in many news reports but also in the Human Rights Watch report, Under Orders (2001).
[7] The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
[8] Kosovo Force, the NATO-led international peacekeeping force in the country.
[9] The European Union Special Representative.
[10] Soma Book Station, a popular café, bar, and restaurant in central Pristina.
[11] An Albanian-language web services company with offices in Kosovo.
[12] United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
[13] A large U.S. Army base in North Carolina in the southeastern United States.
[14] Lidhja Demokratike e Kosovës – Democratic League of Kosovo. First political party of Kosovo, founded in 1989, when the autonomy of Kosovo was revoked, by a group of journalists and intellectuals. The LDK quickly became a party-state, gathering all Albanians, and remained the only party until 1999.
[15] Tahiri was the LDK’s foreign affairs specialist in the 1990s.
[16] A poet, journalist, translator, and interpreter from Prizren.
[17] Alb., Lidhja e Prizrenit. Alliance of Albanian beys founded in 1878 as a reaction to the decisions of the Treaty of Santo Stefano and the Congress of Berlin which redefined the borders of the Ottoman Empire and neighboring countries. The League asked for Albanian autonomy in the Ottoman Empire and awakened demands for self-determination.
[18] A well-known restaurant in central Prizren.
[19] Albanian casseroles.
[20] Alb., Aleanca për Ardhmërinë e Kosovës (The Alliance for the Future of Kosovo)
[21] Alb., Trupat Mbrojtëse të Kosovës (Kosovo Protection Corps)
[22] Serbian: Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija (Yugoslav People’s Army).
[23] The Mayor of Pristina.