Starting from 1 January 2024, citizens of Kosovo will be able to travel visa-free anywhere in Europe, but not to BiH, for which they will need to obtain a visa either from Zagreb, Podgorica, Tirana or Skopje.
Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo cohabited within the same state and legal frameworks for more than six centuries. Sometime from the mid-14th century until the end of the 20th, with a few breaks that altogether lasted less than 30 years, their common administrative and legal frameworks influenced the lives of people in both countries. For centuries, moving anywhere in the area between Bihać and Prizren was just internal migration, which led to the establishment of strong family, cultural and business relations. There are still some 30,000 Bosniaks living in today’s Kosovo, and a sizeable portion of the Serb community in Kosovo can trace their origins to Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the other side, according to estimates that are difficult to verify, there are some 10,000 people with roots harking back to Kosovo, mostly Albanians, living in BiH. From direct contacts, it is clear that a portion of the Serbs from Kosovo moved to BiH after 1998, but more accurate data or even estimates cannot be found.
Despite such historical experience, today the ties between BiH and Kosovo have been almost entirely severed. It is quite clear and fairly understandable that for BiH recognising Kosovo as an independent country is a political issue around which internal political consensus cannot be reached at the present moment. What is, however, ludicrous and hard to explain is the impossibility of visa-free travel between BiH and Kosovo. Due to there being no diplomatic ties between Sarajevo and Pristina, a visa for BiH requires going to Zagreb, Podgorica, Tirana or Skopje, making the process expensive, frustrating and time consuming. BiH does not recognise a host of other documents issued by Kosovo, from car licence plates to birth certificates, making life complicated for many people with ties to both countries. Up until 2019, trade in goods was at a fairly high level given the circumstances, albeit mostly one-sided, because BiH did not recognise Kosovo documents, making the importing of goods from Kosovo impossible. In 2019, Kosovo invoked reciprocity and blocked the import of goods from BiH, which reduced trade by more than 90 percent, making it practically negligible.
Visas remain
One of the more significant agreements under the Berlin Process was that the countries mutually recognise each other’s documents, enabling citizens to travel with ID cards and without visas, and opening the way for trade in goods and all manner of other exchanges. Kosovo ratified all the required documents, but once again, due to a blockade by ministers from SNSD, everything was halted in the Council of Ministers of BiH. These blockades are absurd and incomprehensible, because by allowing travel with ID cards and recognising basic documents, BiH would not be doing anything more than Serbia itself. The president of SNSD and Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik has not explained this position in any way, save for spite, the desire to be a bigger “Vučić” than Vučić himself and some casual prejudice against Albanians.
Every meaningful contact, every visit under these circumstances – and we already have whole generations that have been shaped by these circumstances – means a lot. Such opportunities for meaningful contact are sometimes organised by non-governmental organisations and cultural institutions (in Sarajevo, notably the MESS International Theatre Festival) thanks to dedicated individuals. One such opportunity was the study visit of the Centre for Nonviolent Action Sarajevo – Belgrade at the start of November this year, which focused on culture of memory and dealing with the past in Kosovo.
Due to impediments to travel, all other ties are disappearing, and the language barrier presents a further challenge. Today, we learn about each other indirectly, superficially and only sporadically. An overview of news published in 2023 in the most influential Bosnian-Herzegovinian online media and tagged with Kosovo reveals a significant number of news items, but they are primarily about the crises that keep escalating, acts of violence and statements given by key politicians from Serbia and Kosovo or representatives of the international community. The news is almost exclusively “mediated” in the sense that information is taken from international and regional news agencies or media, but also in terms of language, because it is evident that many statements are first translated from Albanian into English, and only then into Bosnian. The KosSev portal, launched in 2014, fills an important gap in that sense. Thanks to its independence, timeliness and credibility, KosSev has become an important source of information not only for Albanian communities in Kosovo, but for the whole region. According to data from the KosSev editorial board, readers from BiH follow closely behind those from Kosovo and Serbia, showing that there is interest in BiH for events in Kosovo. An important step forwards would be officially establishing cooperation between media from BiH and Kosovo, as well as spaces where reporters from Kosovo could, primarily through interviews, provide resources to media from BiH and vice versa.
In Kosovo, as in other countries that came out of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the 1998-1999 war has become a “founding historical event” for the construction of contemporary Kosovan identity, primarily through various historical myths. Although perhaps most similar to Croatia, on account of the belief that they came out of the war victorious, having achieved all their key aims, when we look at sites of memory, the particularity of Kosovo is a clean-cut and almost complete amputation of the Yugoslav period from the past. Only the monument to “Brotherhood and Unity” remains in the centre of Pristina, but the square where it is located has been renamed after Adem Jashari, one of the leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and there are initiatives to relocate the monument itself and replace it with a monument to Jashari instead. From the socialist era myth about Boro and Ramiz, the former has been completely expunged, while the latter is no longer a central character. The monument to Boro and Ramiz at the site of their death near Prizren has been completely destroyed and a memorial cemetery and memorial museum dedicated to fallen KLA fighters has been constructed instead. There is no doubt that the Albanian experience of living in Yugoslavia is an important and often overlooked perspective in attempts to survey this period in history, but reducing Yugoslavia solely to Serbia and focusing only on relations between Serbs and Albanians is an unproductive simplification. Commemorations of the war itself follow similar and familiar templates where the focus is on military victims, leaving no room for “unpopular victims”, and where memorials are primarily used to mark ownership of public space today. A distinctive characteristic is the militarisation of the culture of memory with dozens of monuments featuring the statue of a soldier, almost always armed. At a time when Sarajevo is announcing plans to erect a memorial tank next to Second Gymnasium, a visit to Kosovo can provide valuable insights into what the militarisation of the culture of memory looks like. On the other hand, the exhibition of the Humanitarian Law Centre of Kosovo titled “Once Upon a Time and Never Again” is dedicated to children killed in Kosovo from 1998 to 2000. An accurate list of 1,133 killed children, commemorating all children irrespective of which side killed them, an exhibition that shows all the horrors of war, but does not kill all hope that life after war is imaginable, this is important for all those seeking ways to nurture memory of killed children.
Demographic challenges
The study visit focused on the culture of memory, but for all those who rarely come to Kosovo or were there for the first time, it was also interesting to see and hear everything else. In Bosnian-Herzegovinian and regional media, the dominant topic since the end of September this year has been the attack in the north of Kosovo, in the region of the village Banjska. The armed clash is undoubtedly an important topic in Kosovo as well, because it was such an escalation of violence that it set the communities in Kosovo back years. What is also shared by people in Kosovo and everyone else is the fact that as time passes, we seem to know less and less about the attack itself. Who was behind the attack, what was the ultimate aim, how did the attackers retreat towards Serbia and why weren’t they arrested, these are just some of the questions left unanswered. The dominant feeling in the Serb community in Kosovo is that they were (once again?) left out to dry, especially after Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vučić made a statement that shifted all responsibility for the attack onto Serbs in Kosovo, and not even the key political representatives of the Serb List, which is under his control, but onto the “people”, using them as a convenient parapet. This “confusion” among the Serb community in the north is also visible when after months of objections, there was a mass preregistration of cars switching over to Kosovan (RSK) licence plates. Why couldn’t it have been done earlier, who was behind the torching of cars of those who dared re-register them earlier, why are licence plates an issue if joint courts and police forces, which should stand for much more important elements of independence and sovereignty, were agreed earlier – none of this makes sense to ordinary people. Having received no answers to such questions, facing a situation where only further uncertainty is certain, whole families have decided to move away from the north, but also from other parts of Kosovo.
A topic that is not on the surface, but will certainly have far-reaching effects on the further development of Kosovo, is the visa-free regime for its citizens agreed with the Schengen area and starting on 1 January 2024. Kosovo currently has the youngest population in Europe, almost half of its two million citizens are under 25, and this is plain to see on the streets of Pristina, Mitrovica, Prizren… The youth give these cities an energy the likes of which the rest of the Balkans and much of Europe have not seen since half a century ago. Few dare to speculate about what will happen after 1 January 2024, but fear of a mass emigration of young people is palpable and people feel the need to talk about it. Europe’s need for a young workforce, the lack of opportunities back home and facilitated tracks towards European Union countries, as we have seen in the experience of all other Balkan countries, have unequivocally negative, almost devastating demographic consequences.
So, starting from 1 January 2024, the citizens of Kosovo will be able to travel visa-free to anywhere in Europe, but not to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Apart from being demanded by the European Union through the Berlin Process and for years by the Association of Albanians in BiH, lifting the visa regime is not a frequent topic in Bosnian-Herzegovinian politics or society. Stereotypes and prejudice that sometimes float to the surface, as in the recent case of actor Alban Ukaj and SARTR, only go so far in explaining the persistent ignoring of this issue. So close, yet so far away will continue, it is now clear, to be the best description of relations between BiH and Kosovo for the foreseeable future.