When Physics Is Not Physics

A short statement by federal minister for Human Rights and Minorities Margit Savovic on TV Politika was enough to stir up public opinion. Savovic said the federal state is calling the ethnic Albanians to transfer from the parallel education system they set up to state schools which will give them credit for the time they spent in the other system.

That caused a variety of comments and Serbian Radical Party (SRS) vice-president Tomislav Nikolic even said, jokingly, that the federal state would give the Albanian children school credits on the criteria of age alone.

VREME asked Savovic for a statement to explain what she said on TV. Her answer: "In the context of problems linked to recognizing classes taught in the illegal, parallel schools of the Albanian national minority in Kosovo, there is nothing fundamentally new. The stand of relevant state institutions is well known. There is a readiness to give credit for the time spent in illegal classes but only within the Serbian school system. Under that condition official documents would be issued with the seal of the republic of Serbia and other state symbols. To our regret and to the misfortune of the children, Albanian separatists refused the offered hand on this issue as well."

The stand of relevant state institutions was partly disclosed in November 1993 when the Kosovo education secretary in Pristina got a recommendation to enable those Albanians who want to attend Serbian schools to pass exams (Serbian as non-native speakers, history, social studies, music and art).

The number of Albanians who took that chance is negligible. The Albanians stuck to their parallel school system. Kosovo provincial education secretariat figures show that the parallel system is made up of 418 elementary and 65 high schools and another 20 colleges. Classes are attended by 312,000 elementary school pupils, 56,920 high school students and 12,200 students. With its 20,000 teachers, the parallel system also has another 400,000 people involved or between 20 and 25% of the population of Kosovo.

Most elementary schools pupils attend shools which use some of the programs of the Serbian school system. Although there are still some cases of the police breaking up classes, the state of Serbia has shown much greater tolerance towards the parallel school system than for other forms of ethnic Albanian organizing into what they call the republic of Kosovo. Classes are often held in schools that teach under Serbian education programs. The total polarization of Serb-Albanian ethnic principle has caused a situation where only Serbs are on one side and only Albanians on the other. There really are two sides because the schools are separated by walls or doors. If school breaks coincide the children use different doors and don't come into contact. The Serb side is paid for by the state, the Albanian by sponsors. The state only pays for inseparable systems such as heating, electricity and similar.

Independent schooling is the most expansive part of the Albanian parallel system. In an article for AIM news agency, Pristina intellectual Sqelzen Maliqi said the Albanians are spending 20-25 million USD a year. For them that is a huge expense but not enough for schooling. Albanian schools are not well equipped and teachers are paid badly.

In the five years that they have been out of the Serbian education system, Albanian teachers have been working out of enthusiasm not for money. Since the Albanian parallel economic system is not immune to the state as the schools are, The Albanians haven't managed to resist becoming poor and five years of enthusiasm is becoming tiring.

The best known Kosovo Albanian dissident, chairman of the Kosovo human rights committee, Adem Demaqi told VREME that the most efficient way for Albanians to return to schools is "for everyone who was expelled from schools, universities, institutes simply go back without threat of repression but they have to win for their cause," he said. He placed the return to schools in the wider context of the return of everyone to where they were expelled from. "People have hundreds of ways to achieve their goals and show their integrity and vitality and this is just one I'm suggesting: workers back to factories, doctors to hospitals, children to schools."

Demaqi said there is no need to adapt the two systems to each other "since nothing has been changed in the parallel system apart from some interventions in Albanian language classes and history. Physics is physics, math is math."

According to Demaqi and other Albanians their native language programs were too burdened with Serbian topics as was music, geography and art. On the other hand the Serbs side criticizes the Albanians for ignoring basic facts in their education system. In 1993, when the most serious talks on education were held, Ivan Ivic, a quiet and delicate minister in the Panic government, presented the Albanian parallel education system through their teaching of history. The history program did not show that Kosovo was a part of the Ottoman empire or part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia or the former Yugoslavia nor part of the FRY.

The education talks, started in Geneva in 1992 and continued into 1993, were the most serious Serb-Albanian talks since the Kosovo crisis started. They ended with an offer from the Yugoslav delegation for Albanian children to be taught under the program adopted by the Kosovo education council in 1990 whose members were mainly Albanians. If the Albanians had accepted the offer the program would have been approved by Serbia which was also obliged to give credit for the classes children attended in the parallel system.

Soon after the seventh round of negotiations ended in February 1993, the police arrested a key Albanian negotiator, parallel university rector Ejup Statovci because he demanded that the legal Pristina university authorities empty the university and student center to make place for his Albanian students. "The Serbs definitely ended the dialogue with that act," said Fehmi Agani a deputy leader of the most numerous ethnic Albanian party, the Kosovo Democratic Alliance (LDK).

Everything was political wrangling, efforts by the federal administration to expand the talks out of the Geneva frameworks and Albanian efforts to make it international.

The Serb-Albanian education talks were always something more. They were primarily a test of the good will of both sides to sit down and talk. That's why Savovic's statement drew so much attention.

Abdull Rama, The LDK's official in charge of education issues, wasn't impressed by her statement. "You should recall that there were 13 negotiations so far within the Geneva conference on Yugoslavia. As you know, there were no results because Serbia wanted to legalize the state that imposed on the Kosovo education system. To start a serious dialogue you need to remove at least the elementary obstacles as a sign of a minimum of good will. An acceptable minimum would be opening the doors of education institutions," he said and recalled that science institutions were also closed.

The Kosovo problem was opened once through the education issue. That does not mean it will be opened that way again. It is certain that both Serbs and Albanians have grown politically cooler and that the whole thing will be resolved in a much calmer mood.