Though there has clearly been much destruction or damage of historic and
religious buildings and other cultural property in Kosovo, beginning in
early 1998 (at least a year before the start of the NATO bombing), there
have been proportionately very few reports of action against museums and
galleries.
What appears to be the first report of deliberate attacks on museums,
galleries or the visual arts in Kosovo appears in today's Washington Post
in an article by Peter Finn "The Lost Art of Kosovo, a Casualty of War:
On a Less Visible Front, Serbs Continue Assault on Culture & Creativity"
(Post, Sunday, May 23, 1999; Page G07), re-distributed on the Kosovo
Daily News e-mail distribution service of the Decani Orthodox Monastery
Brotherhood, southern Kosovo.
Finn's report quotes extensively from Pristina (Kosovo) playwright, Fadil
Hysaj, now a refugee in Tirana, Albania, and Director of the National
Gallery, Tirana, Albania, Gezim Quendro.
Some key extracts follow.
Patrick Boylan
======================================
[CLIPS]
"The flames that have swept across Kosovo in the past weeks, driving more
than 700,000 refugees before them, have also consumed the cultural
breath of a people, the final assault on Kosovo's intelligentsia after 10
years of repression. Painters, sculptors, composers, filmmakers and writers
were forced to abandon their work and flee to Albania or Macedonia as
refugees. And most of them fear that generations of creation--the words
and images that gave expression to the idea of Kosovo--have been
burned.
"The biggest trauma is [wondering] if some of this work can be
re-created," said Hysaj, adding that the only museum of Kosovo art may
now be in the power of memory.
"Serbian forces, according to artists here, have destroyed many of the
artistic spaces, such as the Dodona Theater and Gallery in Pristina and
Studio N in Pec, where ethnic Albanian arts flourished in opposition to the
Belgrade regime's attempts to smother any expression that could be
deemed to have nationalist overtones. The homes of individual artists like
Hysaj were well known to the authorities, who viewed them as nests of
sedition.
"Few artists, no matter how apolitical their creations, escaped the
terror and destruction. The composer Rauf Dhomi was forced to bribe Serb
paramilitaries to escape Pristina, and he left without any of his
compositions or instruments. The painter Rexhep Ferri, now living in a
refugee camp in Durres, left his work hanging on his walls and in his studio.
"If you want to destroy an identity, you start with culture," said Gezim
Qendro, director of the National Arts Gallery in Tirana. "This kind of
destruction is state politics."
"To strike back, and to remind people of what has been lost, Qendro
opened an exhibit earlier this month [in the National Gallery, Tirana] of
the works of the Kosovar painter Mujlim Mulliqi and the sculptor Agim
Gavdarbasha. Both artists earlier moved much of their work here, fearing
it could be seized or destroyed if shown in Kosovo.....
"The exhibit is all the more chilling because Gavdarbasha, who lived in
Pristina, is unaccounted for, according to Hysaj. "We don't know if he is
safe," he said. "And he is not the only one--Faruk Begolli, the director
of Dodona Theater; Istref Begolli, one of our best actors. There are
others missing."
"Kosovo's artists have had to operate outside public institutions for the
past 10 years. When Slobodan Milosevic, now Yugoslavia's president, stripped
the province of its political autonomy in 1989, he also began a campaign of
sweeping cultural repression against ethnic Albanians, who accounted for
some 90 percent of the population. The works of ethnic Albanian artists
were removed from the walls of public galleries, and ethnic Albanian
administrators at such institutions were fired.....
"The cultural destruction began in the early '90s," Hysaj said. "It was so
systematic and it was so cold."
--------------------------------------------
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
For Decani Orthodox Monastery's Kosovo News Service see:
http://www.egroups.com/group/decani
---------------------------------------------
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