From Driven From Kosovo! :
For Mr. Prlinčević, granting this interview was an act of bravery. In March 1999, before NATO began bombing Serbia, Mr. Prlinčević, then 61, was chief archivist of Kosovo. Three months later he and his family were refugees in Belgrade. As he says, they didn't have time to pack a suitcase before they had to run for their lives.
The interview was conducted two months after Mr. Prlinčević arrived in Belgrade, when the shock was still fresh. He wanted the world to know what had happened, although this involved serious risk. For one thing, he had been president of the Jewish Community in Priština; it was his responsibility to avoid any act that would prevent Jews from returning to that city or endanger Jews elsewhere in Kosovo.
It was my impression that, torn between honesty and hope, Mr. Prlinčević held back, not saying all he knew lest he infuriate the new rulers of Kosovo. Even as he told a misinformed world about NATO's actions, which made it clear that the KLA terrorists were NATO proxies, he held onto the hope that the KLA and its NATO/UN supervisors might begin to act reasonable, that things might somehow normalize. Speaking of the residents of Milana, the neighborhood where he had lived, he told me, "Many of the people who lived there are of prominent status and social position in the city." Notice that he used the present tense: "are of prominent status." In fact, at the time, they were no longer.
In November 1999, two months after the interview, I saw Mr. Prlinčević in Amsterdam, where we both had been invited to address a meeting about the reign of terror in NATO/UN occupied Kosovo. He was still devastated and he was still hoping. At the meeting, when he tried to speak about his experiences, he broke down in tears. Talking to me the next day, he commented that the new 'authorities' would of course carefully maintain the archives in Priština. I said that, regrettably, I didn't think so. I believed the KLA would destroy those archives. He was shocked. How could they do that? Surely they would need records – everyone needed records of births and deaths and marriages and ownership, and so on. Didn't they?
I said: "Cedda, the KLA just drove perhaps 300,000 people into homelessness and stole all their property including homes, farms, businesses. The last thing they want is to preserve records of ownership."
In this first interview, I think it required an intense internal struggle between emotion (his hesitation about antagonizing the KLA and NATO) and principle (his desire to tell the truth) for Mr. Prlinčević to be able to say, in Part I, that the stories of Yugoslav army atrocities were lies and, in Part II, that the terrorists marched into Priština side by side with NATO. Because of his courage we have direct testimony from the Director of Archives of Kosovo. The legal records he worked on all his adult life are, I am afraid, no more. But this record remains.
In the second interview, a year later, Čedomir Prlinčević was like a different man, in part because his state of shock had receded and in part because of something he saw in Amsterdam.
Being Jewish, Mr. Prlinčević wanted to visit the Anne Frank Museum. He came out of the museum in a rage. Someone had set up an exhibit 'updating' the Holocaust, so to speak, depicting the Serbs as today's Nazis.
This outrageous act – at once trivializing the murder of the European Jews and smearing the Serbs – convinced Mr. Prlinčević that, for the forces that had attacked Yugoslavia, nothing was off limits, and that things were not going to return to normal in Kosovo. In the second interview [2] he opened up and told me much more about what had happened in Kosovo, answering the important question: Why did many Kosovo Albanians flee to Macedonia and Albania during the 1999 NATO bombing? Were they fleeing bombs, or were they fleeing Serbs? He told me they were fleeing neither.
The interview was conducted two months after Mr. Prlinčević arrived in Belgrade, when the shock was still fresh. He wanted the world to know what had happened, although this involved serious risk. For one thing, he had been president of the Jewish Community in Priština; it was his responsibility to avoid any act that would prevent Jews from returning to that city or endanger Jews elsewhere in Kosovo.
It was my impression that, torn between honesty and hope, Mr. Prlinčević held back, not saying all he knew lest he infuriate the new rulers of Kosovo. Even as he told a misinformed world about NATO's actions, which made it clear that the KLA terrorists were NATO proxies, he held onto the hope that the KLA and its NATO/UN supervisors might begin to act reasonable, that things might somehow normalize. Speaking of the residents of Milana, the neighborhood where he had lived, he told me, "Many of the people who lived there are of prominent status and social position in the city." Notice that he used the present tense: "are of prominent status." In fact, at the time, they were no longer.
In November 1999, two months after the interview, I saw Mr. Prlinčević in Amsterdam, where we both had been invited to address a meeting about the reign of terror in NATO/UN occupied Kosovo. He was still devastated and he was still hoping. At the meeting, when he tried to speak about his experiences, he broke down in tears. Talking to me the next day, he commented that the new 'authorities' would of course carefully maintain the archives in Priština. I said that, regrettably, I didn't think so. I believed the KLA would destroy those archives. He was shocked. How could they do that? Surely they would need records – everyone needed records of births and deaths and marriages and ownership, and so on. Didn't they?
I said: "Cedda, the KLA just drove perhaps 300,000 people into homelessness and stole all their property including homes, farms, businesses. The last thing they want is to preserve records of ownership."
In this first interview, I think it required an intense internal struggle between emotion (his hesitation about antagonizing the KLA and NATO) and principle (his desire to tell the truth) for Mr. Prlinčević to be able to say, in Part I, that the stories of Yugoslav army atrocities were lies and, in Part II, that the terrorists marched into Priština side by side with NATO. Because of his courage we have direct testimony from the Director of Archives of Kosovo. The legal records he worked on all his adult life are, I am afraid, no more. But this record remains.
In the second interview, a year later, Čedomir Prlinčević was like a different man, in part because his state of shock had receded and in part because of something he saw in Amsterdam.
Being Jewish, Mr. Prlinčević wanted to visit the Anne Frank Museum. He came out of the museum in a rage. Someone had set up an exhibit 'updating' the Holocaust, so to speak, depicting the Serbs as today's Nazis.
This outrageous act – at once trivializing the murder of the European Jews and smearing the Serbs – convinced Mr. Prlinčević that, for the forces that had attacked Yugoslavia, nothing was off limits, and that things were not going to return to normal in Kosovo. In the second interview [2] he opened up and told me much more about what had happened in Kosovo, answering the important question: Why did many Kosovo Albanians flee to Macedonia and Albania during the 1999 NATO bombing? Were they fleeing bombs, or were they fleeing Serbs? He told me they were fleeing neither.
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