A Visit to Peja
While my research on Kosovo's implementation of the Istanbul Convention is still ongoing, I took a brief break from it this Wednesday to join the CLARD team for an event in the city of Peja. Peja is the fourth most populated city in Kosovo. It lies in the western part of the country near the mountains, about an hour and a half from Pristina by car. My coworkers told me that it's a very popular location for hiking, camping, and, in the winter, skiing.
The purpose of our visit was to host a meeting between the President of the Basic Court of Peja and the local community. The event was called an "Open Day in Court." My supervisor, Anton, picked me up early in the morning, as well as my coworkers, Edona and Nedzad, so we could make sure we would not be late. After a brief stop for gas and, of course, coffee, we started the long drive west to Peja.
As we got closer to the mountains, my coworkers pointed out how lush and green the countryside was. Anton also showed us his hometown as we drove past it. Every once in a while, as we drove through the beautiful green fields and hills, we would see abandoned buildings in ruins. Sometimes, they were the only buildings visible in long stretches of green. Other times, they were relatively close to other buildings that seemed to be in good condition, providing a stark contrast. Either way, the ruins stood out from their surroundings, making them impossible to ignore. My coworkers pointed these out as well, saying that these were ruins left from the Kosovo War. They said that it was like living in a museum: impossible to forget what happened while constantly being surrounded by reminders of it.
When we finally reached Peja, we headed into the Basic Court. The original plan had been to hold the meeting in a courtroom. However, an emergency hearing had come up, so we needed to pack everyone inside the president's office instead. This took some effort because quite a few people showed up for the event. Most of them looked my age or younger, and I would later learn that they were almost all law students like me. They were very engaged in the discussion and asked a lot of questions, which the president and Anton both answered. One of the requests the students made was to be able to use the court for practice, to which the president said yes.
The combined experience of seeing the ruins left from the war and being in a room with so many young law students led me to think about Kosovo's past, present, and future. When the Kosovo War ended, I was less than two years old. As in many other European countries, a law degree in Kosovo is an undergraduate degree, which means that many of those students I saw in Peja were likely even younger than me. Many of them were likely born after the war ended, spending their entire lives witnessing its aftermath. They also would have been young children when Kosovo declared its independence in 2008. Anton has talked to me a little bit about his experiences before, during, and after the war, as well as the impact of Kosovo's independence on legal institutions in the country. I cannot help thinking about how the law students at that meeting have spent all or almost all of their lives in a place so deeply marked by the war ("in a museum," as my coworkers described it) and have also grown up as the country transitioned to independence. I would be very interested in learning more about the impact of both the war and independence on Kosovo's Gen Z. Whatever that impact has been, I can say that the students at that meeting seemed very invested in asking questions and preparing for their future as lawyers.