[ALST-L] Fwd: ALBSA: Searching For Pages Torn From History

[Besnik Pula]

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From: IPILIKA at wellesley.edu
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 23:08:54 -0500 (EST)
Subject: ALBSA: Searching For Pages Torn From History


LATimes,           Saturday, October 9, 1999


Searching for Pages Torn From History
  Books: Kosovo library may never recover the Albanian-language works
confiscated by Milosevic.

By SCOTT MARTELLE, DAVID HOLLEY, Times Staff Writers


     PRISTINA, Yugoslavia--Mehmet Gerguri measures the library's loss not
in books so much as in
time.
     Most Albanian-language material from the 1970s and '80s is gone,
truckloads of it shipped out in
1991-92 by Serbian administrators to be shredded and turned into cardboard,
said Gerguri, the ethnic
Albanian director of the National and University Library here.
     And virtually no Albanian-language works were added during the 1990s
after 99 Albanian library
workers--including Gerguri--were fired in a Serbian purge of the work force.
     That's 30 years of Albanian books missing from the official repository
of literature, science and
technology in Kosovo province, where the population is 90% ethnic Albanian.
     Librarians have so far been unable to identify all the missing
material because that would entail
matching the massive old-style card catalog with the 650,000 volumes that
should be on the library's
shelves.
     But in a 1997 international appeal for intervention--which went
unheeded--Gerguri used witness
accounts to estimate that at least 100,000 books, more than 8,000 magazines
and six truckloads of
newspapers had been culled from the collection by the regime of Yugoslav
President Slobodan
Milosevic.
     The stacks now are largely filled with Serbian-language books,
augmented by works in English,
German, French, Russian and other foreign languages.
     The National Library, a reading library that doesn't lend books, was
the headquarters for the
province-wide network. Many of the buildings themselves were destroyed by
Serbian forces during the
mayhem surrounding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign
against Milosevic this
spring, Gerguri said.
     "They wanted everything that was Albanian to be pushed away, if it was
not destroyed," Gerguri
said. "We hope we'll manage to rebuild it, and that we'll have all the
copies of the titles in Albanian."
     How to rebuild is the problem. The library plans to appeal to ethnic
Albanians to donate their private
book collections, although it's unclear how many private libraries survived
Serbian wartime looting.
     And while 68 of the former Albanian employees have returned, there's
no money for paychecks.
With no formal Kosovo government, Gerguri has no place to send the
six-month, $780,000 budget he
drafted for salaries, acquisitions and operating expenses.
     Noted Albanian historian Skender Rizaj, 70, who has published about 20
books and 200 academic
articles on world history, said he fears that the loss of the materials
will be a severe impediment to
young Kosovo Albanians who want to study their own history.
     "It will be very difficult for all students," Rizaj said as he sat at
a small plastic table on a shaded patio
at his house. "Our library was poor to begin with, compared to libraries in
London and Paris. And now
it will be even poorer, so this is a very big loss."
     The library was designed by Adrija Mutnjakovic, a well-known Croatian
architect, and was finished
in September 1981. It quickly became the subject of Serbian accusations
that it "was the center of
Albanian nationalism and counterrevolution," Gerguri said.
     The building itself occupies tens of thousands of square feet beneath
a staggered series of milky
glass domes that some--particularly Serbian critics--say were intended to
symbolize traditional white
Albanian caps encased in steel bars or chains.
     "Maybe so," Gerguri said. "But for me, these serve the function of
getting natural light. It's the best
light we could get."
     Although ethnic Albanians across Kosovo have been targeting minority
Serbs in a campaign of
violence since the bombing ended and U.N. peacekeepers moved in, Gerguri
said library workers have
no intention of jettisoning the Serbian collection.
     "We are not going to do what they did to our books," he said.






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