Transcriber: Robert Deliman Reviewer: Denise RQ
♪ Staring at the walls is no good fun ♪
♪ And all the parties around, around ♪
♪ They're already done ♪
♪ Oh, no more stories that end with ol' good songs ♪
♪ And everyone's already getting along ♪
♪ So let it go ♪
♪ Let it go ♪
(Applause)
Well, if you like this kind of music,
you'll notice two things about this video.
The first is that this is a good band.
The second, the people in it are barely recognizable.
I'd like to talk to you today about the Mitrovica Rock School in Kosovo.
Six years ago, I moved to Mitrovica
to help start up a rock music school.
Mitrovica is a town in northern Kosovo
and was already a hotbed of ethnic tension since the late 1980s.
This is when the nationalist movement started
that led to the Balkan wars in the 1990s
that tore apart Yugoslavia.
The last of these wars, the Kosovo conflict,
left Mitrovica with a rigid ethnic divide,
with its ethnic Serb population north of the Ibar River
and ethnic Albanians in the south of the city.
But Mitrovica has another history.
Before the war, Mitrovica was a center for pop and rock music.
Before the war, there were concerts and jam sessions every week.
Musicians got together and formed bands, as musicians do,
based on their musical taste and not their ethnic background.
This wasn't particular to Mitrovica.
Musicians all over Yugoslavia were getting together and forming bands,
making music and organizing concerts.
When the war started, these ties weren't so easily broken.
There's a story of a member of Croatian rock band Majke,
who helped a Serbian musician friend,
who got stuck behind what were suddenly enemy lines,
desert and escape to safety.
One of my favorite stories is of the band Rimtutituki.
Saying this on a stage is a little awkward
because it's actually a dirty word in disguise,
but never mind that.
They were a super group comprised by
members of some of former Yugoslavia's most famous bands
and they released an anti-war single in 1992,
as the wars were starting to break out across Yugoslavia.
But they were forbidden by authorities at the time to promote the single with a gig.
So they hired this truck trailer and they rode it through Belgrade,
giving an illegal, live performance to enormous crowds.
They handed out t-shirts, badges and flyers
with messages about the senselessness of war
Now, as you probably know, this is not the whole story.
Music has played a reconciliatory role in the Balkan conflicts,
but also a destructive one.
Just think of the insidious influence of 'turbo-folk',
the genre created to promote nationalism and division.
But the fact is that, almost immediately after the war,
bands started to tour again throughout former Yugoslavia
picking up old connections despite the enormous damage
that had been done to community relations.
Hard to imagine for people of any other profession, right?
So, back to Mitrovica.
When Musicians Without Borders first arrived in Mitrovica,
we were asked to help revive the city's rock tradition.
Because this tradition had been an inclusive one,
we agreed with our local partners that bringing back rock music
also meant re-connecting the city's now divided youth.
The plan was to start up a rock school for youth from both sides of the city.
We found a location, the basement of the cultural center
immediately next to the main bridge which connects or divides the two sides.
We hoped that youth from the two sides would come there for music lessons
but this was naive.
People in Mitrovica don't cross the bridge,
especially for something like music lessons.
So in 2008, we decided to invite young musicians from the two sides
to travel together to Skopje, which is in neighboring Macedonia and quite close
for what we called then a "Rock School in Exile".
This became our first Skopje Summer School.
Young musicians from north and south Mitrovica
got on a bus together and traveled to Skopje
and in Skopje they formed mixed bands
They worked together all week
with Mitrovica musicians and international rock musicians
towards a big outdoor concert.
When the kids came back to Mitrovica,
they demanded a school in their own town
and, having learned that we couldn't do what we planned,
we decided to restructure the project
to work from from two separate locations in Mitrovica, one on each side,
but where we brought the kids together
for regular summer schools, training weeks and tours.
And we used the Internet.
The school wouldn’t work without Facebook, YouTube, and Skype.
Working in a place where people can't even meet,
trying to promote inter-ethnic relations is tricky.
I came to realize that people on the two sides of Mitrovica
really don't know anything about each other.
Younger generations are growing up without any contact with the other side
and they're being fed the prejudices of their parents.
The reality of this came home to me when a young girl,
a singer song-writer from north Mitrovica,
wrote lyrics for her ethnically mixed band
and she wrote that, "We are suffering for their wrongs"
and she didn't think there was anything wrong with saying that,
because, "Surely, they also know that this is the truth."
Luckily, one of her fellow students was around to explain
that not everybody has the same take on history.
During the same period,
a young guy from the other side confided in us that he feared getting beat up
when he met the other members of his mixed band.
It hadn't occurred to him that normal people, musicians,
would be traveling from both sides to Skopje
because nobody ever talked about normal people on the other side.
But I've seen time and again that,
no matter how abnormal the situation people are coming from,
when placed in a band together,
young people are going to grab the chance for normal interaction.
The next step is connection, and often this is followed by friendship.
One year we had a young musician, a guitarist,
from North Mitrovica who came to one of our mixed summer schools.
His friends back home were flirting with ultra-nationalism and neo-Nazism
and, the first couple of days,
he flat out refused to talk to anybody who wasn't a Serb,
including the Dutch musicians who were working as trainers.
But I could see him gravitating more and more
towards this kid from the south side who was an excellent guitarist.
By the third day, we saw them showing each other riffs
and, by the end of the week, they were friends,
and they're still friends.
The Serb kid is still with the school
and now he's a member of one of our ethnically-mixed bands.
Now, coming from the outside,
it's impossible for me to understand what it means to grow up in Mitrovica
and it's a little awkward for me to stand here talking about it
as if I have the right to speak as an insider.
But I've lived in the region for six years, two of those in Mitrovica,
and one thing that I have come to understand
is just how suffocating it can be
and how important it is for young people
to feel that the doors to the world are open.
I remarked once on a friendship that had been formed
between a girl who I had thought was a political hardliner
with a girl from the other side.
My Serb colleague then commented to me
that this kind of experience is the only chance that these kids get
to experiment with a different kind of life.
As you can probably imagine,
a lot of NGOs have tried to connect the people of Mitrovica.
The big difference between this project and the rock school approach
is that we don't talk about it, we just do it,
or rather, we let the music do it.
When you bring people together
to reconcile their differences by talking about them,
you're still keeping the focus on ethnic identity.
No matter how the conversation goes,
everyone in the room will constantly be aware of the fact
that they're really there together in order to promote inter-ethnic dialogue;
fun, yeah!
But when you place two people in a band together,
then you suddenly have Jelena the singer with Dren the guitarist
writing an amazing new song that has nothing to do with politics.
They've transcended it.
Like the professional ex-Yu rock musicians
who got on stage back together after the war,
so too the students of the Mitrovica Rock School.
They stand out in a crowd and they're not afraid to be different.
They stand on a stage, and they come out in the respect of their generation.
Musicians, especially rock musicians, have been social change-makers
over history and across the globe.
So, little wonder that it works in Mitrovica too, right?
So, what are the lessons of the Mitrovica Rock School
that can be contributed to other efforts
of reconciliation in the region?
First, the main one, I think, is really simple
and it's "Don't force it."
What we do is we create a platform for people to meet through music.
That's it and that's enough.
Any musician who has anything to offer in a band
is going to be interesting to the other band members.
These young people, they connect over
musical taste, style, proficiency or personality.
If you want to help normalize things, you have to act normally.
It's not normal to treat people as members of their ethnic group.
It's normal to treat them as individuals
with their own individual talents and ambitions,
and, if you can, to support them in developing those talents.
But you have to trust people to make connections for themselves.
An interesting or, actually,
an important part for us of this aspect
is our cooperation
with the Fontys Rock Academy in the Netherlands.
They are a bachelor-level music academy in pop and rock music
and they've supported the project with teacher-training,
and their students work directly with our bands.
Being a music school, their focus is entirely
on the musical and didactic development of the Mitrovica Rock School.
This positions the Mitrovica Rock School as a credible institution in the region
but, equally importantly,
the fact that their students, these young Dutch people,
usually don't know who is what,
makes it that much more natural for our students to work in mixed bands.
Something that I have found incredibly important,
especially in a place like Mitrovica where literally everything is political,
is to keep politics out of it and really keep them out.
You can't ask young people
to take their politics out the door if you have a secret political agenda.
They will sniff it out.
We connect people in Mitrovica
because it's normal and natural for people in one city to work together
but we're not trying to further the interest of any ethnic group.
There are enough people doing that
and we think these kids really deserve better.
Something that I've struggled with, personally,
is something that can be a little tricky
because it's hard enough to find good people
and also anybody would agree with me that we should be recruiting
on the basis of talent and not ethnicity.
But at the same time, it's been really important
for us to find a neutral working form.
A lot of mistakes are made in reconciliation projects
by internationals like myself
because we don't understand the subtleties of the situation.
And a lot of mistakes are also made by locals
because they don't have enough distance from the situation to stand above it.
At the rock school, we've always had a core management team
of one local from each side plus one international
supporting a mixed team of local teachers.
So we keep each other in balance.
You have to face the fact that you can't anything
by preaching to the choir.
You have to work with real people.
Now this sounds easy, I know,
but the implications have been anything but easy.
It meant that we had to work from two locations in Mitrovica
bringing criticism that we were actually reinforcing the divide
rather than bridging it.
And it meant that we had to open our doors to everybody,
not just the people who already agree with what we think.
And that includes ultra-nationalists,
neo-nazis and any political color.
because we believed that a solution to an impasse like the one in Mitrovica
is not going to come by just involving the people
who already think that things should be different.
You need to involve all kinds of people.
And it takes time,
but we have had some small success stories with these people too.
It's very hard to keep your prejudice
when you start working with people on the other side.
Now, the other thing,
working from two locations is something that we have to explain a lot
and there are a lot of misunderstandings about it.
I will try to explain it the way I see it.
Basically, there are two levels of problems,
if you want to oversimplify it.
The first is the kids' own prejudice and their unwillingness to work together.
In the beginning, this was all that we were focusing on,
but when we started to achieve results
and we saw that kids actually wanted to come together
because they made friends with the other side
or had a band that included members from the other side,
we ran into a second problem.
That is the pressure from their communities not to interact.
At this moment, it is simply not safe for the students
from the Mitrovica Rock School to take lessons in a single location.
We are trying to change what we can with gentle pushing and pulling,
but we're not willing to push it to the point
where we're actually endangering our young students or teachers
or making them severely uncomfortable.
A Dutch reporter once accused us of giving in to terrorism
because we turned down his request for an interview.
I find this arrogance beyond comprehension, really:
to require of teenagers on the other side of Europe
that they exhibit the kind of bravery that you will never be asked to show
in the face of dangers that you -- let's face it -- really don't understand,
at zero risk to yourself.
We've had to learn to say no to the press.
When The Architects, the band that you saw in the beginning,
fell apart, we realized that we were to blame.
We had thought that we needed the publicity
in order to secure the funding for the school or get bookings for the bands,
so we didn't give our kids protection from reporters
and reporters are, of course, after their own story
and once that's done, they're not so interested
in the well-being of the kids or the school or whatever.
After than happened, we had a complete press ban for over a year.
Since then, we've slightly reopened the doors to the press,
but we're incredibly careful and highly selective.
We think that one or two media reports per year
is enough to get the message out.
In any case, the most important thing is for the kids to know
that our focus is on them and their music.
What I have found the hardest, and what takes the hardest work,
is to go slow,
to stick around,
and not to expect quick results.
People in Mitrovica are divided because thousands of people
invested their energy plus millions and millions of euros into the conflict,
over several generations.
It really doesn't make sense to expect a one-week summer camp
to make a big difference, unless, of course, it's part of a bigger program.
Now, any NGO will tell you they would love to have long term projects
but they can't afford it because that's not how the funding is structured.
Most donors consider a one-year grant log term.
It is also really true that it is much more difficult to design your own project
and then keep developing it year after year.
But I think that it's the only thing that works,
and that's kind of the point, isn't it?
Think about it.
Every successful venture in non-conflict countries is long-term.
So why would these so-called hit-and-run projects
be the answer to the complicated issues in post-conflict regions?
This approach is soft, and it's slow, and it's subtle.
but it keeps it real and it works.
And there's nothing soft or subtle or slow about our bands
which I think speak for themselves.
I'm going to leave you with The Architects,
who are, by the way, back together again and still rocking hard.
Thank you.
(Applause)