South Serbia Albanians Eye New Faculties with Suspicion

Belgrade presents new Albanian-language university facilities as a vital boost to an under-developed region – but some local politicians aren’t satisfied.

Each working day between 7 and 10 am, student Albert Aliu wanders the streets of the small town of Medvedja, waiting for his lectures at the Faculty of Economics.

The faculty is one of the two newly founded higher educational institutions in South Serbia where ethnic Albanian students can hear lectures in their mother tongue for the first time.

“I have only one bus and it reaches Medvedja at 7am. I have nothing to do till the beginning of lectures, so I walk around,” the freshman from the nearby village of Tupale told Balkan Insight.

Strolling round at those hours, Aliu meets only the street dogs that run around between the billboards advertising the benefits of the various international organisations that have assisted in the reconstruction of infrastructure in Medvedja.

However, external assistance has not been on a sufficient scale to remove the greyness from the centre of one of the poorest towns in Serbia, with a population of around 10,000, a stumbling economy and from where people constantly migrate to other towns.

It is partly because the town is so deprived that the government decided to open branches of the Faculty of Economics and Law School in Nis here.

The government reached their decision to open the faculties in July 2009 and the plan was realised in less than three months.

During the ceremonial opening, the Serbian Prime Minister, Mirko Cvetkovic, gave away 50 student grade books. Nine went to young Albanians, the first students in Serbia ever offered the chance to listen to lectures in Albanian.

The government has presented the opening of the faculty in Medvedja as a contribution to the establishment of inter-ethnic trust in the tense border region, which saw armed conflicts in 2001 between security forces and a local Albanian guerrilla force, the Liberation Army of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja.

The authorities see the project as proof of Belgrade's determination to integrate Albanians from the three municipalities into the wider community.

At the opening ceremonies, Cvetkovic said a step forward had been made in assisting the development of one the most underdeveloped municipalities in Serbia and in creating a new opportunity for students to learn and study at European standards while living and working in their own community.

Ethnic Albanians from Serbia currently study in large numbers in Kosovo, but Serbia does not recognise diplomas from Pristina University, for example, on account of the dispute between Serbia and Kosovo over Kosovo’s status.

Many Albanians with university diplomas from Kosovo cannot find any jobs in Serbia and permanently leave the country. The establishment of Albanian-language college lectures in South Serbia is intended to address this grievance.

However, some local Albanian politicians are hostile. Their complaint is that the faculties have been opened in the town with the smallest percentage of Albanians of the three – and they resent the fact that the lectures are given by Serbian professors whose words have to be translated.

They boycotted the ceremonial opening, which was attended, beside Prime Minister Cvetkovic, by the Minister of Education, Zarko Obradovic, and the head of the government’s Coordination Body for Southern Serbia, Milan Markovic.

Ragmi Mustafa, mayor of Presevo, 150 kilometres from Medvedja, where a 90 per cent of locals are Albanian, says real Albanians need to teach at the new faculties – not Serbs using translators.

"We have a good example of this in Novi Sad, where Hungarian professors lecture in Hungarian,” he said, of the university in Serbia’s multi-ethnic northern province, “or in Podgorica [in Montenegro], where professors from the faculty in Skadar [in northern Albania] lecture in Albanian.”  

Jonuz Musliu, speaker of the local assembly in the neighbouring municipality of Bujanovac, where about 60 per cent of population is Albanian, agrees. The faculties in Medvedja won’t be of use to most Albanians from Southern Serbia.

Musliu claims the decision to site them in Medvedja, where Albanians make up only about a quarter of the population, proves Belgrade does not truly care about the integration of Albanians. “This is just a whitewash,” he said.

In fact, the government has already pledged to open similar facilities in Bujanovac and Presevo.

In Medvedja, a Serbian flag waves in front of the Law School and Faculty of Economics, one of few new building constructed in the town in the last ten years.

The building houses several classrooms. Nine Albanian students listen to lectures by Serbian professors from Nis whose words are then translated.

“The interpreter at the Economics Faculty has only just begun working,” Albert says, “ and we still don't have textbooks in Albanians due to technical problems”, he adds, heading into the lecture hall.

However, law professor Slobodan Nikolic says he and his colleagues are satisfied with the working conditions, as are most students who, he says, show great interest in their studies.

Asked about the problems with the textbooks, Nikolic says only parts of the books have been translated into Albanian while other parts are still being translated.

“The important thing is that the teaching is carried out according to accredited programmes and that it has the same content as the faculties in Nis,” Nikolic says. “We try to maintain the lectures and exercises at the same level as at the Law School in Nis.”

Not all Albanians need translators, in any case. While waiting for interpreters to get up to speed, and for the translated textbooks to arrive, some students say the content of the lectures is more important than their form.

“I listen to the lectures in Serbian. I know it well and don’t need a translation,” law student Razija Jakupi says.

The coordinator of the Law School, Professor Zoran Ciric, explains that the institution opened as a result of an agreement between the faculty, the municipality of Medvedja and the government, whereby each side accepted defined obligations.

“The obligation regarding interpretation [of lectures] was taken by the Coordination Body. We cannot organise lectures in Albanian,” he says.

The condition set by the Law School in Nis for opening a branch in Medvedja was that professors from that faculty must give all the lectures.

“We don’t want to hire visiting professors. If someone wants to take professors from other faculties… we would walk out of the whole project,” Professor Ciric added.
Medvedja mayor Slobodan Draskovic sees the opening of the faculty as a new chance for a town where only 1,500 people have jobs.

He now plans to turn the building of the Lepce mine, closed a long time ago, into a student dormitory and so return some life to Medvedja, which has seen more deaths than births in the last six years.

“Both Serbs and Albanians are leaving Medvedja owing to the poverty,” he said. “Opening the faculty is a way to reduce migration.”

However, the opening of the faculty, which beside nine Albanians has another 50 Serbs and Roma, still not changed everyday life in Medvedja all that much.

Apart from those students that live in Medvedja, the other Albanian students travel in every day from the towns in which they live, by car or bus, often for hours.

After lectures they hurry back home. Local businesses do not derive much benefit from the opening of the faculties, apart from the owners of some cafés that the students and professors frequent between lectures.

Draskovic’s hopes that the faculties will revive his town are also dampened by the news that the government intends to open similar faculties in Bujanovac and Presevo. That means the departments in Medvedja may lose their Albanian students.

Zoran Kosanovic is a journalist from Nis. This article was published with the support of the British embassy in Belgrade as part of BIRN's Training and Reporting Project.