Kosovo Theatre Director: Art Must Aid Post-Conflict Reconciliation

It was 1989 when theatre director and playwright Enver Petrovci locked himself in his apartment in Belgrade and started putting ink on paper for a play that would then go on to gather dust for many years to come.

The play would only be performed in a theatre around three decades later, long after Petrovci left the Serbian capital, and after the wars that devastated the region in the 1990s.

Entitled 'Creoles of the Balkans', the play explores the experience of children who were born of mixed ethnic backgrounds in the Balkans, a place where nationalism, ethnic divisions and hatred are deeply rooted.

In Petrovci's play, a young 'creole' called Hekuran, who has an Albanian father and a Serb mother, is being questioned by a police inspector who is also from a mixed family.

After he is released, the plot relocates to a basement where Hekuran is working with a group involved in subversive activities against the Yugoslav regime. But because of his ethnically mixed origin, he is perceived as a 'spy' in the eyes of the group.

"I felt the regime was collapsing, I saw it in how people kept communicating between them," said Petrovci, who is now 66, recalling the period in which he started writing the play, not long before the Yugoslav wars began.

"I had friends who had parents of mixed ethnicities and they were most careful ones. Those who were nationalists started to talk openly about their views, they were liberated," he told BIRN in an interview in Pristina.

Petrovci said that people with mixed ethnic backgrounds were privileged during the reign of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, but the situation began to reverse itself after Tito died in 1980 and the foundations of the Yugoslav federation began to be shaken by the rise...