Photo: Atdhe Mulla.
The play Negotiating Peace had its premiere at Pristina’s Oda theatre in October, before going on tour.
Wars eventually end, but the peace that follows is often uneasy. Art can bring some laughs into people’s lives and add to the accumulation of small things that make a more lasting difference.
Philip Oltermann writes at the Guardian, “When political leaders present war as the only solution, it is up to artists to remind people that finding peace is still possible. That is the starting point for a Kosovo-based theatre company, Qendra Multimedia. …
“The lesson it draws, and the genre it chooses to present its findings, is unexpected: the Kosovan playwright Jeton Neziraj’s Negotiating Peace shows the diplomacy of peace as a farce, albeit a necessary one.
“Dramatizing roundtable talks between the fictional warring countries of Banovia and Unmikistan, the play is a frenzied comedy in which vain generals can only be lured to the negotiating table by promises of Hollywood films celebrating their actions. Opposing parties get drunk while negotiating demilitarized zones, mix up drafts of ceasefire agreements and sign on the wrong dotted line. Maps of disputed territories are partitioned with paper scissors until holy lands turn into showers of confetti. …
“ ‘When you talk about serious things, you must not talk about it in a serious way,’ said Orest Pastukh, a Ukrainian actor who is one of five members of Qendra’s multinational cast with first-hand experience of their country going to war. ‘If we would speak seriously about war and peace, everybody would go mad.’
“The play … is loosely based on the Dayton accords that in 1995 brought a halt to the three-and-a-half-year Bosnian war, the deadliest chapter in the breakup of Yugoslavia. At its premiere at Pristina’s Oda theatre last week, it also mixed in elements of the peace settlement that four years later ended the war in Kosovo. …
“To end that conflict between Serbs and Kosovo-Albanians in the breakaway province, Nato acted more swiftly and aggressively than it had done in the Bosnian war. In downtown Pristina, gratitude for the US’s assertive leadership in the peace talks is still palpable. There is a statue of a waving Bill Clinton, a bust of Madeleine Albright and a street named after Richard Holbrooke. …
“It may seem surprising, therefore, that in Negotiating Peace, moral certitudes come wrapped in sarcasm and not in pathos. The Holbrooke-type character, Joe Robertson, played by Harald Thompson Rosenstrøm, a Norwegian, is not just a ‘beast of peace’ but also ‘a schizophrenic, a brutal Mazarin.’ …
“ ‘When I read Holbrooke’s memoir To End a War, I realized that the negotiating table was also a kind of stage,’ Neziraj said on the eve of his play’s premiere. ‘And a dramatic stage on which actors were acting quite bizarrely,’ involving negotiators staging walkouts and new political borders ‘being drawn on napkins.’
“He said studying the Dayton agreement, as well as the Oslo accords signed between Israel and Palestine in 1993, had robbed him of the illusion that peace talks were structured conversations led by experts in their fields. ‘They are the fruit of the wills of individuals at a certain moment,’ Neziraj said. …
” ‘War doesn’t end when you lay down your arms,’ Neziraj said. ‘We in Kosovo live in an interim state, which is not war but neither a fully fledged peace.’ …
“Neziraj is aware of his own cynicism, and Negotiating Peace eventually manages to snap out of it. Towards the end of the play, the summit looks like a failure: faith in the UN is shot to shreds, there are calls for a second conference organized by the EU.
The chief negotiator appeals to the audience for advice to break the deadlock.
“As the play tours around the Balkans, the company intends to invite different real-life witnesses on to the stage. In Pristina the job fell to Aida Cerkez, a veteran Associated Press correspondent who covered the siege of Sarajevo from the Bosnian capital. Her 10-minute monologue changes the mood of the play.
“ ‘The only precondition for peace is to get everybody around the same table,’ she said after the curtain call. ‘And to get everybody around the same table, you have to militarily weaken the dominant side. As long as one side can think it can win, there’s no reason to sit down at the negotiating table. In Bosnia, that condition was met by Nato bombing. …
” ‘Peace is not the absence of armed conflict,’ she said. ‘In Bosnia we are living the absence of armed conflict, not peace. But that’s not nothing. It’s a lot.’ “
More at the Guardian, here. No paywall.
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