No, it's just last year's intervention project.
"On the road to Pristina, we passed slum dwellers hawking smuggled cigarettes and phone cards, trash heaps crawling with feral dogs, shotgun shacks crammed together like bad teeth, and, intermittently, sites of glimmering new construction. Here and there, protected by sandbags and concertina wire, were the offices and barracks of the United Nations and Nato, some structures little better than shipping containers built to house the international bodies that came to save the land. The hot June air was heavy with petrol fumes, the stereo blared rap music in Albanian over pounding bass lines, and in the distance the red sun was sinking behind snow-draped mountains. My driver, Scratch, jockeyed through traffic down one and two-lane roads pocked by potholes wide enough to swallow our blue BMW sedan. Scratch said that he was armed and told me not to worry. “You never know,” he said.
Scratch swerved the car around a cow, then a military vehicle equipped with a swivel gun. The speedometer clicked upward, and a man came into our sight, staggering down the edge of the road, carrying in his arms what appeared to be the limp body of a woman. The man shook his head at the passing traffic. Soon I could see that the woman’s head was bleeding, her eyes and mouth wide open, and her left hand dangling twisted and limp as if her sun-burnt skin were the only thing keeping it attached to her arm. Shouldn’t we stop? I wondered. We didn’t; no one did. Cars and trucks cut around the man and woman, kicking up tiny clouds of dust, and then past two crashed-up hatchbacks in a weedy ditch, where three men stood gesturing at the darkening sky.
“Welcome to Kosovo,” Scratch said.
The wreckage of intervention
Christopher Stewart
The National
July 10, 2009
Technorati Tags: Confusing?, Foreign Policy
