The Gorani Community: Emigration and Identity in the Frozen Conflict Between Serbia and Kosovo

The Gorani Community in Kosovo

As a result of sustained migration, which affects all communities, the population of Dragash municipality has fallen from 39,435 to 28,896 over the past 25 years. Most Gorani now live elsewhere in Kosovo, in cities such as Prizren, Pejë and Pristina, or abroad in North Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, elsewhere in Europe and the United States. The same trend can be observed among the Gorani of North Macedonia and Albania. Although they are not recognised in official censuses there, migration and assimilation are believed to have significantly reduced their numbers, which two decades ago were estimated at 4,000 people in the Macedonian villages of Urvich and Jelovjane, and 7,500 across nine villages in Albania’s Kukës region.

“Living conditions have never been better in Dragash. There is more development and infrastructure than ever before: new water systems have been built, and there is not a single village without a paved road. Yet people are leaving the villages for the towns; in Opoja, half the population has moved to Prizren or Pristina,” says Hilmi Dauti, an ethnic Albanian from Dragash, a father of two, retired for the past seven years and a honey producer in his spare time. “My children, despite their education, cannot find work in Dragash. Here you can survive by looking after a single cow. There are farms, livestock, around a hundred people employed by the municipality, and jobs in cafés and supermarkets,” he says, listing the local options.

In another café in Brod, Ramadan, the owner, and Mirsad, a shepherd, believe there is “no future” in Dragash. Mirsad laments his bachelorhood, which he partly attributes to his profession. Shepherding, he says, has become stigmatised; it is seen as “a job for older people” and “not something women like”. “These days it’s almost shameful to have this profession, but I don’t have any other skills,” admits the Gorani shepherd before describing the lack of opportunities in the sector. “Livestock farming isn’t stable because there’s no market. Lamb is €12 a kilo, and people can’t afford it. I could keep 1,000 sheep, but I have nobody to sell them to, or middlemen want to make money by buying them from me cheaply.”

Sinan, who has lived in Belgium for more than twenty years, is the founder of the Belgian burger franchise Beastie, where the meat is seasoned according to his grandfather’s recipe. His grandfather also had to emigrate, though he headed south to Thessaloniki in Greece. It worked out well for him, just as it has for Sinan – tall, broad-shouldered and self-assured – who is spending his holidays in Brod. “We want industry. We want economic capacity. Cheese from the Šar Mountains has won many awards, but we have no way of distributing it. We need solutions,” he says, calling for measures to halt the exodus from a community renowned for its pastries, flaky dough and börek.

Unlike Semin, Sinan believes that roots always call people back, and he is convinced that the Gorani will never completely abandon Brod. He points to himself as an example: he returns every year and hopes that his daughters will do the same in future. It is an idyllic image of gatherings and celebration, one that belongs to spring and summer, when the diaspora returns, marriage proposals are made, weddings take place, and local residents earn some extra income. Winter, by contrast, is harsh and grey, with scarcely any people – and very few young people – left behind. Many are forced into a cycle of circular labour migration, spending these months working elsewhere in Europe so that they can live in Brod for the rest of the year.

Ethnic Patronage

Across the Balkans, and not only in Kosovo, the most talented people are invariably drawn to foreign companies or universities, while many others end up as cheap, itinerant labour in Europe’s fields and factories. After all, three months’ wages in Germany are equivalent to an entire year’s income in the Balkans. People also have little faith that politicians, who perpetuate a corrupt system, will change the status quo. As a result, they face two choices: adapt to a clientelist system or emigrate. In Kosovo, however, the problem has an additional dimension: because of Serbian interference, patronage also carries ethnic overtones.

“The political situation is a problem. In a village like Brod there are five parties: Gorani, Serbian, Albanian, Bosniak and Turkish. Their aim is to divide us. If we were united, we could demand more rights,” says Sinan. “It’s our own fault. For money, we side with either Serbs or Albanians. If you say you’re Bosniak, you get money and jobs from Kosovo; if you say you’re Gorani, you get them from Serbia,” adds Semin.

He points out that in winter the only work available is at a nearby ski resort, which attracts around 2,000 visitors every weekend. Yet Brod benefits very little from it: it is the Albanian community that runs the slopeside hotel equipped with all the necessary services.

Since the end of the Kosovo war in 1999, Serbia has no longer governed the territory, but it continues to exert influence in Kosovo’s ten Serb-majority municipalities, in Mitrovica and the various enclaves, as well as in territories inhabited by Roma and other minorities such as the Gorani. As a result, parallel education and healthcare structures still exist and are used by different communities. In Brod, Semin estimates that 60% of the community attends Serbian schools and therefore may never learn Albanian or fully integrate into Kosovo’s institutions. That is precisely Serbia’s objective. In order to maintain the frozen conflict, it provides public-sector jobs, influences the private sector and distributes subsidies, pensions and other benefits through a highly politicised patronage system.

“Even today, Serbia continues to fund communities. People remain connected through economic interests, access to pensions and social benefits. Serbia finances schools and hospitals, and in the negotiations [between Kosovo and Serbia] it is not only Serbian interests that are at stake, but also those of the Gorani and other minorities in Kosovo,” says Uzair Hamza, who has spent the past 25 years heading the office responsible for protecting community rights in Dragash municipality.

“A child attending a Kosovo-system school will learn that the KLA/UÇK liberated Kosovo, while a child attending a Serbian school will learn that it was a terrorist organisation. Moreover, as someone working to promote integration, I cannot employ people with Serbian secondary-school diplomas in the municipality because those qualifications are not recognised.”

The pressure exerted by both sides has its most obvious and painful consequences in integration, but there are also more mundane examples of how everyday life is made more difficult. In its efforts to curb Serbian influence, Albin Kurti’s Kosovo government has banned the withdrawal of Serbian salaries, pensions and social benefits within Kosovo, forcing recipients to travel to the border. This carries a financial cost that is particularly burdensome in Dragash, where residents must cross the entire country in order to reach Serbia.

As a result, new problems are piled on top of old, entrenched and frozen ones, making daily life increasingly difficult. For young people, emigration often appears to be the only viable solution.

“My father had to choose a side – the Bosniak one – in order to find a job and start a family. I don’t want that life, which is why I’m leaving,” says Semin, visibly weary. He explains that an agency charging him 10% of his salary for six months has arranged everything for his new life in Germany, from accommodation to employment.

A Contested Identity

In religious terms, the Gorani are one of the Slavic Muslim communities of the Balkans. In Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey they are known as Pomaks. In North Macedonia, as Torbeši. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, they are Bosniaks. Owing to the geographical distance separating them, among other factors, these Slavic Muslim communities were not historically one people or tribe, beyond sharing a South Slavic ethnic origin and the Islamic faith.

Before the arrival of Turkic peoples and the Ottomans in the Balkans, most of these communities were Christian. Some of them, as is believed to have been the case with the Gorani, embraced Bogomilism, a Christian sect persecuted by the orthodoxy of the Byzantine Empire and by the Bulgarian and Serbian kingdoms. This repression, which forced the Gorani into mountainous, rugged and isolated areas such as Brod, helped pave the way for their gradual conversion to Islam from the fifteenth century onwards, particularly to the heterodox and syncretic Bektashi Sufi tradition on which the Ottoman Empire relied in the Balkans.

Today, these Slavic Muslim communities each possess their own distinct characteristics in the countries where they live, although they share disputes linked to competing identity projects and assimilation. In Kosovo, the Gorani enjoy recognised rights, but they also suffer the consequences of the frozen conflict with Serbia and face an identity dispute with the Bosniak community, which argues that the Gorani are Bosniaks who drifted apart under Serbian influence. Uzair Hamza is adamant on this point: they are one people; they are all Bosniaks.

“In 1993, during the Bosnian war, Milošević sought to create ethnic groups in order to divide us. Since it was not easy to be Bosniak in Serbia, the Gorani identity emerged in Gora. Later, UNMIK blindly accepted this division, and the Serbs achieved their objective: dividing us,” Hamza recalls. “Political interests have led to the recognition of a group based on a geographical region, Gora, but we are one nation. We are Bosniaks,” he insists.

Officially, Dragash is home to 2,900 Bosniaks and 7,828 Gorani. The Gorani community also speaks of an identity shift, although in the opposite direction to Hamza’s account: following the Kosovo war, some Gorani began identifying as Bosniaks out of fear.

“We simply want to live in peace and enjoy our rights. We are not Bosniaks, we are not Serbs, we are not Bulgarians. We are Gorani, and we have been here for a very long time. We began embracing Islam in the thirteenth century; in Mlikë there is a mosque that predates the Ottoman Empire. Bosniaks, by contrast, did not convert to Islam until the fourteenth century. So how can we be Bosniaks?” asks Sinan.

His remarks point to another actor in the dispute: Bulgaria, which considers the Gorani – like the Macedonians and the Pomaks – to be part of the Bulgarian nation.

During the Ottoman Empire, with a few exceptions, communities were organised around the Abrahamic faiths. Later, in Yugoslavia, censuses recognised certain identities but included neither a Bosniak nor a Gorani category, subsuming them into other groups or under the designation “Muslims”. As Yugoslavia began to collapse, many communities sought official recognition. Some had longstanding historical claims, while others were more recent; some were highly politicised, while others emerged more organically. Among them was the Gorani community, which, like the Balkan Egyptians and the Ashkali, seized the moment to secure recognition in Kosovo.

https://www.nationalia.info/new/11765/the-gorani-community-emigration-and-identity-in-the-frozen-conflict-between-serbia-and-kos