From Kosovo with Love

After 700 years of ethnic tension, despite 50 years of relative peace under Tito's communist Yugoslavia, the country began to fragment along ethnic lines. Slovenia and Croatia were the first to separate in 1992, followed by Bosnia in 1993. But each time Yugoslavia shrunk in size, the dominant Serbian ethnic group reacted in protest, often dispatching their military to stymie the inevitable.

Inspired by the successes in other former Yugoslav satellite states in achieving independence, the previously dormant Kosovar Albanians began to actively resist sovereign Serbia. The Albanian population in Kosovo, following in the footsteps of the other Yugoslav minorities, was seeking independence. Two primary factions emerged. The first was the Democratic League of Kosovo, a nationalist-separatist group led by Ibrahim Rugova. Gathering most of its support from urban Albanians, it managed to form a parallel government system that provided to the best of its ability education and health services as well as political leadership. It furthermore eschewed violence as a means of achieving its goals, thus bringing it into conflict with the second faction, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). This second faction made up of mainly rural Albanians as well as a large portion of the diaspora community used similar tactics to the Serbian militias. Populations were displaced, rape and murder were regular occurrences.

From the Serb perspective, Kosovo was historically the heartland of Serbian folklore, the centrepiece of Serbian identity - it was on that land that Prince Lazar fought off the Turks in 1389, on that land that the Serbian nation was born and persevered, and on that land that the Serbian Orthodox Church laid its roots. Serbia could not let Kosovo go without a fight. As Serbian nationalists chanted in protest, “Kosovo is Serbia!” As in Bosnia and parts of Croatia, the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) as well as semi-independent militias fought to prevent Kosovar secession. Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosević committed countless crimes against humanity in Kosovo and elsewhere.

As the humanitarian situation for Kosovar Albanians grew dire, the international community grew compelled to intervene in order to prevent a potential genocide, as had happened in Bosnia only five years prior. But conditions worsened, and in March 1999 a coordinated NATO bombing campaign raided Serbian infrastructure in its heartland and Kosovo.

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In this game, you will be playing as Liam McKenzie, a detective working for the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), investigating the high-profile murder of the wife of a high ranking KLA commander (a fictional character). You will have to navigate amongst severe ethnic tensions in the region in order to solve the murder and keep the tensions at bay.

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This is your victim: 34 year old Vesna Acimović, wife of Stanislav Acimović who is the senior KLA commander in Kosovo.

She was shot and killed while eating dinner with her husband at the restaurant Pjata in central Podujevo, near Pristina.

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You find yourself in yet another meeting at the KVM headquarters in Pristina. The date is January 16th, 1999, and you look sideways to see the skies shelling soft flakes of snow battering on the other end of the one-way mirror, outside. You miss your home back in Canada, as do the other 99 Canadian personnel of this 2000-person mission.

Turning your attention back inside, you listen to more briefs from your various colleagues, who were stationed across the frustrated Serbian province of Kosovo. They talk about meetings held with journalists, politicians, and locals, mostly held in private: in hotel rooms, parks, and restaurants. They also talk about the rate of emigration among Serbians, and sporadic mass rallies held by ethnic Albanians across the country… the situation does not look pretty.

Before your turn to debrief the group on the tensions in your designated Regional Centre, the North-eastern province of Podujevo, you are summoned by the KVM Mission Director, Brigadier-General J.R. Michel Maisonneuve. In privacy, he informs you that the wife of a high-ranking KLA commander has just been murdered near your district of Podujevo.

Maisonneuve: “<i>It’s a mess out there. The Albanians are blaming the Serbs, the Serbs are blaming the Albanians – the streets are a mess. For god’s sake, this might just be the next Sarajevo</i>.”

You stay silent as you think about what this means. There’s enough political gunpowder in the air for anything to explode, at any moment. This may just be the largest spark yet ignited.

Maisonneuve: “<i>We’re afraid things are going to get out of control… and that KLA commander, he’s not happy… I spoke to him 5 minutes ago, he’s fuming. He knew what becoming a political figure might mean, I mean, look at the Jasharis… and he asked us to unleash NATO, as if we can just summon the troops!</i>”

He guffaws with laughter. You laugh too, because he’s your superior... but does he really expect the KVM to get to the bottom of this? For the past 5 months, since KVM’s inception, every Verification task you pursued has been cut short by a breach of ceasefire. This situation must absolutely get under control, you reason, before it escalates. But do you really think you can make a difference?

Maisonneuve: “<i>McKenzie, we need you out there. You’re the most qualified guy on our team, and if there’s anyone who can get anything done… it’s you.</i>”

It’s time to make a decision. Do you go to the crime scene straight away or leave it until the following morning? It’s 9PM on a Saturday.