The editorial board of the trilingual Albanian-Serbian-English website “Little, Big People: A Documentary Repository of Albanian-Serbian Coexistence, 19th-21st Centuries” is pleased to announce our website is going live today at www.kosovo-ordinarypeople.com. The website brings together resources and information on positive examples of coexistence, cooperation and friendship between members of the two communities in Kosovo in the past.
Searching for positive examples of interethnic relations, our intention is not to fabricate or embellish the reality, but to contribute to its more complete understanding. Namely, today’s tabloid media and reckless ethnocentric historiography in both regions have already done enough to highlight the negative heritage and negative examples of Serbian-Albanian relations, and this has already become the standard mutual perception in people’s minds. We are searching for positive examples in order to offer them as a model for today and the future.
The material we present here is the result of cooperation between three NGOs: the Center for Historical Studies and Dialogue from Novi Sad, the Network of Peace Movement from Kamenica and CASA (Center for Affirmative Social Actions) from North Mitrovica, in the period of 2019-2022. The project has been supported from the beginning by the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Regional Office in Belgrade. In 2021, we also received support by the European Fund for the Balkans.
The website will be continuously updated with additional content (interviews, historical sources) that we came across in our research. We hope that it will contribute to a better understanding and cooperation between the two communities, whose members have managed, throughout history, to find a path towards coexistence and common life, regardless of the historical and political circumstances that surrounded them.
15. 02. 2022
The editorial board