But he doesn’t ask. “Some man came to pay for your rooms while you were gone,” he offers instead. “I can give you a receipt.”
The Ali Baba is that kind of place. It’s where you stay if you want no questions asked. Or if you want to see a rare example of multiethnic harmony in a province that has become a byword for ethnic tension and conflict.
So while our translator shouts about renewed fighting near the village of Shoshaj, we race up and down the hotel stairs throwing bags into the car and leaving clumps of gooey brown gunk all over the carpeted stairs.
Selami smiles. “You better come have a coffee,” he says calmly. “I think you need it.”
He doesn’t know who we are-spies, “business” people, United Nation’s workers, journalists-and he doesn’t try to find out. But he has figured out the most important part: that we’ve been in Serbia illegally for the past three days.
He also realizes we may be able to give him information about the latest events in neighboring Serbia’s Presevo Valley, where ethnic Albanian rebels have overrun a demilitarized buffer zone and are clashing with government troops from Macedonia amid fears that the Balkans conflict will widen yet again.
The Sadikus-who moved to Kosovo from the Presevo city of Bujanovac several decades ago-are worried about family members still living in the disputed territory and Selami wants to know what we have seen.
We tell him of lightly-armed rebel fighters squared off against better equipped Serbian forces, of gunfights spreading from village to village, and international efforts to end the year-long violence.
“We have already had that experience here, and now we have this,” Selami tells us, making a sweeping gesture around the Ali Baba’s poorly lit coffee bar.
Sandwiched in between an empty lot and a car repair shop, the Ali Baba Hotel is something of a dump. Garbage cans sit right next to the entrance, and the building looks nothing like the exotic, Eastern adventure the name conjures up in the mind.
But beyond the peeling paint, power shortages and leaking toilet, the small 15-room establishment may be a symbol of how the battered province could start to move away from the pain of the past.
Outside the hotel, Kosovo’s U.N.-led administration has spent the last two years struggling to rebuild a province ravaged in a conflict rooted in Serbia’s crackdown on ethnic Albanians.
Bombings, kidnappings, shootings and clashes during demonstrations have served to further entrench mistrust between Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority and minority groups like Serbs, Gypsies, Turks and Bosnians.
Though the war ended in June 1999, violence continues throughout the area. Bombings, kidnappings, shootings and clashes during demonstrations have served to further entrench mistrust between Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority and minority groups like Serbs, Gypsies, Turks and Bosnians. Last month, 10 Serbs died when unknown assailants blew up a bus bringing them from Serbia into Kosovo to visit family members.
But inside the Ali Baba, which sits on the edge of “Serb Quarter” of Gjilan (Gnjilane in Serbian) the groups mix freely. The Sadiku brothers are Albanian, the housekeeper and handyman are Bulgarians, the night-shift guard is Turkish.
“Everyone is welcome here,” says owner Behluli Sadiku, as he moves from table to table in the hotel’s small coffee bar switching from Serbian to Albanian to Turkish to converse with different groups.
Guests are equally varied. A clientele ranging from truck drivers to French diplomats traveling incognito willingly pays $20 a night for the Ali Baba’s clean-but cramped-double rooms with paper-thin walls, doors that sometimes won’t shut and a shared bathroom that doesn’t include toilet paper.
“We just like to watch all the people come and go,” says one of the hotel’s Albanian neighbors. “It’s very interesting.”
Of course, the hotel is not completely isolated from the tension and wariness outside. Conversation stops, for example, when two young men walk into the coffee bar and nod at the Sadiku brothers before turning to a corner table. “Dober dan,” says one in Serbian. The room sighs in unison and everyone returns to their coffees.
Selami Sadiku, too, has his own concerns. Two of his sons and their families joined the mass exodus of refugees who fled Kosovo in fear of retaliation after the 1999 NATO bombings of Serbia. He has not seen them since; now he clutches a picture of two granddaughters and tells us he hopes to get a visa to visit them soon.
The Serbs have fled, too-more than 100,000 have left Kosovo since the bombing stopped almost two years ago. Even now, an average of two families a week leave the violence-plagued province. At present, slightly more than 13,000 Serbs remain in the Gjilan municipality, most of them in enclaves like the village of Portes. Two large KFOR checkpoints staffed by Greeks and Americans from KFOR, the NATO-led peacekeeping force, flank a large Orthodox Church guarding the village against attacks by more extreme elements of Kosovar society.
In the city of Gjilan itself there are less than 400 Serbs left. Most of them are elderly and, according to a recent report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), “housebound by fear and totally dependent on humanitarian assistance.”
“My next door neighbor is a Serb, and I told him if anyone gives him problems he should come to me,” says Selami, who believes the Serbs responsible for atrocities against ethnic Albanians here left the province a long time ago.
“Those who remain should be left alone to live in peace,” he feels. “All of us deserve peace after what we’ve been through.”
Amazingly, the hotel-which is full almost every night-has had no ethnically related incidents since it opened five months ago. Now the brothers are planning to open a second hotel in a few weeks.
“It will be small, only five rooms, but maybe this is all just the start of something bigger,” Selami says hopefully. Kosovo’s prospects may look bleak at the moment, but that kind of optimism can only help.
