Mitrovica is known for being a divided city. Primarily, there are Albanians in the South and Serbs in the North. The divide isn’t centered around a wall or a fence. There is actually a river that divides the city, although the geographic line can be easily traversed via multiple bridges. The main bridge has a Kosovo Police SUV that has sat there for so long that the tires hardly have air left in them. In a car, you may get briefly stopped but on foot there is freedom of movement.
When you cross the bridge, no one really notices although there may be a concealed bridge watcher watching you with binoculars and taking notes. Once you get in to the North, you are largely ignored and can walk around unhindered and unmolested. You may be asking why this is an issue, and hopefully in a later post this security aspect of Mitrovica North will be explained.
Anyway, we decided to check out a compound at the North end of the city, almost at the city limits, that houses the EU House, EULEX, UNMIK, UAM, OSCE, and other NGOs and international organizations. Our loitering of the premises was interrupted by a man at the top of one of those metal staircases that are sometimes attached to the outside of buildings. He asked us what we needed and we explained that we were grad students writing about Kosovo. He then told us out to seek the first floor behind a Raiffesen bank down the street towards the center of Mitrovica North. In Europe the first floor is usually what we would consider the second floor, but either way, we were not sure to whom we were directed (nor did we really care, just someone who would speak with us about Mitrovica).
Anyway we found the bank and indeed behind it were buzzers labeled with floor numbers. We buzzed the first floor and a Serb woman stuck her head out the window indicating that the door was already open. We went up the stairs to find something called the EU information center where we were greeted by a goateed Serb who told us that someone would be with us in a minute. He led us in to an office with a couple of computers that we were invited to use.
Of course it was he himself who came to see us and he began to give us a presentation on student programs offered by the EU in the University of Pristina, currently known as the University of Mitrovica: Tempus and Erasmus Mundus. Before speaking about Tempus and Erasmus Mundus, the University of Pristina is considered temporarily located in Mitrovica, but called the University of Mitrovica by the North and by Serbia. (There is a University of Pristina in Pristina, Kosovo however). There are 10 faculties, which in the US would be considered schools, such as philosophy, economics, etc. Briefly, Tempus helps modernize curriculums to EU standards while Erasmus is a European student exchange program, and this particular branch is looking to increase the exchange of Serbian students with other universities in Europe. After about a 15 minute speech on what Tempus and Erasmus Mundus is doing in Mitrovica North for the University, we then were able to explain the EU info center representative that we were students but not prospective students of the services he was explaining.
Yet we did learn that the University of Mitrovica/Kosovo is funded by the budget of the Ministry of Education in Serbia while the EU programs get grants from the EU Commission and the ECLO. Europeanizing their higher education obviously has to do with eventual EU accession of Serbia (and perhaps Kosovo); but it makes me wonder if they know that, barring partition of North Mitrovica to Serbia, this University is within Kosovo territory and would eventually join the EU as a Kosovo university rather than a Serbian University. The budget of Serbia is funding a University that may join the EU in a different country. One also wonders what the EU's logic here is, working with a University in Kosovo that gets its budget from Belgrade.
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