The Balkans: Europe's Forgotten Frontier (Review)

In this two-part BBC series (first shown in February 2025), reporter Katya Adler, who covered the conflicts of the 1990s, returns to the Balkans to see how the region has changed, nearly thirty years on from the end of the Bosnian War.  It’s a whistlestop two-hour tour - part travelogue, part social commentary - with archive footage dotted here and there, and a brief history of the region’s 20^th century.  Adler takes us on a fascinating, insightful journey through the former Yugoslav states of Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, as well as neighbouring Romania and Albania.

The main message that the series brings home is the way outside powers are currently competing for interest in the Balkans, from Chinese investment in infrastructure, to Islamic countries funding the building of new mosques, to Russian political and religious ties (in one disturbing segment, a Bosnian Serb motorcycle group fly Russian flags with Putin’s face on it). It appears that the rest of Europe is losing the battle for influence in the Balkans, hence the tagline of the ‘forgotten frontier’.

 

The theme of wounds not healed is also prominent throughout the two episodes.  Shots of pockmarked buildings, a visit to the Srebrenica memorial and interviews with Kosovar police about the Serb incursion into Kosovo in September 2023 all serve to show how raw the region still is.  There has been no real closure for many of the victims of the wars, which is undoubtedly linked to the fact that many Serbs still see themselves as the victims.  Interviews with Kosovar Serbs were eye-opening - especially the vitriol directed towards the British for their role in the Kosovo War - but most surprising was the implication that it remains a mainstream view amongst Serbs that Kosovo belongs to Serbia.

 

The thread running through all the segments on the former Yugoslav countries is the unspoken question: how many generations removed must we get before people can move on?  Adler interviews some 14-year-olds Bosnians (speaking excellent English, of course) who argue passionately against the segregated Muslim/Croat school they attend.  Does this signify hope for the future?  This documentary would seem to suggest not.  There is now whole generation of adults who were born after the wars ended and yet underlying concerns about tension in both Bosnia and Kosovo pervade.

 

Adler also visits Romania, where the appeal of the super-rich is drawing many of its people back again, despite corruption and criminality in some areas, and Albania, with its newly flourishing tourist industry, but large numbers of migrants leaving.  Slovenia, North Macedonia and Montenegro don’t get a visit.  Slovenia, perhaps, is understandable, since with its virtually ethnically homogenous population and close ties to western Europe, it avoided the conflicts of its Yugoslav neighbours, seceding in 1991 with relatively little bloodshed.  However, I would certainly be interested in a further series, possibly examining the issues between North Macedonia and Greece, as well as Montenegro’s nationalist ties to Serbia.

 

This was a varied and comprehensive watch, as much as it is possible to truly examine such a complex region in just two hours. Like many documentaries of its type, it seeks to present a certain point of view, and interviews the right people to accomplish this.  Personally, I’ve not met that many vehement nationalists in any Balkan country, so it’s hard to know whether the voices heard here are those of the majority or the minority.  However, if you’re interested in the Balkans, this is a must-watch addition to the discourse on the region.  If you know nothing about these countries, it’s a great introduction to their history, culture and politics.  As Adler entreats us – let’s not forget about the Balkans.

 

The Balkan: Europe’s Forgotten Frontier is available on BBC iPlayer.

Pristina: A City Break with a Twist

Bulevardi Bil Klinton

It is a strange yet powerful experience to visit a country that has been in existence barely a decade. Kosovo has been a nation state for only as long as I have been an adult.  Having visited its Balkan neighbours many times, I was keen to pay a visit and so I did, in August of last year.  Arriving in Pristina just as dawn broke, after a surreal, overcrowded night bus journey from Podgorica involving snatched, uncomfortable sleep and much shouting in Albanian at the border, only the straining of the engine betraying the landscape outside in the darkness, Kosovo’s capital seemed something of a ghost town as we wandered empty residential streets clutching a Google maps printout in search of our accommodation.

But after much needed sleep, we ventured into the city centre.  Unlike its neighbouring countries, the streets of Pristina were crowded with new and expensive cars bearing an assortment of international number plates.  The constant flow of traffic was punctuated by ubiquitous Balkan horn honking and, after the sweltering, oppressive heat of Montenegro, the temperature was a pleasant 25 degrees with a cooling breeze.  Bill Clinton greeted us cheerily from atop his plinth as we made our way up his titular Bulevardi.

More than any other Balkan capital, Pristina is an international city. It is a city unashamed in its gratitude to its American saviours – Bill Clinton has his boulevard, Madeleine Albright a square. The Stars and Stripes fly alongside the deliberately uncontentious Kosovar flag and US multinationals slap their brands across the city.  Nowhere was this more ironically obvious than the Coca Cola stall pumping out turbo folk and obscuring the much-photographed Newborn monument, updated with the golden digits 1 and 0 to mark Kosovo’s tenth birthday.  It is perhaps true that this monument, in all its chipped, graffitied glory, encapsulates everything that is conflicted about this tiny new nation.

Flags, as they so often do, play an important role in national identity here.  As visible as the gold and blue flag of Kosovo (colours and design chosen to offend no one), is the black and red of the Albanian flag. It functions almost as a de facto dual national flag and signifies the controversial history of this small country that was so quickly taken to the heart of an international community anxious not to screw up another Balkan war so soon after Bosnia.  Uniformed soldiers, wearing the patches of their home countries on their sleeves, stroll the streets as another reminder that all is not so rosy beneath the surface.

Kosovo's National Library (with abandoned church in background)

An enormous, ostentatious Orthodox church newly erected in the centre of Pristina seems to be the ethnic elephant in the religious room, since no one appears keen to discuss their Serbian neighbours.  A more accurate metaphor might be the derelict church beside the mesmerisingly striking national library, where trees grow from long-gone windows. At the national museum, an enthusiastic guide with near-perfect English was keen to show us their mementos of war and made no apology for his hatred of the Serbs nor his hero-worship of Adem Jashari, leading martyr of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army).  In 1999, the Serbs had run out of international sympathy, their leadership having spent the best part of the 1990s positioning them as the bad guys, and so the suffering of the Kosovo Serbs in KLA reprisals is conveniently forgotten.  One wonders if Kosovo can truly move its young nation forward without acknowledging this, though recent proposals for land swaps with Serbia might just clamp a convenient lid of denial on the issue forever, if the swaps can settle the dispute that is preventing both Serbia and Kosovo from joining the European Union.

Ibrahim Rugova looks down over Bulevardi Nena Tereze

If the city centre was a little more awake than the outskirts, it certainly burst alive at night.  Down the pedestrianised Bulevardi Nëna Terezë (named for Mother Teresa, another local hero), the air was full of the smell of singed corn on the cob, fanned over flames until it began to pop, the sweet smell of candyfloss and omnipresent Balkan cigarette smoke.  The sounds of the call to prayer mingled with the squeaks of toy dogs with demonic eyes. Children played amongst brightly lit jets of water and zipped around on battery powered ride-along jeeps. Watching over the crowds with fatherly benevolence loomed statues and photographs of Ibrahim Rugova, Kosovo’s first president.

A handful of notable buildings aside, Pristina’s attraction lies in the features that makes it so unattractive to the casual eye – its newness, its half-finished infrastructure, its struggle to define itself, to free itself from its recent history and to know whether it should draw its strength from within or without.  Who are the Kosovans most thankful to for their independence?  Pristina is a city half broken, half renewed but mostly coming alive.  It is a work in progress and it felt like a privilege to be there to witness this.  Kosovo may not top your list of travel destinations but to visit at the formation of a nation is a rare opportunity that will only be lost as time marches on.