P.U.L.S.A.R. project is an innovative development of the Civil Peace Corps Project in Kosovo – supported by Naples Municipality (Italy) – lasted from 2011 to 2013 and followed by PRO.ME.T.E.O. (PROductive MEmories to Trigger and Enhance Opportunities) project scheduled from 2016 to 2017. The acronym is for “Project for Understanding and Linkages to Serbs and Albanians Reconcile”, covering the period from the 2014 implementation to the 2015 development, issued by Peace Workers Campania, IPRI-CCP Network (Italian Peace Research Institute – Civil Peace Corps Network) and RESeT Association (Research on Economy, Society and Territory) with the support of the Waldensian Table (Italy).

The aim of the project is to promote activities, monitor conflicts and engage public to facilitate dialogue between and across the major local communities, Albanians and Serbs, in Kosovo, heading a feasible reconciliation in the post-1999 Prishtina and Mitrovica. The ground of the project is based on the role of “memory”, in terms of social and collective memory, able to shape a common vision and to achieve a shared profile inside the community, and of social and cultural identity, meaningful to pave the base for awareness and ownership and to foster common grounds inside the respective social groups.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) estimates the Northern sector of Mitrovica (North Mitrovica or, for Serbs, Kosovska Mitrovica) has around 30,000 inhabitants; around 23,000 are Serbs, of whom around 6,000 are internally displaced people (IDPs). The remaining 7,000 are Albanians (5,000), Bosniaks, Roma, Ashkali and Gorani. Albanians live primarily in three locations: the “Three Towers” on the north bank of Ibar river, Kodra Minatorëve/Mikronaselije (Miner’s Hill) and Bosniak Mahala (Bosniak Quarter). All these locations had the KFOR mission protection throughout the recent years.

The number of Bosniaks has significantly declined from the pre-conflict number of 6,000 to around 1,000. The pre-conflict Roma population (around 6,000) in South Mitrovica has been displaced to the North and in Central Serbia. The March 17th, 2004, violence (pogrom) against Serbian communities and enclaves added to the IDP strain with additional 1,000 Serbs and 250 Roma fleeing to North Mitrovica, after the eruption of violence by Albanian extremists against Serbian people. UNMIK (United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo) efforts to encourage significant returns generally failed, because of the unsafeness of the situation on the ground, the vacuum in confidence building measures and such perceived gap in authority, confidence, credibility by the same international authorities.

Estimates of the population of South Mitrovica range around 75,000, according to various esteems; apart from the already mentioned minorities, all of them are Albanians (70,000). A significant part of these are coming from rural parts of Kosovo. In this frame, Mitrovica does not currently have the physical infrastructure and the urbanizing topography to split into two separate cities in effect. Ordinary topography and main infrastructures are placed to naturally constitute a «united city». The only regional hospital is located in the North, while there is manly a generally equipped clinic in the South. The Isa Boletini University is located in the South; the Prishtina University in Kosovska Mitrovica is located in the North.

In this scenario, important locations for outdoor activities are the ethnically mixed areas, especially of Three Towers, Kodra Minatorëve and Bosniak Mahala in the North (where social survey and conflict monitoring have been conducted) and the whole area of the Main Bridge (where monitoring and intervening to moderate tense situation have been driven), while important locations for indoor activities are social or common spaces for trainings and planning and also, in a wide landscape, the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade, the Museum of Mitrovica, the “Pjetër Bogdani” National and University Library in Prishtina and the “Vuk Karadzic” Municipal Library in Kosovska Mitrovica for action-research purposes. 

Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade

Since 2018, the project has been mainly continuing and developing in the form of action-research on places of culture and places of memory for peace, and has been relaunched since 2024 as H.E.R.M.E.S. (Heritage-based Education and Research Measures for Empowerment and Sharing) project identifying factors and contents of cultural heritage, with a special focus on the Yugoslav heritage, to support a culture of peace and a peaceful coexistence. As Vesa Sahatçiu wrote, in effect, «it is clear that these monuments, today, are not considered Serbian, Croatian …, or Albanian. One need only notice they are neglected by their host countries and left to crumble in all the regions of the former Yugoslavia. […]

«Resurgent nationalist sentiments leave no room for monuments with no national identity. There’s no space for these relics when so many are busy rewriting history, as is Macedonia with kitsch and historically incorrect monuments. Who needs monuments that are neither Serbian nor Albanian, and yet they are both? Ironically, it is more than correct to deem these monuments as futuristic, as they have been deemed by observers. These monuments are in a sense without history. They simply have no space in the historical precedent we value today. At most they are leftovers, aberrations in the flat, linear flow of our history».