Here We Are – Ten Years Later JETON MIKULLOVCI Ten years on – here we are. While going through the archives, I looked at KOHA Ditore’s cartoons covering the past ten years. I skimmed through more than two thousand five hundred editorial cartoons that figuratively reflected the chronology of political events in Kosova. Some of them with very good ideas, but with a graphic output that I would redo to-day. Some others have good graphics but not very clear messages. It is the challenge for all of us dealing with political cartoons on a daily basis: to harmonize the artistic and the journalistic within and consolidate an identifiable drawing style. During the period 1998-1999 it would have been a luxury to have concentrated on harmonizing these components of editorial cartoons. The political development of those times were so shocking that on occasions it was impossible to percept them with the eye of a cartoonist, at least not by a local cartoonist. KOHA Ditore’s front pages were inundated with pictures of horror and terror caused by Serb forces. There was too little to caricaturize. Maybe unconsciously, during that period, the cartoon became a non-cartoon, a strange drawing in which I used to try and capture the tragic cycle of the events. Even when we counted the hours and could barely wait for NATO’s attacks to start, as the newspaper was being prepared for print (the last one in that era) – I was suffering, trying to find the “right” idea for the cartoon, as if it were the second most important thing after NATO.
The post-war period brought us not only a new mood, but also a new approach by the newspaper that started regarding the importance of the topic as opposed to the news. The chaos of our posttraumatic contemporariness produced many topics and many of them so catchy and that easy to transfer into a cartoon. Without the pressure that haunted me in the pre-war and war years, the cartoon of this period, as I had always wished for, became more a cartoon. Maybe this is also the reason that whenever I met a regular reader of our newspaper, and once he/she understood who I was, a smile would illuminate their faces – and they would not hesitate to talk to me with the language of the figures, convinced that I would thus understand them better. I became employed at KOHA Ditore as a cartoonist and, I believe that by giving me its space, the newspaper contributed to the continuity of journalistic caricature in Kosova, a tradition that had been started earlier and had been cultivated with great passion for decades by the Pleiades of excellent Kosovar cartoonists. Political developments in Kosova are now impetuous, expectations are huge. At work, I always have the fear as if the events are drifting without being treated properly, that the drawing could have been better, that the cartoon that was published today, could have been done.
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