On one of his early trips to Kosovo, Henry “Hank” H. Perritt Jr. struck up a conversation with a waiter who turned out to have been a member of the clandestine guerrilla force known as the Kosovo Liberation Army. The waiter said he’d decided to join the rebel group after Serbian police stopped him on his way home from school one day, noticed that he was carrying a book written in Albanian, and made him tear out the pages and eat them. It was just one more incident in the long blood feud between Serbs and Albanian Kosovars, but it helped get Perritt, a professor at IIT’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, hooked on the cause.
In 1912, Kosovo was annexed to Serbia, which eventually became part of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Starting in the late 1980s, Slobodan Milosevic, the demagogic Serbian president, came to power, reigniting old prejudices and subjecting Kosovo’s Albanians to a harshly repressive rule. That gave rise to the Kosovo Liberation Army, and an insurgency. In 1999, NATO intervened with a bombing assault that drove Milosevic’s troops out and turned Kosovo into an international protectorate. Westerners streamed in to help the Kosovars rebuild their devastated territory, including teams of students from IIT led by Perritt, who’d made his first trip there in 1998, just before the intervention.
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Perritt started taking students to Kosovo when Richard Holbrooke, then Clinton’s special envoy to Kosovo, suggested that they could help with refugee relief efforts by setting up Internet technology there. The U.S. Information Agency funded some of the students’ travel. Perritt says, “Law students, and sometimes undergraduates from IIT, would go to Kosovo two or three times a year to help with various small projects—legal education, political party development, economic development.” While Perritt maintains he wasn’t working for the CIA, he adds the classic caveat, “But I wouldn’t tell you if I was.”
With the exception of a single scene set in Chicago (where the population of Serbian descendants in the area is estimated at 300,000, versus about 15,000 of Albanian ancestry), You Took Away My Flag takes place in Kosovo in the late 1990s, before the UN invasion. If it turns out to be more Les Miz than Springtime for Hitler, its two acts, 14 scenes, and 37 songs (with titles like “Shell Them and Bomb Them” and “Shoot Them All”) will bring the tragedy of Serb/Albanian enmity to life through the ordeal of a single family.
Opens 6/12. Through 6/20: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway, 773-528-9696, strawdog.org, $20.
