Pearl Jam and "No Boundaries: A Benefit for the Kosovar Refugees"

Friday 15 February 2013

Hey everyone, long time no see, but I’m back!

I was considering writing about my favorite band ever, Pearl Jam, but when I was looking for some facts about the band and stuff, I found this charity work which they were involved in and luckily it had a lot to do with the subject we just studied in our English classes.

Many artists came together to record this album called “No Boundaries: A Benefit for the Kosovar Refugees”, one of them was Pearl Jam, they did this awesome cover of “Last Kiss” (one of my favorite songs by the way, and I had no idea of the reason why it was recorded). The money raised from the sale of the album was used to help refugees of Kosovo.

 You may be asking what happened in Kosovo that forced people to flee. Well, Kosovo War was a conflict between Kosovar Albanians and Kosovar Serbs, all members of The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). The last one corresponds to the last fragment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), founded during World War II. SFRY included six socialist republics: Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Serbia included the two autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo and Metohija. Although it was a socialist nation, SFRY declined to sign the Warsaw Pact during Cold War, so it wasn’t part of the Eastern Block. (Just by curiosity, the Warsaw Pact was sign to respond to the creation of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and it was a consequence of the post war tension between USA and the Soviet Union, known as Cold War.)

However, and returning to the topic, FRY was only constituted by Serbia and Montenegro, since the other nations had already emancipated themselves. The war lasted from 1998 until 21st of June of 1999. This war is known for the multiple war crimes committed by both sides. During the war, 90,000 Serbs fled from Kosovo. The Yugoslav Red Cross registered 247,391 mostly Serbian refugees by November of 98. More than 164,000 Serbs left Kosovo within seven weeks since Yugoslav and Serb forces withdrew.

 This is a perfect example of how celebrities use their image and talent to help others, in the cover of the album you can see some other names that were also part of this project. This is not the only cause supported by Pearl Jam over the years, but I guess this one is really interesting since we are talking about this issue. I will leave you with the song “Last Kiss” which was recorded for this charity album. I’d also like to say that we need to face the fact that these kinds of wars are not history, this one happened in 1998, that’s like yesterday, and that makes it a lot more real and tragic. We have a tendency to see this as a terrible story which happened a long time ago, but this war happened when we were already born and our parents remember it clearly. Think about that!

Have a nice weekend, and thanks for reading!

Inês Ribas Dias