23 May 1999
I don’t remember ‘Candle For Kosovo’, but I remember why Kosovo was in the world headlines in 1999. A decade that had begun so optimistically, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the European communist regimes behind it, plus the end of apartheid and the liberation of Nelson Mandela, had quickly regressed to the mean: war, fear, suffering. In Europe, the Balkan conflicts gave us the horrible euphemism of ‘ethnic cleansing’ along with genocide, mass rape and concentration camps – stuff that we in Europe had supposedly left behind us in 1945. Refugees arrived in Ireland from various Balkan states throughout the ’90s; Kosovans in 1999 were the latest. And here we are today, with refugees from besieged Ukraine, along with arrivals from other troubled regions around the world. Honestly, nothing changes.
The video below is all I could find of ‘Candle For Kosovo’ so I trust it’s the right one. It aims for ‘Let It Be’-style singalong spiritual consolation, and even borrows the middle section of Oasis’s ‘Champagne Supernova’ for itself. An educated guess of mine is that there was some tie-in with a high-profile TV or radio show to boost this to the top of the charts, as nothing in it has any sort of power or poignancy. Yes, buying this record raised funds to help those displaced. I suppose my main qualm with ‘Candle For Kosovo’ is that its literal response to the plight of Kosovan citizens and refugees is to light a candle for them, like your church-going nan might have done before your Leaving Cert: a performative action that gives you a warm glow inside but isn’t much practical help to real-life fellow human beings suffering barbaric cruelty and traumatic hardship at the hands of other human beings. But here I am, Old Man Yells At Cloud, shaking my fist at a pop record. Let’s just be kind to people and their differences, vote for the politician who doesn’t use the word ‘woke’, and maybe the world will improve to being bearable. Then we can do something useful with those candles, like share them with our neighbours and refugees for the energy-crisis winter blackouts.
