Serbs in Kosovo
Double Hostages
AIM Belgrade, 26 May, 1998
After several years of bragging, living with the myth on Kosovo and the tall story about omnipotent police protection, outside reality and mostly with no wish for normal relations with Kosovo Albanians, the Kosovo Serbs are nowadays double hostages: of the regime which encouraged their illusions about its power, about Kosovo which belongs to the Serbs on the one hand, and of the so-called Liberation Army of Kosovo (OVK) on the other. In the war which is devastating the province, they are increasingly the target of the Albanian groups. Peasants of Serb nationality are abandoning their homes, hiding in monasteries and the wealthier ones are leaving for Serbia. Their own state has a few days ago imposed the embargo on food on them.
Until the second half of April, the conflict in Kosovo was the matter between armed Albanians and the police (later on also the army). There were civilian victims mostly among the Albanians. As known, in its initial operations in Drenica, the police killed a few ten women and children, and the OVK liquidated about twenty "loyal" Albanians. Therefore, it is only logical that the first serious attacks on Serb houses occurred also in Drenica, and native Novak Belic was killed in one of them. A few times unknown attackers shot at the school building in Srbica where refugees from Bosnia are accommodated.
After the new zone of conflicts, in Metohija, had opened, things started to change. The first incidents in Metohija are linked to the village of Babaloc near Decani and its immediate environment. At the range of bullet from this village populated by the Albanians lies a refugee settlement with the same name populated by the Serbs who fled from Albania in 1990. At a similar distance from this refugee settlement is Glodjani where the concentration of rebels is the highest. Attacks against police forces which are guarding Serb refugees are daily, and the inhabitants of the camp in Babaloc were already evacuated a few times to Decani and then brought back again, often in the course of a single day.
The Serbs are abandoning villages around Decani, Djakovica and Klina. Momcilo Trajkovic, president of the Serb Resistance Movement says for AIM that since the beginning of the conflict 40 villages in Metohija have been abandoned by the Serbs. The newly fled are temporarily accommodated in an improvised settlement near the Decani monastery. There is not enough food for them, which is supplied by the army and the police. But the peasants have also brought their livestock with them, and there is absolutely no food for it. A few courageous men tried to bring some hay from their home villages, but they were welcomed by fire. Now the cows are shifting around for themselves scattered in the surrounding forests, uncontrolled by their owners.
The month of May has brought about similar developments in the surroundings of Klina, the place via which the Albanian rebels wish to connect the Drenica and the Metohija centres of conflict. Miloje Djuricic from Grabanica near Klina was badly wounded when on 17 May his home was attacked, and Ralevic family, the last Serb family in the near-by village of Boksic, was threatened on 18 May by masked armed men and given half an hour to leave the village with just bare necessities. The Ralevics found refuge in Klina. A few days later Serb houses in the villages of Budisavci and Veliko Krusevo were attacked. Fifteen-year old Dalibor Lazarevic was killed, and Slavisa and Dragomir Miljanovic were wounded.
On Sunday, 24 May, in front of the police station in Pec, a few hundred relatives and friends of the disappeared policeman Ivan Bulatovic protested. They demanded "interruption of the defensive policy towards the terrorists". Bulatovic had been kidnapped the day before while travelling with his wife by train between Pec and Kosovo Polje. Near the village of Banjica, in the vicinity of Glogovac, a "biggish group" of armed Albanians stopped the train and searched all the passengers. Bulatovic was in civilian clothes, but he was the only one the holders-up of the train took away. Later on his wife claimed that the armed men had murdered him on the spot, but other passengers say that the kidnappers had taken him away alive, just beating him up.
In Kosovska Kamenica, protests similar to those in Pec had started five days earlier. The local Serbs demanded from the police to do something about the kidnapping of Dejan Stojiljkovic, also policeman who was neither on duty nor in uniform when he was kidnapped when a bus driving between Pec and Kosovska Mitrovica was held up on 19 May. Inhabitants of Kamenica say that they will organize themselves in order to resist Albanian terrorists. Inhabitants of villages Banje and Suvo Grlo near Srbica organised village watches a few months ago, which, they say opened fire when these villages were attacked in the evening of 21 May.
In conflicts around Decani, the Albanian party started taking hostages from among Serb civilians. First, seven elderly men and women from the village of Dusanovac disappeared on 22 April. Then three Mikic brothers were kidnapped in Klina on 26 April. After the intervention of the local Albanian population, they were released four days later. The destiny of the seven elderly from Dusanovac is still a mystery. A petition signed by 191 persons was sent to the American Information Centre in Pristina, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, in which it was demanded that these institutions and organizations make an effort to have the prisoners released. The family of Zarko Spasic, driver employed by the electric company of Serbia who had disappeared in the evening on 14 May, acted similarly. They referred to all the mentioned addresses, but also to the Democratic League of Kosovo and the Parliamentary Party of Kosovo. The Spasics received information via their personal connections that Zarko, allegedly with another six hostages, was kept near the tunnel on the road between Dobrosevac and Glogovac. The American Information Centre sent an American journalist to check this information. A few kilometres before the mentioned tunnel he was stopped by a group of armed Albanians who the journalist learnt nothing from, but the "patrol" promised that they would convey the message of the "American from Pristina" to their command.
"The police is powerless to help these people", says Momcilo Trajkovic. "They can only try to solve the matter by force, but it is questionable whether the hostages would survive it. Only on 19 May five people were kidnapped, among them an employee of the Employment Bureau who was on her way to visit her seventy-year old mother who is refusing to leave her native village with another three elderly persons, a policeman Dejan Stojiljkovic and three Romanies, Orthodox, kidnapped on the village road in the municipality of Klina. Nobody has stipulated conditions for liberation of these people, nobody knows whether they are alive".
Along with mutual killing, it can be said that the two ethnic communities also share problem of supplies. There is no edible oil and sugar in shops in Kosovo, like in fact in the rest of Serbia. Occasionally, it is impossible to buy flour in Kosovo, and supply of milk is especially bad. Even when some of these goods appear in the shops, the stocks are quickly exhausted, because the intimidated population is making private stocks, private merchants do not exhibit everything they have because without the key goods they might as well close their shops, and there are, of course, profiteers. That is why all these goods can be found in the black market, where a litre of edible oil costs 19 dinars. A litre of pasteurized milk can be bought for 22 dinars. For the Serbs who purchase their supplies in Albanian shops there is an additional problem. "I have lived away from Kosovo for a long time, since my childhood", says an elderly Albanian. "When I returned ten years ago, I spoke poor Albanian. I tried in Serbian, but all I heard in reply was: 'There is none! There is none! No!'"
Serb sources claim that bakers in Djakovica, who are all Albanians, refuse to sell bread to the Serbs. As if the situation were not bad enough, at the roads approaching the province, between May 15 and 21, the police strictly checked all the trucks bringing food to Kosovo. Inflow of food was cut, but traffic was then normalised on 21 May after insisting of American diplomacy, since representatives of Kosovo Albanians threatened that they would not appear at the agreed negotiations. Some Serbs close to the authorities openly speak about this measure as retaliation against the rebellious Albanian population. But, would not shortages affect the Serbs too? They say they would not, because majority of the Serbs are employed in socially-owned enterprises and state institutions, so they could be supplied through the trade union. Nevertheless, this could hardly be done with the inhabitants of Pec because their only connection with the world are roads over the mountain pass Cakor and Kula which lead to Montenegro, because the roads Pristina-Pec and Pec-Kosovska Mitrovica have been shut for days.
Whether intentionally or not, with their actions, Serb authorities are lending a helpful hand to those who wish to see Kosovo without Serbs. In the beginning of the current crisis, with their excessive use of violence and lingering with the beginning of the dialogue, they not only gave the OVK enough time and propagandist material to spread and cleanse most of the Drenica and Metohija region of the Serbs, with the latest trading blockade they are not just helping many Serbs, especially those with families and children, make up their minds to leave the province, but they also seem to be doing their best to make them leave as poor as possible. For years already they are preventing them to sell their property to the Albanians, so that since the New Year's eve real estate trade has fully become illegal. As a result, prices have drastically gone down. Even many of those who do not intend to move have already sent away their women and children.
In the towns of Kosovo, Orahovac for example, the Serbs are moving to their relatives and friends to the parts of the town populated mostly by the Serbs, and they are ready to use the only "blessing" the state of Serbia has generously supplied them with. A Serb from Pristina told us that the Albanians had lately started to 'report' that in some local communities weapons were distributed to the Serb civilians, but that this was not true: "Weapons were distributed a long time ago. Members of the reserve forces of the Army of Yugoslavia, along with uniforms and equipment, were given rifles and some ammunition". Momcilo Trajkovic confirms that weapons are acquiring increasing significance among Kosovo Serbs: "When I recently toured the stricken areas, people often showed me rifles. Our Movement is in favour of a peaceful solution, but how can I tell anybody 'You don't need the rifle', when all around them there is shooting and killing?"
Zoran B. Nikolic