Serbia and Kosovo

How Much is the Province Worth?

AIM Belgrade, 24 June, 1998

Serbian regime which cannot cope with what it has stirred up itself in the past ten years in Kosovo where the war is being waged just fifteen odd kilometres away from Pristina, is now desperately trying to persuade the people of Serbia to believe that life is going on normally in Kosovo, that money is invested there in development and that coexistence of the Serbs and the Albanians is possible.

With this propagandist message accompanied by appropriate music and text resembling some kind of election campaign messages, an act of normal life in the province is put up by Radio-Television Serbia. Last night, it carried the festivity organized on the occasion of opening of a large shopping centre in Pristina. There was all kinds of things there, least of all visitors. In the second part of the propagandist message, demolished houses and the inscription in Serbian and Albanian: "This is what life is like where the terrorists are". In the mentioned five-minute contribution, information were also given that Kosovo was well supplied with food, aid that the Serbian government is donating for reconstruction of houses in demolition of which Serbian police has played the main role.

Last month, trucks from Serbia, loaded with food, were stopped at the border with Kosovo. Eye-witnesses claim that the police advised the truck drivers to go back where they had come from. The first news about the embargo arrived from Kosovo.

The picture deja-vu in 1989 at the border with Slovenia, and last year at border crossings with Montenegro. This time, the border has dangerously approached the capital, and Serbia is for the first time introducing the embargo on delivery of its own goods on its own territory. It is hard to tell what is the reason of this utterly irrational act except to manifest arrogance and power to rebellious Kosovo and the citizens who live there. Whether it is the matter of punishing the Kosovars or unsettled financial accounts of the Serbian and Albanian commercial lobbies which, as the connnoisseurs claim, despite the almost war circumstances in the province, operate flawlessly. Judging by the behavior of Serbian authorities in similar circumstances, Belgrade has never cared much for the economy. That is how it is nowadays behaving in relation to Kosovo, the economy of which, if something is not done fast, will go into the legend along with the Serb myth on its holy land.

Torn between relics, history, tradition, monasteries and several-year long abuse for political purposes, Kosovo can nowadays be spoken of only as a former economic giant which used to be promising, more thanks to the money invested in it than to its actual mining potentials or to what the economy and industries of the province really had to offer at its best, when money was poured into it like into a bottomless pit.

The collapse of Kosovo economy which has never been glorious, has lasted for about ten years. Enormous investments have gone down the drain, and nowadays there is not a single sound enterprise in Kosovo, there are no jobs, and all the economic indicators in fact show that the economy practically does not exist. Last-year analysis of seventy Kosovo enterprises speaks about the degree of utilization of 30 per cent, and shows that 80 per cent of the equipment is obsolete. In the confusion which has lasted for several years, much equipment has been demoshed and stollen. It was dragged away equally by the Serbs and the Albanians.

Aleksandar Vlahovic of the Economic Institute warns that the discouraging situation in the economy of Kosovo reflects management of the economy by political decrees: "In the thirty-year long period of intensive investments (1955-1985) through the fund for development of underdeveloped regions, republics of former Yugoslavia invested 17 billion dollars in Kosovo. These investments, especially in the last five-year period of great investments (1980-1985), were extremely inefficient, and a part of the aid went into consumption". Vlahovic says that expensive installations were built in underdeveloped Kosovo, inadequate for the environment and the needs for jobs: "That is why nowadays in Kosovo there are more than 400 thousand square meters of constructed factory halls which are completely empty or just partly equipped. In some of these buildings whole technological lines are lying unpacked for almost a decade. Kosovo nawadays has plenty of overcapacitated industrial installations which have never been finished".

After dissolution of former Yugoslavia, the sources of money for Kosovo and Metohija ran dry, so the province ceased to be the symbol of economic development in which obviously more stress was laid on expensive representative buildings for showing off than on economy which could bring about progress. The real economic shock the result of which is the nowadays devastated Kosovo economy started with inauguration of Slobodan Milosevic when Serbia had more important business in the province.

Kosovo then acquired a new significance for the Serb cause. It is less spoken of as the economic pride of the Republic, and increasingly as the historical Serb sanctuary. The data show that in former Yugoslavia, Kosovo had more economic connections with Slovenia and Croatia than with Serbia.

The Republic of Serbia has no data on the real life in Kosovo and economic circumstances, about the real social product of the province, the number of the employed and the contribution of grey economy in survival of the province. According to an investigation of the Ekonomska politika journal, there are 375 thousand employed persons in Kosovo, out of which only 150 thousand are registered by pension and social insurance funds. It is estimated that more than 200 thousand persons are employed in grey economy. What it really means in economic parametres, nobody actually knows.

Depending on ethnic affiliation, inhabitants of Kosovo live two parallel lives. At this moment they sustain two states on a small territory: the state of Serbia and the parallel authorities of Kosovo Albanians, the so-called republic of Kosovo which has the entire superstructure: schooling, health system, political authorities and Bukoshi's government in exile.

Connoisseurs of circumstances in Kosovo say that Kosovo Serbs hold the bankrupt state enterprises (in which production and business success exists only on state television), which the Albanians have left, either by force or by their own free will, a few years ago, while all the key levers of Kosovo economic life - private sector and trade - are in the hands of the Albanians.

Creation of the Albanian businessmen's lobby is ascribed to Milosevic by the allegation that in fact he rules Kosovo by means of businessmen. Momcilo Trajkovic, president of the Serb Resistance Movement is an entrepreneur himself - the manager of Ratar enterprise in Laplje Selo near Pristina, describes Albanian busnessmen for AIM as powerful men who partly "work for the current Serbian regime, and partly for themselves and the Albanian separatist movement: "They are enabled to get strategic products - flour, oil, sugar, wheat and other food stuffs - via the economy of Serbia and Voivodina. The price of everything coming from Serbia which is paid by all the inhabitants of the province includes the price of production, margin, bribe, taxes for the Republic of Serbia and for Rugova's parallel authorities".

The goods are paid to Serbian producers in foreign currency which are mostly flowing in from Albanian workers employed abroad. The money from smuggling narcotics and weapons is also increasingly mentioned. In the divided and blood-stained Kosovo, there are no political and ethnic limits only for business that brings money. Kosovo Albanians own majority of gasoline stations opening of which requires a number of permits from the state of Serbia. There are also joint enterprises which operate in Kosovo - with Serb names and Albanian money. As our sources in Kosovo claim, Serbs who do not live in Kosovo enter into such joint undertakings. There are also the opposite cases of Albanian firms with Serb capital. In the story of businessmen, Kosovo Serbs-officials also have their place. The story about successful businessmen does not refer to them. As they say in Kosovo, they trade only with state interests which they sell and the money made in this way they use partly to move to Serbia while persuading the people that they need to stay in Kosovo.

In the general confusion in Kosovo with uncertain ending, it is quite clear that the economy is ruled by political and national problems and interests. The economy is becoming the privilege of a small group of the Albanians and the Serbs mostly aimed at acquisition of personal wealth.

What can Serbia actually expect from Kosovo? The economy, which has in the course of ten years of rule of the man who had promised Kosovo Serbs, forgetting majority Albanians along the way, peace and a safe state, been thrown back thirty years, to the time when the mentioned 17 billion dollars had just started to flow into the province.

For years there were stories about fabulous mineral resources of the province, but actually both parties were using the insufficiently investigated mineral resources and natural wealth for their political propaganda such as the one "Trepca is working for the benefit of Belgrade". At the same time, for years, stories have been launched in Belgrade about inestimable wealth, deposits of non-ferrous metals and ore, used by the Albanians to finance their separatism with.

Expert findings, however, say that it is utterly absurd to speak about inestimable deposits of mineral wealth in Kosovo. Srboljub Antic, expert on power generation at the Economic Institute, does not deny the significance of coal deposits in Kosovo for Yugoslav economy. According to the investigated deposits, there are about ten billion tons of lignite in the Kosovo basin: "The coal is of low quality and cannot be transported a long way. It could be significant only for electric power generation. According to the current situation, the degree of utilization at the Kosovo basin is just one per cent, and in Metohija it is null. Therefore, the whole matter would have some sense if strategy of electric power generation could be founded on Kosovo. However, in the conflict of two nationalistic causes, suggestions of this type have no significance whatsoever".

Along with deposits of cobalt, bauxite and the "accompanying" gold and silver, Kosovo deposits of nickel are estimated to 18 million tons. With its deposits of lead and zinc ore (46 million) Trepca is the richest and could work for another thirty years with changing quality.

Rich under the surface, at war on the surface, Kosovo is nowadays living between war and poverty and incessant quarrels of the Serbs and the Albanians about what belongs to whom and who is robbing whom. Two stories are predominating among the inhabitants: the Serb is linked to the past, sanctuaries and monasteries, and the Albanian to the republic of Kosovo. In the "rich" province, everybody is poor nowadays, or at least a large majority. The economy and development which imply normal life are unimportant. Nobody mentions the ore, the factories and power generation. What Kosovo nowadays has for sure are weapons. For as long as this is the case, it is needless to wonder whether Serbia can survive without Kosovo. The regime claims that it can survive without the whole world, but that it can hardly survive in power without Kosovo. The economy is not important. What matters is the myth on Kosovo.

Branka Kaljevic

(AIM)