Security, Yes, But Not in Cantons

AIM Prishtina, 6 September, 1999

Despite its peaceful and normal appeareance, the current situation in Kosovo is characterised by numerous difficulties which can be described in just a few sentences: absence of authority, anarchy, insecurity, threats and murder, explosions, maffia-style crime, international military and civilian administration too slow and insufficently strong to introduce order. The results of the establishment of parallel authorities with the ones civilian administrator Bernard Kouchner is trying to establish, departure of the Serbs because they are threatened and attacked and because of general insecurity or their concentration in a few regions of Kosovo, conflicts with NATO troops or boycott by Kosovo Albanians discontented with developments in Mitrovica or Orahovac. Unnoticeable or inefficient work of the judiciary, and despite everyday arrests, a large number of people especially from the neighbouring Albania without any papers, who are involved in various dubious business affairs in Kosovo. Corruption is also one of the most burning problems the local population is faced with. Generally, for many Albanians, to say nothing of the members of the Serb community, the situation is becoming unbearable.

UNHCR recently came up with the estimate that in the capital of Kosovo there are about one thousand Serbs left. Until NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, it was believed that in the city itself which had almost 300 thousand inhabitants and because of the tide of refugees from inside Kosovo stricken by conflicts of the Serb police forces and Kosovo Liberation Army (OVK), about 25 thousand Serbs lived there and a considerable number of Romanies. Nowadays in Prishtina it is possible to hear only one language - Albanian, not counting the ones members of the international military and civilian forces speak. Not to speak Serbian means saving one's neck. To say nothing about the remaining few hundred Serbs, mostly elderly, lonely and ailing, who have no place to go and who are living in their apartments as in private prisons. If humanitarian organisations have no information about their whereabouts, their lives are in the hands of their neighbours or acquaintances and their relatives from outside Kosovo, who if nothing else supply them with food. At the marketplace or in stores, the remaining Serbs do not dare shop on their own. It is sufficient that they ask for a price in their language to be either ignored or, not at all rarely, attacked, kicked out or beaten up. In some cases, even the children are involved in "hue and cry" aginst the Serbs. If they get no answer to the customary question "What is the time", they start shouting: "Shkina, shkina!" (which is the counterpart to the Serbian insulting "Shiptar" for the Albanians)... Then young men who roam around the marketplace or other parts of the city gather around this person and then "trampling" begins. There is always the recognisable whistle which is a call to others to come to "get the job done". In one of such attacks, a woman who stood by unable to do anything, according to her own words, asked later a young man who had participated in this act: "Do you feel better now?" and he answered: "I don't, but I could not resist hitting him a few times myself". Recently an Albanian was killed when he tried to prevent one of these groups from attacking two women of Serb ethnic origin. Humiliation experienced by the remaining Serbs, although abandoned even by their leader Slobodan Milosevic, forces them to seek ways to leave Kosovo and go to any place in Serbia. Just a small number of them make up their minds to find temporary refuge in nearby Gracanica or Kosovo Polje. It is necessary to pay for accommodation there like everywhere else, the natives have no money and cannot even sustain themselves, schools and similar buildings are already crowded with refugees who receive aid from international organisations and the Yugoslav Red Cross.

The high-pitched and long whistle can also be heard at night when in early morning hours the city is submerged in silence. Those who stay up late already know it: there is either a burglary going on or breaking into an apartment or an explosion will follow. KFOR helicopters which then come on the scene and fly over a certain part of the city just certify that an "operation" is going on. The worst seems to be killing of elderly men and women in their homes or their disappearance overnight and then the next day, in the apartment where they have spent their whole lives you find a completely unknown person who calmly claims that that had been his apartment all along. Of course, the atmosphere of fear among the remaining Serbs and Romanies is intensified by various other acts of psychological and physical violence (anonymous threats on the phone, beating up, planted explosives in front of apartments and houses they own, almost systematic setting Serb and Romany homes on fire in many towns of Kosovo, kidnapping and cases of mass murder like the one in the village of Staro Gacko where 14 villagers were killed after they had returned from their fields, murdered Romanies etc.) perpetrated by groups of anonymous young men or even individuals.

Such a situation, atmosphere of fear and various forms of violation of human rights of minority groups in Kosovo (Serbs, Romanies, but in some cases Bosniacs and Turks...) was condemned primarily by organisations involved in protection of human rights, such as HRW, Helsinki Committee, Committee for Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms in Prishtina, but also the main political protagonists in Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova, Hashim Thaci who not only disapproved on several occasions of such misdeeds and demanded that a stop be put to them, but also publicly demanded that Serb refugees return home and their property be preserved. However, these appeals and demands, including the appeals of known personages such as Bob Dole or Elie Wiesel, proved to be insufficient to overcome this situation. Even the main headquarters of OVK on several occasions appealed on the public with its statements reproaching such misdoings and their perpetrators who are in certain cases said to be men "who abuse the insignia of OVK", demanding that these "criminals and socially undesirable persons" be brought to justice. The sharpest in condemnation of the crimes and such acts were Pajazit Nushi, president of the Committee for Protection of Human Rights who condemned not only beating up of elderly persons of Serb ethnic origin in the streets of Prishtina and perpetrators of such crimes, but also citizens who "pass by indifferently or silently approving" such acts, as well as Veton Suroi who called it fascist notion according to which all the Serbs were responsible for the crimes committed over the Albanians and according to which they should all be punished or banished.

Among foreign political circles and analysts of the circumstances in Kosovo it is estimated that such campaigns are carried out either by radical groups of OVK which are believed to have got out of control of the central command or by various groups of mobsters who use the current situation and absence of state institutions for acquiring personal wealth and profit. However, there are also those who claim that a part of the vengeful attacks against minority groups, of the Serbs inclusive, can be attributed to individuals and consequences of the war syndrome. In favour of these theses speak perhaps the statements of certain people close to the OVK (such as that of Behlul Beqaj, political advisor of Hashim Thaci, in Koha ditore) which speak of the need to defend OVK and its reputation from "those who abuse its name".

The attempt of the Serbs to do something to protect themselves have not met with understanding of representatives of the international mission in Kosovo. Members of the Transitional Council of Kosovo, Episcope of Raska and Prizren, and Momcilo Trajkovic from the Serb Resistance Movement proposed division of Kosovo into cantons, in other words, establsihment of five regions with local self-administration where the Serb population is concentrated. Representatives of Kosovo Albanians did not even take this proposal into consideration and a priori rejected it, and Bernard Kouchner himself reacted in exactly the same way. The proposal on cantonisation was linked to the period which preceded NATO intervention when Trajkovic advocated this idea. "With this proposal they can go only to number 7 Francuska street" (the seat of the Association of Writers of Serbia, believed to be the creator of the nationalistic ideology of the Serbs), declared Hashim Thaci after the meeting in Kouchner's office. The proposal on cantonisation is linked by everybody to the Serb Academy of Sciences and Arts which according to them has been producing various memoranda on Kosovo for decades which have largely led to the current developments.

It seems that the position of the Serbs has been made even more difficult by the fact that the German mark has become the official currency in Kosovo. The decree about it was issued by Bernard Kouchner who did not rule out the use of Yugoslav dinar. But, contrary to all foreign currencies, if payments are to be made in dinars, a special administrative tax will have to be paid. And it is an established fact that according to estimates, there are still about 50 thousand Serbs in Kosovo who receive some money from the budget of Serbia as salaries which neither arrive regularly nor can satisfy their basic needs. The only thing that can save them of hunger are crops from their orchards and fields. Insisting of Serb political forces in Kosovo and outside it on political topics such as advocating that Kosovo should remain within the political boundaries of Serbia or cantonisation which are received with unanimous and a priori rejection by all relevant ethnic Albanian political forces (which believe them to be the main cause of the tragedy in Kosovo and mass crimes) just intensify the atmosphere of intolerance and antagonism towards all minorities. The possibility of creation of a tolerant, multi-ethnic, pluralistic and democratic society in Kosovo, and interruption of the current tendencies are in this way greatly reduced and postponed.

Support to such spiritual climate is offered not only by certain Albanian political forces and intellectual strata which are slaves of the anachronistic political concepts about state and ethnic institutions with the inevitable ethnic prefix and which exclude other communities with a different ethnic prefix, but also by a part of nationalistic and rightist press (such as, for instance, Bota sot) which pass silently over facts and insist on nationalistic discourse and intolerance towards differences and others. The general atmosphere of intolerance in Kosovo is intensified by almost daily discoveries of mass graves (about 400 of them have been discovered so far) and by encounters of its inhabitants with terrible results of "operations" of Serb armed forces, as well as by the awareness that a large part of the Serb population from Kosovo eligible for army service and due to general mobilisation during bombing, directly or indirectly participated in these operations.

The local more liberal intellectuals see the causes of all this in deeper layers of cultural identication, among other in the school system which, according to them, is a slave to nationalistic mythomania and intolerance, and not only among the Albanians. That is why, according to them, efforts of KFOR and the civilian administration (which as the only legitimate power in Kosovo bears the greatest responsibility for creation of safe living conditions for all) and their concept of ensuring security for the Serbs and not only them, in a civil society and not a society divided into cantons or any new form of ghettoes in Kosovo, will become efficient only when conditions are created in Kosovo for overcoming such cultural patterns, conceptions and behavior. Until that time comes, they predict, the vicious circle of violence and revenge of minor or major intensity will continue to exist.

AIM PRISHTINA

Ana Bardhi