Independent (London) - August 17, 1999
UN EVACUATES SERBS FROM KOSOVO
[no byline provided]
The United Nations in Kosovo is moving hundreds of Serbs out of the province because of the increase in attacks on the dwindling Serb population by local Kosovo Albanians. The issue was brought to a head on Sunday night when an elderly Serb woman was beaten to death in her home in the capital, Pristina.
A spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said the agency was reluctant to move people from the province, but the number of attacks was increasing.
Major Roland Lavoie, a spokesman for the K-For international peace-keeping force, said yesterday the level of violent crime in Kosovo had declined for three straight days but was still too high. "This is an encouraging sign, although criminal activities continue to be much higher than what is acceptable in a free and democratic society," he said.
Kosovo has been plagued by lawlessness since K-For arrived in mid-June. Revenge attacks on Serbs by members of the ethnic Albanian majority have been common but officials say score-settling among Albanians and organised crime have also contributed to the high levels of violence, kidnapping and robbery.
Major Lavoie also reported that a patrol of Russian troops had come under fire in eastern Kosovo on Sunday evening. An armoured personnel carrier had responded with automatic fire and a search for the attackers was continuing. Russian troops are deeply unpopular with many ethnic Albanians, who are suspicious of Russia's close ties to Serbia.
Tensions eased yesterday in the northern Kosovo city of Kosovska Mitrovica after the UN mollified protesting ethnic Albanians by announcing a plan to resettle them slowly in the Serb-controlled part of the city. Kosovo Liberation Army commanders and other ethnic Albanian officials called off a planned demonstration at a bridge connecting the two bitterly divided ethnic enclaves of this northern mining centre. The UN and Nato plan provides for 25 ethnic Albanian families to return each day. Angry Albanians, eager to cross the bridge to their former homes, had confronted French peacekeepers in sometimes violent clashes on four consecutive days last week.
With a total of 1,200 ethnic Albanians waiting to return to the Serb-dominated side, they had originally proposed that 100 families be allowed back a day. Bajram Rexepi, mayor of the ethnic Albanian sector, said the Albanians will assess the UN plan after seven days and then decide whether to resume their protests. It was unclear how Serbs in their part of the city would react. But Mary-Pat Silveira, a senior UN official , said they had given "tacit agreement" to the plan.
Earlier, the area's KLA commander, Rrahman Rama, waded through the small crowd of 150 people, telling them to go home. Some, such as Jashar Osmani, 52, were angry at the rally's cancellation. "I'm sleeping in a front yard with my eight children. So how can somebody stop me from going to my home?" he asked. "We shouldn't listen to anybody. We should just cross this bridge and go to our homes."
Ms Silveira said some of the apartments are now occupied by displaced Serbs, and officials have to find alternative shelters for them before the Albanians can return. "We will not put people out in the street," she cautioned, adding that French soldiers will escort families back. It was unclear clear how much protection the French would provide afterwards.
In another positive development yesterday, some 200 Serbian railway workers returned to Kosovo - the biggest group of returning Serbs in the past six weeks. A UN official, Terry Stewart, said they would start working after being registered.
Most of the province's 200,000 Serbs fled to escape revenge by Kosovo Albanians, infuriated by atrocities by Serbian forces who pulled out in June as part of the peace deal.
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Wall Street Journal Europe - August 17, 1999
THE FIGHT TO MAKE KOSOVO TOLERANT ISN'T OVER
By Philip G. Smucker, a free-lance writer living in Pristina.
PRISTINA, Kosovo -- When I arrived home after midnight a couple of days ago, Albanian thugs were hacking away with an ax at the door of my neighbor, a member of a small ethnic minority, the Gorans. British forces charged with keeping the peace in my neighborhood dashed up the stairs in time, but the culprits escaped right past them, hiding the ax in the stairwell as they left.
Advising the traumatized residents, a NATO officer reached down and grabbed a metal crow bar left at the foot of their door. He handed it to one of the Goran residents. "Here. Use that to defend yourself," he said in an explicit acknowledgement of NATO's inability to provide security. "Since you don't have a phone you should scream at the top of your lungs and throw glass bottles out your window if they come back."
One would like to think that ethnic Albanian neighbors would pitch in and help. This is after all one of the major Albanian gripes against Serbians -- that they just stood and watched as the forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic repressed the Albanian majority before NATO ejected them from Kosovo in June.
But there is a spooky silence sweeping the cafes and conference rooms that makes living in Pristina a nauseating experience. Most ethnic Albanians are afraid to rat on the Albanian thugs for fear of ending up like all the other victims. The result of this observance of omerta was seen again recently, when members of the King's Royal Hussars of Britain hung their heads in despair after they came across one of their favorite Serbian grandmothers flung in a dung heap with two bullets through her chest.
Creating a tolerant society in Kosovo is proving to be an even greater challenge to NATO and the U.N. than stopping Milosevic's thuggery with a sanitized video war. A full two-months into NATO's peacekeeping operation in Kosovo, the mission is already looking like a miserable failure. There appears no respite from the cycle of revenge. Serbs, Gypsies and Gorans, by virtue of their birthright, find themselves at the brutal end of an intolerant society. If election plans go forward, Kosovar Albanians may be entitled to their own idea of freedom by 2002 -- even to eventual independence. But if they are not going to create a society that embodies Western values of respect for human rights, then we in the West shouldn't pay their bills for reconstruction or security.
This would mean not handing over one penny more of the several billion dollars in assistance that the Kosovars are due to receive over the next three years.
On the other hand, if the West is determined -- as it should be -- to create tolerance, the Kosovar Albanians should be confronted with an ultimatum.
Frenchman Bernard Kouchner, the head of the U.N. mission in Kosovo, is the man to deliver it. He is already expressing his moral outrage. "In the future, I will not allow the homes of 10 or 15 Serbs to be burned down every night even if that means confrontation with the KLA," Mr. Kouchner told the Athens daily Eleftherotypia over the weekend, speaking of the Kosovo Liberation Army. "I have told [KLA-appointed 'Prime Minister' Hashim] Thaci that my patience has run out. If the Serbs leave Kosovo, we will have lost."
Telling the Kosovars "Play by our rules or rebuild Kosovo by yourself!" should not mean that NATO intends to pull up its tent pegs and drive its tanks back to Macedonia. The Western Alliance's successful challenge to Milosevic's paramilitaries needn't be sacrificed. That was a battle for human rights worth fighting. But Mr. Kouchner needs urgently to use his broad mandate. He has the resources at his fingertips to both establish justice and launch a plan to resettle Kosovo's displaced Gypsies and Serbs.
Make no mistake, the KLA -- particularly the small group that ruled one of Kosovo's purest Albanian regions, the Drenica district, during the war -- is the power to be dealt with in Kosovo. Loyal militants installed by this clique are more in control of Kosovo these days than either NATO or the U.N.
The Drenica hard-liners have nearly created the fait accompli of an ethnically pure Kosovo. Now they are opening their humanitarian fund coffers for the world to fill. It is never easy to lure former rebel leaders into the relative boredom of a Western-style civil society. Unfortunately, Mr. Thaci (nom de guerre: "The Snake") already has reason to believe he is immune from censure. From the looks of it, he is being coddled.
Important Kosovars go to him every day to make deals. Internationally he's a hit, too. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her right-hand man, department spokesman James Rubin lauded the 31-year-old as the next "Gerry Adams" in a dangerous slide toward "radical chic" during a conference on Kosovo at Rambouillet, France, last year.
At the same peace conference, Mr. Thaci was also promised a "will of the people" vote on independence, a pledge that few countries other than the U.S. felt comfortable with. Then, when the "prime minister" and his clique balked at a compromise with Belgrade, senior American diplomats stepped in to reassure the disgruntled rebels, promising Mr. Thaci and the KLA special consideration for U.N. policing jobs.
The Danish chief of the U.N.'s police force for Kosovo now says that any such favors for the KLA are off. But if Mr. Thaci and his clique don't get beyond just paying lip service to a multi-ethnic Kosovo, they can and should be removed physically from their offices in downtown Pristina by Mr. Kouchner's U.N. police backed by NATO fire power. There are plenty of open-minded liberals among the Kosovar Albanians, even within the KLA, who can take their place.
The majority of Kosovars followed the policies of nonviolence promoted by Ibrahim Rugova for most of the last decade. When those policies proved bankrupt because of Mr. Rugova's feeble leadership, idealistic students, easy-going farmers and mafia thugs all found themselves thrown together on the road to militancy. Even human rights advocates joined in. When Serbian paramilitaries slaughtered the first Albanian innocents and left them on a woodpile in Likoshane in February 1998, a human rights worker, Shaban Shala, led journalists to the massacre site. He popped up soon afterward in a KLA uniform as a senior Drenica commander, claiming that armed rebellion was the only way to carry on with his struggle for "human rights." Across all walks of life, Albanians in Kosovo swore allegiance to the KLA.
But that doesn't mean they are loyal to the Drenica clique. Without firm action by the U.N. and NATO, the vast majority of tolerant Albanians will get squeezed out of the political mix even before next year's planned elections.
Mr. Kouchner still has time. He also has no illusions about Western interests in Kosovo. He should know that Kosovo's greatest value for the West lies in its becoming a tolerant statelet in Europe, not an ethnically pure one.
But first things first. NATO and the U.N. need to give the Kosovars and the KLA an ultimatum on cooperating with criminal investigations; to begin returning expelled minorities; and then to start leveling the playing field for broad-minded Albanians. Acceptance of the Balkan status quo only means complicity in "ethnic cleansing" and a slap in the face for NATO and the U.N.