Friday, June 25, 1999
Ethnic Albanians Demand Jobs Back at Radio and TV
Station
Kosovo: British forces are called in to mediate when Serbs respond to the
ousted workers in Pristina by brandishing weapons.
By VALERIE REITMAN, Times Staff Writer
RISTINA, Yugoslavia--It was just after 3 p.m. on July 5,
1990, Miradije Kuqi recalls, when a Serbian police officer
walked into the control room of Kosovo's major radio and
television station, pointed an AK-47 automatic weapon at the
technician's throat and demanded to know why the Serbian news out
of the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, wasn't on yet.
It's time for the Albanianlanguage news, she replied.
That was the last time news of the ethnic Albanian community in
Kosovo aired. The Serbs expelled several hundred ethnic Albanian
workers from Radio and TV of Pristina, which had featured
programming for the province's many ethnicities, including majority
ethnic Albanians and minority Serbs, Turks and Gypsies.
The Serbian employees--who made up about 15% of the station's
1,350 employees at the time--took over. Since then, the station has
been used as a propaganda organ for Yugoslavia's Serbian-dominated
government.
On Thursday, a few hundred ethnic Albanian former employees
converged at the front door and demanded their jobs back.
The Serbs refused, brandishing guns. British troops patrolling this
provincial capital were called in to mediate.
It was a scene that is likely to be repeated in the coming weeks at
dozens of institutions around Kosovo, the war-scarred province of
Yugoslavia's dominant republic, Serbia. Ethnic Albanian workers,
emboldened by the presence of NATO-led peacekeepers and a
fledgling democratic government being created by the U.N., will try
to undo Kosovo's long-standing ethnic apartheid.
In the early 1990s, Kosovo Albanians were expelled by the
Serbian-led government from their jobs at most government agencies,
schools, hospitals and corporations, though they made up an estimated
90% of the province's prewar population of 2 million.
For those workers, the decade has been tough. They tried running
private shops or businesses, one of their few options to replace
once-steady paychecks.
Qazim Oruqi, 59, who had been the chief editor of the radio
station's music programs for both Serbs and ethnic Albanians, barely
managed to survive while trying to replace the paycheck he lost. His
subsequent ventures--opening a store, playing music in bars, even
repairing shoes--failed.
"It was impossible for Albanians to profit on anything," he said
Thursday.
Putting the system back together equitably won't be easy,
particularly since there is no judicial or arbitration system in place in
Kosovo. The Serbs who have remained in Pristina--and there are
many--want to keep their jobs, and representatives from the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations say they are
committed to establishing a multiethnic society.
But tolerance is in short supply. Many ethnic Albanians say it will
be impossible to work with Serbs.
"Here was the nest that supported [Yugoslavian President
Slobodan] Milosevic the most--ordinary journalists, managers,
editors," said Selim Arifi, 59, formerly the chief news editor for
Albanian-language radio programming at Radio and TV of Pristina.
"You have to know these were the journalists who always supported
the war against the Albanians."
Freedom of the press was nonexistent. Once taken over by the
Serbs, the station stopped reporting about mass rallies for Kosovo
independence or about ethnic Albanians shot by police or the military,
said Nexhmedin Shehu, 53, a former senior official in the TV division.
If a similar situation existed in the United States, it might take
armies of lawyers to sort through everyone's claims. In the
make-it-up-as-you-go-along rules that now apply in Kosovo, the task
has fallen to peacekeeping forces following the withdrawal of
Yugoslav police and troops from the province as part of the peace
accord that ended NATO's 11-week bombing campaign.
In fact, it will be peacekeepers ordinarily responsible for dealing
with the news media who will be leading negotiations between the
Serbs and three representatives of the station's former employees.
The talks are due to resume today and are likely to take a "long
time--all day and night," said one British soldier trying to disperse the
angry crowd, which scattered about two hours after the incident.
"We are all traumatized," one former worker at the station
shouted to the crowd as he appealed for calm. "The last 10 years we
have been under all kinds of stress because we are frustrated. But
this is the day we've waited for for 10 years." -- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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