Emin Xhinovci may be an eccentric, but he typifies a place where speaking the wrong language can be fatal Kosovo: special report
Chris Bird in Mitrovice Wednesday October 13, 1999
Meeting Emin Xhinovci for the first time, one's laughter is mixed with horror at how Adolf Hitler's double could be walking around this ethnically divided and explosive town in northern Kosovo. It is as if the nightmarish film The Boys from Brazil has come true, where clones of Hitler are manufactured from cells preserved from the dead Führer.
Mr Xhinovci, 40, might be an eccentric but his face, which evokes friendly waves and giggling salutes from ethnic Albanians in the southern half of Mitrovice, symbolises the continuance of virulent ethnic intolerance. The kind of intolerance which led to the murder of a United Nations official who answered in Serbian when asked the time by a group of ethnic Albanian youths late on Monday.
The doppelganger was until recently a guerrilla with the recently disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army, where he won a reputation as a fierce fighter who commanded real respect among the ethnic Albanian locals. "I am a soldier," he says simply, echoing Hitler's pride in the Iron Cross the Austrian corporal was decorated with in the first world war.
Mr Xhinovci has opened a bar in Mitrovice known variously as the Bar Hit and Jet, or the Pizzeria Hitleri. He complains that French Nato troops removed a sign which carried a badly painted swastika. A disgusted French captain says only that his troops are absolutely forbidden to frequent the bar, its simple interior decorated with portraits of the owner in KLA uniform.
Mr Xhinovci has taken great pains to enhance his physical likeness to Hitler. His black toothbrush moustache is neatly clipped. His hair is dyed jet black, cut and combed in perfect imitation of the lick of tar-like hair that fell across the Nazi dictator's forehead. Otherwise his purple suit, greasy white shirt and string vest are testament to his breathtaking ordinariness.
"Zum voll!", he says, toasting in German - he lived near Düsseldorf from 1993 to 1997, where he said he had an import-export business before returning to fight for the "motherland". "Everyone who is against the people who carried out the bloodshed against my people is a friend of mine," he says.
He refers to the brutal Nazi occupation of the former Yugoslavia, when German troops based in Mitrovice turned a blind eye to ethnic Albanian attacks on Serb homes. The occupation ran concurrently with a bitter and confusing civil war, in which ethnic Albanians fought both as communist partisans and as members of the Skanderberg Division of the Waffen SS, formed from ethnic Albanians when Hitler began losing the war.
Memories are long in the Balkans and the fact that there is an admirer of Hitler in Mitrovice will not surprise the sullen Serbs, some of whom are suspected paramilitaries who carry walkie-talkies and hang out in the Dolce Vita bar, just across the Ibar river, where they watch the bridge to make sure no ethnic Albanians return to the northern, Serb, half of the city.
A non-smoker like Hitler, Mr Xhinovci says the dictator went too far in killing women and children, but that it would be "a good idea to eliminate all those who thirst for our blood" - his catch-all phrase for Serbs.
The extremists in Kosovo do not have to look like Mr Xhinovci to be effective in clearing the province of its ethnic minorities. There are near daily attacks on and murders of Serbs and Roma.
In yesterday's latest update of violence across the province, K-For peacekeepers said the body of a Serb man had been found in a village in eastern Kosovo. At the weekend, the Guardian came across more burnings of Serb houses in Bresje, a village a few miles west of Pristina. In the nearby town of Kosovo Polje, the Serb exodus continues unabated as buses come to collect those with only a densely packed holdall to leave for central Serbia. K-For says there are about 100,000 Serbs left in Kosovo, out of an original population of 200,000, but aid workers and UN officials say there are 40,000 left at most.
While K-For and the UN are supposedly the only legal force here, and the KLA has been officially disbanded, KLA members continue to harass minorities, ensure that ethnic Albanians do not sell goods to Serbs, and keep a general eye on goings on in the community, not unlike Hitler's brownshirts in the 1930s.
The Guardian visited a Serb monastery near the western town of Decani at the weekend, swathed in barbed wire and guarded by Italian troops to protect the 20 monks inside. We were watched going in by three ethnic Albanians who stopped us on the way out, claiming to be police. They not only asked for documents but pulled out a camera and photographed us as well, clearly aiming to scare us away.
Few ethnic Albanians question the new intolerance, for to do so is risky. One who has is Veton Surroi, the publisher of the newspaper Koha Ditore. He recently condemned attacks on minorities as "fascism", and warned that it threatened the ethnic Albanians' own democratic future. For this, he earned himself and his editor, Baton Haxhiu, the threat of a lynching from the KLA's news agency, Kosova Press.
"Those who don't mind stepping over the blood of those who made freedom in Kosovo (KLA) _ should know that they could become subject of an eventual and very understandable revenge," the agency wrote last week. "Neither Veton Surroi nor Baton Haxhiu, these ordinary mobsters, will go unpunished for their criminal acts, because their idiocies help the chief criminal, Slobodan Milosevic."
Mr Surroi and Mr Haxhiu have reiterated the newspaper's stance in an editorial: "The systematic persecution of a human being because of his ethnic or racial group is fascism, and this the Albanian nation, as a victim of fascism, should not tolerate," they wrote.
The international authorities in Kosovo came out only with weak condemnations of the KLA news agency, not mentioning it by name.
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