Ethnic Strife in Yugoslavia : Behind Serene Facade, Troubled Kosovo Boils

Except for the fact that a pair of MIG fighter planes spent a somewhat disconcerting hour making low passes over the town, a casual visitor might have been excused for assuming it was a normal spring morning deep in Kosovo’s heartland.

White plum blossoms bobbed in the sunlight beneath mountains whose topmost crevices held the last stubborn remnants of winter’s snow. The shoeshine brigade was set for business as usual by the taxi stand at the edge of the bazaar. The old Muslim men in their traditional white felt conical caps went about their talk and their business.

But it was not really a normal day in Pec. A middle-aged man carrying a briefcase was interrupted in his hurried passage along the sidewalk and said, in French: “It is shameful, what is happening. The majority of people are very unhappy. Schoolchildren are being killed. The situation is intolerable.”

Then he added, “I must go. I am not supposed to talk to you.”

Took to the Streets

The day before, in half a dozen scattered towns in the province of Kosovo, ethnic Albanians had taken to the streets in continued protest against what seems to them a vicious and vengeful campaign to restrict their rights of self-rule in Yugoslavia’s fractious federation of six republics and two autonomous provinces.

The result of those protests, on Tuesday, was a death toll of at least 19, most of them killed by rifle fire from federal riot police. According to doctors in one hospital, at least two of the dead were, as the man on the street charged, children.

It was the latest and worst outbreak of ethnic violence here since 1981, when clashes between ethnic Albanians and police left nine people dead, and it suggested that the struggle for political control over the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo will continue to be long and bitter.

The low-flying jets were a further sign--not that the warplanes were about to begin strafing the town’s citizens, but that attitudes were hardening as never before, and that the fist of federal authority, powered by Serbian muscle, was being shaken forcefully in Albanian faces.

Like the other towns in the region, Pec is predominantly populated by Albanians. But the Serbs, who can recall that their 14th-Century czar, Stefan Dusan, set the seat of his dynasty here, are fond of citing a prior claim to the fine landscape of peaks and valleys and mountain meadows. On the plains outside Kosovo’s provincial capital of Pristina, the Serbs lost a great battle to the Turks in 1389.

Force of Emotion

These historical memories add the force of emotion to the Serbian dissatisfaction with events in Kosovo. There are more modern dissatisfactions as well, and some of them are much less attractive than ancient history.

There were about 400,000 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo at the end of World War II, Serbs point out bitterly. Now there are nearly 2 million. By some counts, they have become 95% of the province’s population. They have too many children, the Serbs say. It is not just that the Albanians are Muslim, whereas the Serbs are Orthodox Christian; they are, to the Serbian way of thinking, “different.”

Even the most mild-mannered and rational Serb, letting his feelings go, can recite a long catalogue of complaints against the Albanians: they are lazy, dirty, violent, corrupt and poorly educated; they keep guns. And most of the Serbs will go on to say that they have one or two “close” Albanian friends who will say the same things, or worse.

As much as anything, the Serbs seem to object to the intractable Albanian poverty, which infusions of cash, levied from the rest of the federation at the rate of $1.5 million a day, and grandiose construction projects seem unable to reverse.

This state of affairs has worsened in recent years, and particularly in the last year, until the enmity on both sides seems to run as deeply and grimly as it does in Northern Ireland. And, like the situation in Northern Ireland, there are no easy answers, only mixtures of bitterness, bewilderment and anxiety.

The latest violence grew out of a new Serbian assertion of control over Kosovo courts and police, in an effort, Serbs say, to ensure evenhanded justice in a court system that had come to favor the Albanians in any conflict. The drive to secure the required constitutional revisions was led by the Serbian Communist Party boss, Slobodan Milosevic, who has ridden the Kosovo issue--and a general economic dissatisfaction in the country--to prominence on an awakened Serbian national consciousness.

Separatists and Nationalists

Serbian and even federal government and Communist Party officials have taken up the cry that Kosovo is riddled with “separatist and nationalist elements” bent on either seceding from the Yugoslav federation and linking with neighboring Albania or on winning themselves the status of a republic in the Yugoslav federation.

“If there is anyone here who wants to join Albania,” said one shopkeeper in Pec, “they are a very small number. We just want the old constitution, that’s all.” He meant the 1974 constitution, the one the Serbs officially revised Tuesday.

In the town of Orahovac, not far from Pec, a teen-ager guided a pair of reporters through the steep cobblestone streets where a pitched battle had taken place Tuesday between federal police and demonstrators. There were bullet scars along the walls of the houses and bullet holes in the windows. Expended tear-gas cartridges lay in the stream of mud and water trickling down the hill from an overflowing well.

The youth pointed to a collapsed wall in front of a run-down mosque.

“They pushed down the wall with a tank,” he said. “They had a tank there, and there, and over there.” He pointed to the convergence of three narrow streets.

“They had helicopters,” he said. “They fired from the helicopters. Tat-tat-tat-tat. Machine gun. Machine gun and tear gas.”

The demonstration, he said, started at 7 a.m. Similar demonstrations were beginning at the same time in nearby towns, the people in Orahovac heard later. Their own battle went on until 1 p.m., when the shooting and rock-throwing finally stopped.

“Fifteen people were killed,” the youth said. “There were 48 wounded.”

At the police station, officers summoned an official from nearby Prizren to give an account of events.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “I can give no information.”