Hostility Is a Birthright in Southern Serbia

Whenever her young neighbor tries to make friendly chitchat, Blerta Perolli can’t bring herself to respond. Both girls are teenagers, attend the local equivalent of high school and live in a residential district here in the capital of Kosovo province.

But Blerta is ethnic Albanian and her neighbor is a Serb, and the distance between them is enormous.

“She is always nice to me,” Blerta said. “But I have something against her. I don’t know why. I don’t like to talk to her.”

It’s like two magnets placed against one another, she says, and the invisible force that pushes them apart.

At 16, Blerta belongs to the emerging generation of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo who have never known cordial relations with Serbs--and probably never will. They have grown up in a world almost completely separated from the Serbian status quo that they believe denies them basic rights.

Kosovo, Serbia’s southernmost province, is ruled by Serbian authorities and police but is overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Albanians, most of whom want an independent republic. With many of its people expelled or forced from Serb-controlled state jobs and schools starting a decade ago, the Albanian community has made a deliberate decision to, in effect, secede and build its own parallel society.

Kosovo’s Albanians have created their own schools, health care network, taxation system. They ignore Serbian and Yugoslav elections and hold their own. They have their own pseudo-government, with a pseudo-president. They patronize separate restaurants and cafes, speak their own language and watch official Albanian television. A para-culture in a para-state.

This alternative system enables Albanians to maintain their ethnic identity. But it also preserves prejudices on both sides and provides no opportunity for common ground to develop--not that the Serbs are particularly eager to promote reconciliation either.

Rift Deepens

The intractable division between the communities only hardened in recent weeks when the simmering dispute between Albanians and Serbian authorities escalated into armed conflict, with state security forces battling outmatched Albanian separatists. And there seems little room for peaceful negotiation.

Albanians like to compare their situation to that of Bosnia-Herzegovina just before ethnic war engulfed that country in the early 1990s. But the circumstances are very different: In Bosnia, Muslims and Serbs more or less lived together before their war, at least in the cities; they mingled and even intermarried. But in Kosovo, the segregation is almost total. The two communities are, as one local Serb put it, like a railroad track, its two sides running forever parallel and never crossing.

Unlike in Bosnia, there are no significant projects to bring the two ethnic groups together. Those attempts that have been made have largely failed. Albanians and Serbs are both under intense pressure from their communities not to socialize with the “enemy.”

At the Pristina chapter of the Post-Pessimist Club, an antiwar youth organization with branches throughout the former Yugoslav federation--only Serbia and Montenegro remain a part of Yugoslavia--a few Serbian teens have joined their Albanian counterparts to play on the computers and, once, to co-host a jazz concert.

But members like Blerta and others still show the mistrust that characterizes their generation. When the Albanian kids published a magazine, the one Serbian girl who contributed did so under an Albanian pseudonym.

“They would have had trouble from their side; we would have had trouble from our side,” said Violeta Selimi, an Albanian counselor at the club.

Albanian and Slavic clans in what is today southern Serbia have fought one another off and on for centuries. Kosovo formed part of Greater Albania before World War II but was awarded to the newly constituted Yugoslav federation under Marshal Tito in 1946. Recent history has been marked by alternating periods of relative freedom for the Albanians, then Serbian police repression, then Albanian retaliation and Serbian exodus--the Balkan cycle of violence and revenge.

In 1974, Kosovo, along with Vojvodina, an ethnically diverse province in northern Serbia, was granted broad autonomy under the constitution of the Communist Yugoslav federation. But Albanians and Serbs were at least forced to share workplaces and some aspects of their lives. They were generally tolerant of one another.

In the 1980s, however, Albanian students protesting discrimination began demonstrations that grew through the years--and were met with increasingly stiff police crackdowns. Many Albanians were arrested or purged, a number were killed, and some resorted to vandalism and sabotage to strike back at the Serbs.

After Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in 1987, political repression of the Albanians increased further, and, in March 1989, he revoked Kosovo’s autonomy.

The following year, Albanians set up their clandestine government, and the other institutions came soon thereafter. In 1991, Serbian authorities fired Albanian teachers from public schools and cut off funding for Albanian-language instruction. The parallel school system, which started in the basements of private homes and today teaches more than 325,000 students, was born.

Ever since, Kosovo’s society has become more and more polarized and segregated. Last month’s deadly police crackdown on alleged ethnic Albanian guerrillas, in which more than 80 men, women and children were killed, merely confirmed a well-established pattern of alienation--and it radicalized many Albanian youths for whom every funeral has become a call to arms.

Demographics contribute to the separation because there simply are not large numbers of Serbs left in Kosovo. With one of the highest birthrates in Europe, Kosovo’s Albanian population is soaring while Serbs are leaving. Even Milosevic’s plan to resettle refugee Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia in Kosovo failed to alter the balance: Roughly 90% of Kosovo’s 2.1 million people are ethnic Albanian. (Exact figures do not exist because the Albanians boycotted the 1991 census, as they boycott all activities of the state.)

Friendships Denied

Those Serbs who remain in Kosovo are seen by Albanians as part of a repressive regime. Fed on their own leadership’s propaganda, the Albanians are blooming nationalists. Fewer and fewer learn or speak the Serbs’ language. Some feel compelled to deny friendships they once had with Serbs.

“There are a lot of prejudices on both sides--some founded, some not,” said Jetish Jashari, 32, an ethnic Albanian politician who works with youth. “There is no communication between the two communities. In the eyes of an Albanian, a Serb is a policeman. And Serbs feel threatened, maybe because of the size of their community.”

Jashari participated in a Dutch-financed program called Open Minds that put Albanians and Serbs together to discuss their problems. But all of the Serbian participants were from Belgrade--the Serbian and Yugoslav capital--and not Kosovo, and political issues were studiously avoided.

Milenko Karan, a retired university sociology professor, is a Serb who has lived in Kosovo most of his adult life. He is part of the older generation, which once interacted with the other ethnic group.

Today, Karan said, a Serb dares not have a friendly relationship with an Albanian, and vice versa, without risking condemnation from his own people. Solidarity is based on ethnicity and clan, he said, where the collective means everything.

A Moderate Voice

Karan, 71, is arguably the most moderate Serbian voice in Kosovo. He used to work with Albanians and had a few Albanian friends, with whom he and his wife sometimes traveled or dined.

“I’m not saying it was Shakespearean love, but it was a civilized relationship,” Karan said.

But in the last decade, as Kosovo became more polarized and the two communities more extreme, Karan stopped seeing his Albanian friends. Living in one of Pristina’s many Communist-era high-rise apartment buildings, he has little contact with his Albanian neighbors. For many of the older Kosovo residents, coffees are shared across ethnic lines with only the utmost discretion, behind closed doors in anonymous apartment blocks.

The aging Serb, seated in a cold apartment with worn furniture, was philosophical when asked whether he misses the friendships that were once nominally permitted.

“It’s like asking me if I miss Hawaii,” he said. “Since it is impossible to have it, I do not miss it.”