Ethnic Albanians Redefining Life in Postwar Kosovo

He arrived at the pediatrics ward of the main hospital here alone and nameless after being discovered by Serbian police in a field in northern Kosovo.

Serbian nurses gave the pale-faced toddler a popular Serbian name, Zoran. But when the war ended, returning ethnic Albanian nurses named the child again--exchanging the Serbian moniker for an Albanian one.

“We call him Lirim,” nurse Xhevahire Kelmendi said, “which in our language means ‘the one who got free.’ ”

The renaming of this war orphan is but a small example of the changes that are sweeping through Kosovo.

Not since Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic instituted a form of ethnic apartheid in this province of Serbia a decade ago--a move that heavily favored the Serbian minority at the expense of the ethnic Albanian majority--has the region undergone such a wholesale shake-up.

Only this time around, it’s the ethnic Albanians who are ushering in a dramatic shift in power affecting nearly every aspect of life. Swiftly and thoroughly, thousands of ethnic Albanians have reclaimed coveted jobs at hotels and hospitals, coal mines and cafes--jobs that in most cases had been snatched from them.

Perhaps just as telling are the subtle ways in which Kosovo Albanians are erasing traces of Serbian culture.

The little boy at the hospital, who was found in a predominantly ethnic Albanian area, probably is ethnic Albanian. But no one knows for sure. Regardless, if no one claims him, he will be put up for adoption and is likely to grow up as an ethnic Albanian.

Across the province, signs written in the Cyrillic alphabet are being scraped from walls and windows everywhere, from hamburger stands to road markers. Inside the Centrum restaurant, just off the main drag in downtown Pristina, the provincial capital, prices are displayed on the Albanian-language side of the menu only.

And hundreds of Kosovo Albanians have begun covering up the tiny Yugoslav flags and Communist stars that had adorned their car license plates, using pieces of tape, dashes of white paint or equally small stickers of the Albanian flag.

“There’s no Serbia anymore in Kosovo,” said Bujar Berila, a 24-year-old ethnic Albanian cigarette vendor who paid two German marks, a little more than $1, for the Albanian flag sticker on the license plate of his Opel Ascona. “The Serbs are not welcome here anymore, and they know it.”

This continuing purge raises the question of whether the international community will be able to realize its goal of creating a truly multiethnic, democratic Kosovo.

“There’s no multiculturalism in Kosovo,” said one United Nations official. “The reality is that multiculturalism is a nice idea. But once you’ve just finished killing each other’s brothers and sisters, it’s not possible. The Serbs are leaving.”

In the surgical unit at the main hospital, 200 ethnic Albanian doctors and nurses have returned to work, many for the first time since 1990. At the same time, the roster of Serbian doctors and nurses--who numbered more than 400 before NATO’s air war on Yugoslavia--has dropped to 20, according to one senior ethnic Albanian physician.

Fearing reprisals by returning ethnic Albanian refugees, more than 100,000 Serbs--roughly half the prewar Kosovo Serb population--are believed to have fled the province since NATO ended its 11-week air war last month. Try as they might, international peace-keepers have been unable to stamp out random acts of violence targeting Serbs, who have seen their statues blown up, their churches damaged and their homes set ablaze.

The departure of so many Serbs from Kosovo is complicating efforts by officials of the U.N. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, among others, to establish integrated institutions.

At the Grand Hotel in Pristina, British peacekeepers had hoped to convene negotiations between the Serbs and ethnic Albanians to draw up plans to integrate returning Kosovo Albanian workers with the existing Serbian establishment.

But the negotiations became a moot point when, one by one, key members of the hotel’s Serbian management team fled Kosovo, as did a growing number of Serbian workers. The final straw came when the hotel’s Serbian manager ran off with all of its cash, according to Sabri Mikullovci, an ethnic Albanian representative of the negotiating team and the hotel’s new director.

Mikullovci, who was expelled from the hotel in 1990, said he and other ethnic Albanian workers don’t care so much about the money, noting that they are just happy to have their old jobs back. About 20 ethnic Albanians were employed in mostly low-level jobs before the war, compared with the current count of 140, a figure that grows daily.

Mikullovci believes that many of the Serbian workers who recently left the hotel were corrupt, but he remains confident that he and the other ethnic Albanian employees will be able to work peacefully with the remaining 70 or so Serbian workers.

“There are a number of Serbs here who had nothing to do with the dirty work that went on here,” Mikullovci said. “But we did find a list in one of the computers of workers who had been engaged with Arkan [Serbian warlord Zeljko Raznjatovic] and Serb paramilitaries. They were all working here as employees, cooks and waiters.”

The United Nations reopened Pristina City Hall on Monday with a mixed Albanian-Serbian staff and urged its members to work together.

The provincial capital’s administration will be headed by co-mayors, one Serb and one ethnic Albanian. The new staff consists of about 80 ethnic Albanians and 60 Serbs.

But distrust of Serbs is a key issue among ethnic Albanians.

British peacekeepers, for example, recently took members of the media on a tour of the Obilic coal mine just outside Pristina. They proudly explained how, after holding more than a week’s worth of negotiations, they had helped broker a deal that paved the way for 250 Serbs and 600 returning ethnic Albanian workers to get the mine up and running again.

A representative of Kosovo Albanian employees joined his Serbian counterpart for a news conference at the mine, during which each man chimed in to say how pleased he was that the mine had reopened. Feelings were not so rosy among returning Kosovo Albanian workers, however.

“We won’t cooperate with the Serbs until the Hague tribunal [investigating war crimes in the Balkans] clarifies the role they played during the war,” said Jahir Nexir, 50, as he took a break from overseeing production at the mine.

The situation is perhaps most dire at Kosovo’s major radio and television station in Pristina, which the Serbs took over in 1990 and then used as a propaganda organ. Days after international peacekeepers rolled into town, several hundred ethnic Albanians showed up, demanding their jobs back.

Eager to fill the media vacuum, U.N. officials set up a meeting between a small number of workers representing their Serbian and ethnic Albanian colleagues. The goal was to get a mixed management in place so that broadcasts could begin again.

But the day of the meeting, a huge delegation of ethnic Albanians showed up and started threatening the Serbs, who in turn asked for and received a military escort to the border, where they fled into Serbia proper. U.N. officials later ordered hundreds of ethnic Albanians they found operating the studio to leave, but not before the ethnic Albanians managed to get on the air for a couple of hours.

U.N. officials have been holding separate talks with the remaining Serbian workers and the returning ethnic Albanians, but so far the efforts have proved fruitless.

A key problem, according to U.N. spokesman Kevin Kennedy, is what he described as an unwillingness on the part of the ethnic Albanian representatives, who are aligned with the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, to negotiate with any of the Serbs--an assertion the ethnic Albanians dispute.

Another issue is that the ethnic Albanians want the programming to be proportionate to the population, Kennedy said. Ethnic Albanians made up about 90% of Kosovo’s prewar population of 2 million.

Bajram Kosumi, minister of information for the “provisional government” that KLA rebel leader Hashim Thaci heads, proposes giving the Serbs one frequency on which to broadcast their programming. But he strongly believes that the Serbs and all other groups should be banned from using the medium to spout propaganda.

While the problems fester, the status quo reigns, with both sides saying they don’t know when broadcasting will resume. In the meantime, rebroadcasts of the BBC fill the air.

But a glimmer of hope shines at the hospital, where Dr. Isa Haxhiu, the new ethnic Albanian coordinator of surgery, outlined instructions he recently gave to his staff.

“We will never ask patients about their religions, nationality or ethnic origin,” Haxhiu said. “I’ve also suggested to my colleagues that they communicate in the language of the patient and that medical documentation should be in the language of the patient, which was not the practice of the past 10 years.”