Hatred Splits a Kosovo Town Into Wrathful Riverbanks

It was at the Ibar River on Monday that this war-ruined Kosovo town was literally tearing itself in half.

The river that flows through the town’s center marked a new line of conflict between Serbs and ethnic Albanians, and the only bridge that spans it bore the human weight of hatred and revenge that are Kosovo’s past, present and possible future.

Hundreds of returning ethnic Albanian refugees, driven away nearly three months ago by some of the worst Serbian violence in Kosovo, were stuck on the river’s southern bank just a few hundred yards from home. They were blocked by Serbs, who predominate north of the river.

And hundreds of Serbs who have been living south of the Ibar streamed across the bridge to the north. Some were in tears. Others were overloaded with bundles and bags, and one woman was in a wheelchair. They said they had been expelled by newly emboldened ethnic Albanians.

The developments in this northern town, Kosovo’s fourth-largest, are part of the cycle of vengeance playing itself out throughout the countryside in the aftermath of NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia.

After the last Serbian soldier pulled out of Kosovo--a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic--on Sunday, the only deterrents to bloodletting between people on opposite sides of the river were a French tank at one end of the bridge, two more at the other and a handful of well-armed French marines.

The bridge, the river and the town constituted a living example of the obstacles to peace in the coming days and months.

“The Albanians now want to cleanse us from their side of the river. They want to expel all the Serbs from Kosovo,” shouted Miroljub Bozovic, a 45-year-old maintenance worker at the local power plant who was among the crowd of Serbs on the north bank.

“But we will never leave. We will fight and kill the last one. The river is the border now, and as long as we live they will never cross the river.”

In the heart of the destroyed predominantly ethnic Albanian neighborhoods that lie south of the river, Nexhdet Abrashi and his sister Faket felt pretty much the same way.

“We came back to our apartment for the first time in months yesterday, and the Serbs living there shot at us,” Abrashi said. “We ran to the French soldiers, who had just arrived. And they took two Kalashnikovs [automatic rifles] from the Serbs.

“But there are still Serbs in our building. And after all this, now I’m looking for a gun.”

The Abrashis said they never left town despite a two-month orgy of violence that leveled entire city blocks where ethnic Albanian-owned shops and homes once stood.

They said they were driven from their apartment by masked gunmen in Yugoslav army uniforms, who took everything of value. They fled to their father’s home a few blocks away and hid.

But on May 8, Nexhdet said, Serbian paramilitary fighters found them. They burst in and separated the women from the men, who they lined up to be shot. During the half an hour wait, he said, he escaped and hid with his sister in another part of town.

As they toured their old neighborhood amid the new French armed presence, even the Abrashis seemed overwhelmed by the scene.

The destruction of the south side of town included one of Kosovo’s oldest mosques--the centers of the ethnic Albanians’ Islamic faith. The ancient structure that local Albanians called the Mosque of the Bridge once stood like a citadel on the southern bank of the Ibar. On Monday, there was nothing but rubble. Local residents said the mosque had been looted and defaced, burned and finally bulldozed.

On the northern bank of the river, some Serbs wept and others shouted as they watched fellow Serbs straggle across the bridge. There was unanimity in denial that any local members of their community were responsible for the destruction.

Most blamed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which heavily bombed this city that lies just south of the border with Serbia proper. And now, they said, the local Albanians are punishing them for the crimes of others.

“They threatened they would slaughter me,” said Slavica Jovanovic, 36, of the ethnic Albanian men who had burst into her apartment on the south side.

Crying in her wheelchair, near a small pile of possessions and just half an hour after an evicted neighbor had pushed her across the bridge, she added: “And I was alone with my 70-year-old mother.”

Tears flowed from the eyes of her neighbor, Mileva Ivanosevic, 60, a postal worker who fled the south side with two grandchildren, 4 and 6.

“They had knives and chains,” she said of the men who entered her apartment wearing the insignia of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army. “They didn’t allow me to take anything.

“We didn’t loot anyone during the war. No Albanians even lived in our building when the bombing began.”

In fact, the demographics of Kosovska Mitrovica had started to change before the NATO bombing.

An integrated city where Serbs and ethnic Albanians lived, worked and socialized in harmony until just over a decade ago, it witnessed a gradual migration from both sides of the Ibar River that started soon after the Yugoslav government revoked Kosovo’s autonomy.

“It was like standing in slowly rising water ever since,” said Vidoje Lazic, who said he moved to the north side a few years ago when he became the last Serb in his neighborhood. “Suddenly, I was alone. So after 73 years, I moved to across the Ibar.”

Each community, in its own language, calls the other side “across the Ibar.”

Judging by the volume of traffic since ethnic Albanians started returning to their ruined side and the level of fury on both sides, it seemed Monday that before long each community will have its own enclave, separated from the other by the river and the French marines.

People on both sides of the river replied “never” when asked whether Serbs and Albanians could live beside one another here.

“Never again will we live together,” said Nexhdet Abrashi as he and his sister gingerly walked toward their building. “It’s just lucky I don’t have a weapon now.”

As for the French, Maj. Gregoire Montout, a communications officer who was stationed on the bridge, observed: “If they don’t want a melting pot, I don’t know how they will solve this problem.”