Evictees Exemplify Cruel Balkan Cycle

The modern, 78-unit townhouse complex in this Kosovo village became a showpiece Tuesday of the mad, vicious refugee cycle spawned by a decade of wars in the Balkans.

Until last week, the complex was a residential enclave built exclusively for Serbian refugees from nations that broke away from Yugoslavia earlier this decade. It was home to people such as Zivka Savic, 43, who in 1995 fled fighting in Croatia, and Dobrila Cuk, 40, who two years earlier escaped the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

But the two women don’t live here anymore. They’re homeless refugees once again.

Ethnic Albanian guerrillas from the Kosovo Liberation Army evicted them and their Serbian neighbors last week during the final withdrawal of Yugoslav troops from Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s main republic, Serbia.

It was part revenge, part logistics--part of apparent efforts throughout the province by the separatist rebels to clear Serbian real estate and make way for returning ethnic Albanian refugees.

Sure enough, as Cuk and Savic roamed Pristina, the nearby provincial capital, Tuesday in search of a future, the townhouses here were filled anew--with returning Albanians whose houses were destroyed or ruined by the Serbs during NATO’s 11-week bombing campaign.

“The Serbs burned my house,” said Ramadan Cakaj, one of the complex’s new residents, pointing to a hillside of ruined homes across the road. “We have no home. So it’s only right we should live in their houses now.”

Ebb and Flow Driven by Years of War

This snapshot of a human ebb and flow driven by eight years of war and its aftermath helps explain the movements of refugees through Kosovo during the past several days, as the return to the province of more than 170,000 ethnic Albanians--among the about 1 million driven out during the air war--has triggered the exodus of more than 50,000 Kosovo Serbs.

The NATO-led force that replaced Yugoslav troops in Kosovo has encouraged the Serbs to stay and has appealed to those who have left to return, even while peacekeepers have been preparing a mine- and bomb-littered land for the ethnic Albanians’ return.

“I hope that all--and I stress all--who have left in fear will return,” declared British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, who commands the peacekeeping force known as KFOR, or Kosovo Force.

But Cuk and Savic, who have become experts in such migration matters in the years that they and more than 500,000 other Serbs have fled their homelands, are planning an opposite tack.

“I have no apartment,” a distraught Cuk said, her face lined beyond her years. “I have no property. I have no job here. Others have made that decision for me. KFOR made the decision for me.”

The two women said they went to KFOR’s main base, in Pristina, seeking relief and complaining that the newly deployed French troops here stood idly by as the Serbs were being driven out.

“We begged the French soldiers to help, and they just laughed at us,” Savic said.

The women acknowledged that local Serbs did destroy the homes of ethnic Albanians across the road during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air war, but they insisted that they themselves were blameless.

“My husband and I didn’t kill anybody,” Cuk said. “We didn’t loot anything. We didn’t burn anything.”

Added Savic: “Those Serbs whose hands are dirty already have gone. They took their loot and went north to Serbia long before our last soldiers were gone.”

New Occupants Indifferent to Old

It does not matter to the complex’s new residents whose hands were dirty.

“Look at what they’ve done,” said Cakaj, as he set up a business selling cigarettes, fruit and Coca-Cola just outside the entrance to his new home.

“I lived in the mountains for months after the Serbs burned me out of my home,” Cakaj said. “When I came back the other day, I found the fruit trees cut down, the cows were killed, and they killed my dog and threw it in the well.”

Even grimmer was the tale behind the latest wave of ethnic Albanian refugees arriving here. They came from Albania in a truck packed with scores of gaunt men who were taken from their homes and imprisoned by the Serbs at the height of the air war before they were released near Albania more than two weeks ago.

“There were 10,000 of us in the prison, and only 800 of us were set free,” Fetah Istrefi said shakily after he hugged his 4-year-old son on Monday for the first time in five weeks.

There was a similar quaver in Savic’s voice, the same look of uncertainty in her eyes, when the expelled Serbian refugee spoke of what might lie ahead for her.

“I don’t know how long I’ll stay here. Serbia is not allowing us to move there,” she said, referring to the Serbian government’s policy of discouraging Kosovo Serbs from moving north.

“I’m waiting for KFOR to tell me where to go,” she said. “And if they tell me to go in a hole under the ground, I will go.”

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Zoran Cirjakovic in Pristina contributed to this report.

On the Web

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