‘The Night Is Long When You’re Afraid’

The women and children are gone now on Lovcenska Street, and 69-year-old Pero Samardzic hasn’t slept in five nights.

As armed ethnic Albanian gangs move from block to block, evicting and looting the Kosovo Serbs who once dominated this town, he has stayed up each night with a hunting rifle, ax and knife. He is determined to protect the house his father built more than half a century ago--and to safeguard a semblance of multiethnicity in what is fast becoming an Albanian land.

Then, on Wednesday, he ran out of coffee.

“I don’t dare leave or they will come and burn my house down. I only came out to buy this,” Samardzic said, pointing to a coffee bag, as he drank a quick vodka at 10 a.m. in the only open restaurant in town. “The night is long when you’re afraid.”

This was the scene Wednesday from inside the last sizable Serbian enclave in Kosovo--and perhaps the ethnic group’s last line of defense in the province. For the Serbs, this town located four miles west of the provincial capital, Pristina, has become Ft. Apache.

Town Has Long Had Concentration of Serbs

Even before the civil war that pushed more than 1 million ethnic Albanians from the province, Kosovo Polje was a Serbian stronghold. There hasn’t been a formal census in Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic, in two decades. But the Yugoslav government estimated before the war that more than 55% of the town’s approximately 50,000 residents were Serbs, their largest concentration in a province where the ethnic group made up less than 10% of the population.

But the town’s significance goes beyond its numbers.

It was here, on April 24, 1987, that Slobodan Milosevic, now president of Yugoslavia, delivered a historic speech that threw down the gauntlet for local Serbs.

The speech--two years shy of the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje, in which the Serbs were defeated and subsequently dominated by the Ottomans--began a process that emboldened Serbian nationalism in Kosovo and led to limitations on the province’s autonomy in 1989. Power shifted to the province’s Serbian minority, leading eventually to the war--and the peace--driving these Serbs from this land.

Since the Yugoslav military and Serbian police forces began their withdrawal from the province earlier this month, Serbian leaders in Pristina said Wednesday, as many as half of the estimated 200,000 Kosovo Serbs have left, though other estimates put the number at 50,000. And they continue to head north to Serbia by the day, leaving behind small rural pockets and urban apartment blocks.

Top Peacekeeper Comes With a Message

The NATO-led peacekeeping force, which is committed to protecting both ethnic communities, has appealed to the Serbs to stay. The peacekeepers’ commander, British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, came to Kosovo Polje last week to deliver the message in person. But in the days since the last Yugoslav troops left Kosovo Polje and the nearby provincial capital, Serbs say violence against them has soared.

“Hundreds of Serbian apartments are today being broken into, dozens of Serbs are being kidnapped and Serbs are being killed,” said Momcilo Trajkovic, leader in Kosovo of the Serbian Resistance Movement, which is opposed to Milosevic’s rule.

“I’m afraid if measures are not taken immediately to protect the Serbs,” Trajkovic said, “the international community will be alone with the Albanian community.”

And that would be especially ironic here, where Milosevic shouted from the balcony of Kosovo Polje’s House of Culture 12 years ago: “You should stay here. This is your land. These are your houses, your meadows and gardens. Your memories. You shouldn’t abandon your land just because it’s difficult to live.”

His most historic declaration that day, a single line that helped bring him to power in Serbia and then Yugoslavia: “No one should dare beat you.”

And so it was in the restaurant beneath that same balcony at the House of Culture on Wednesday that Samardzic said, “Of course I’m staying.”

His wife, son and daughter did not. Nor did any of the women and children on Lovcenska Street, most of them now with family or friends elsewhere in Serbia.

“We have 18 houses on the street, and only men are left,” Samardzic said. “This is a ghetto now. You see what they are doing to us. As soon as the police and army left, it became a ghetto.”

But Samardzic’s accounting included just the Serbs’ houses. There also are four ethnic Albanian homes on Lovcenska Street--each of them looted, gutted and abandoned.

On Wednesday, Samardzic said, the first of those families returned to the wreckage that once was their lives. They greeted a Serbian neighbor and asked, “Who did this?” The neighbor, Samardzic said, replied, “Really, we don’t know.”

“It happened two months into the bombing, and I was working 24 hours a day in that time,” said Samardzic, the chief maintenance officer at a nearby open-pit coal mine. “I never saw the people who did this, but it wasn’t us. We got along with them until the war.”

He said he feels bad for what happened during the war that Milosevic’s speech ultimately helped inspire. But even its outcome hasn’t shaken his support for the Yugoslav president.

“I was here for the speech that day,” Samardzic said in the restaurant. “In spite of everything, we’re still proud of Milosevic. No one can fight the entire world.”

He acknowledged the irony in the Yugoslav president’s appeal to stay in a town many already have fled. But, he said: “Milosevic can’t protect us now because the U.N. took charge. So now the U.N. should protect us.”

But Wednesday it appeared that the peacekeeping force was not protecting Kosovo Polje. During a three-hour period, the peacekeepers’ only presence was a lone British armored personnel carrier parked on the main street for less than 30 minutes.

“If this international force doesn’t do something, there’s no chance Serbian people will stay here,” Samardzic said.

Later, though, when he reached home again with his coffee and a dozen tomatoes, Samardzic looked around his house and said: “This is our lives, for two generations. To leave all this and go to Serbia to live as a refugee would be insanity.

“The only way they will get me out is to kill me.”

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Zoran Cirjakovic contributed to this report.