Arson Hits Pristina Neighborhood

It was midafternoon, and the neighborhood of Sitnica, where poor Gypsies and ethnic Albanians live, was burning Tuesday. First one house, then a second, then a third succumbed to the flames in the warren of small streets.

Residents pleaded for NATO to come and help, but a British army officer who was the first on the scene was powerless. “There’s only one fire engine,” he said. “I’m trying. I’m trying. But there are that many fires in the city.”

As he spoke, plumes of black smoke could be seen over other sections of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo province.

British firefighters summoned to the scene estimated that, by the time the flames in Sitnica were contained about 10 p.m., 12 houses had been destroyed--in other words, 12 more families had been added to the almost unfathomable toll of human misery in Kosovo over the past three months.

Arson attacks taking place under the noses of North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops demonstrate how far Pristina is from becoming the lawful, stable city that Western officials have promised.

Nonetheless, British military spokesman Lt. Col. Robin Hodges said Tuesday that quite a lot has been achieved since June 12, when international peacekeepers first entered Kosovo, in southern Serbia, the main republic of Yugoslavia.

“We have gone from almost total anarchy--which is what war is--to a reasonably calm and safe place to be,” said Hodges, citing as an example the fact that no homicides had been reported either Sunday or Monday night in Pristina.

Much of the instability and arson plaguing Kosovo since June 9, when NATO and Yugoslavia signed a cease-fire agreement, has its roots in anger left over from the recent civil war in the province.

Some of the about 1 million ethnic Albanians who fled Yugoslav forces during NATO’s 11-week air campaign against Yugoslavia have felt justified in carrying out reprisal attacks on Serbs and their property. Gypsies, a minority group perceived as taking the side of the Serbs in the conflict, also have increasingly become a target of this pent-up ethnic Albanian rage.

Although NATO forces have arrested more than 200 suspects for allegedly carrying out such reprisals, most cases of looting and burning have gone unpunished simply because the NATO troops cannot be everywhere. Peacekeeper tanks stand guard on the main thoroughfares, and foot soldiers patrol areas considered potential flash points, but the smaller streets and back alleys of Pristina have a law of their own.

Particularly in the case of arson attacks, it seems clear that the peacekeepers are far from gaining the upper hand.

Martin Head, a British fire captain, said Tuesday night at the Sitnica fire that his two crews had been fighting fires continuously since 2 a.m.

“And the night is not finished yet,” he added. “We’ll be going out again.”

Another firefighter, this one from the British Royal Air Force, said there were 22 fires in Pristina on Tuesday.

The 16 British firefighters, all volunteers who have come to Kosovo under the aegis of the British Defense Ministry, are hard pressed to keep up. They are in effect the only fire department that exists in Pristina now--the Serbs who ran the old one have left with most of their equipment.

Head said their ability to fight fires is hampered not so much by a lack of equipment as by the lack of water and pressure in the Pristina water system, which suffered severe damage during the NATO bombing campaign and is being slowly restored by Western engineers.

An ethnic Albanian resident of Sitnica, Xhevrije Sejdiu, watched the flames anxiously. She said that looters who are not known in the neighborhood are setting fires when they finish stealing Gypsies’ property. Now she is afraid for her own home.

“We want NATO to guard the area,” she said. “There is no way to protect ourselves. We would have to be in the street day and night.”

For the first time, British peacekeepers were patrolling Sitnica’s alleys Tuesday night, but it was not an auspicious beginning. With British soldiers only a short distance away, a group of young ethnic Albanian men standing at the corner in the half-light joked and snickered to a reporter about the fires--and predicted that there would be four or five more blazes soon.

“It happens sometimes that Albanian houses get burned, but the point is to get the Gypsy houses,” said a thin-faced young man who identified himself only as Hassan. “Come to my house. Do I have anything? No, the Gypsies took it away.”