Clinton Visits Kosovo, Pleads for Tolerance

President Clinton pleaded Tuesday with Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians to try to forgive the Serbs in the wake of atrocities in the province earlier this year, but his call for tolerance was coolly received.

“The time for fighting has passed,” the president said, five months after a U.S.-led bombing campaign forced Serbian troops from the separatist province. “Kosovo is for you to shape now.”

The president toured Kosovo’s American sector by Marine Corps helicopter, met with a delegation of ethnic Albanian leaders and two Serbs, and ate an early Thanksgiving dinner with some of the 6,000 U.S. troops stationed in the province, which is formally part of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic, but is now under U.N. administration.

But the centerpiece of his nearly eight hours in Kosovo was his visit to a municipal gymnasium and his message of reconciliation in the wake of the Serbian campaign of “ethnic cleansing.” The hearty cheers that greeted his expressions of sympathy for the trauma that Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians endured faded quickly when he counseled against vengeance.

“You can never forget the injustice that was done to you,” Clinton said, to muted applause. “No one can force you to forgive what was done to you.

“But,” the president said to a hushed room of more than 2,000 people, “you must try.” Only a few people applauded, without enthusiasm.

After the president spoke, Giyle Ajvazi, a 47-year-old teacher, said without much conviction: “He said to forgive the Serbs. We have to try to do that.” She then told how her husband, a school superintendent, had been on a Serbian execution list. To escape, family members moved from house to house each night until they eventually reached neighboring Macedonia.

“They’d like to kill us, kill my son, kill everybody,” she said.

Urosevac, which is called Ferizaj by ethnic Albanians, is about halfway between Pristina, the province’s capital, and the Macedonian border. There were 7,600 Serbian residents here before the war, but now, in a population of 150,000, only 25 are Serbs, said Richard Howe, the deputy commander of the U.N.-run police station here.

On the scuffed painted floor of the basketball court, schoolchildren in jeans and colorful parkas were eager to try out their English--and just as eager to criticize the Serbs.

“The Serbs are the most bad people in the world,” said 12-year-old Visar Demiri.

“No like Serbians,” added 11-year-old Valon Bafti.

“I don’t think a lot of people are open to reason,” said Jennifer Cline of the Lake Tahoe area, a community service worker here with the Adventist Development and Relief Agency. “Many are still mourning loved ones. Many are still living in tents. I’m not sure in a culture of vengeance you can teach forgiveness and tolerance for other people.”

Clinton’s flights above the bleak landscape of Kosovo took him over villages showing the telltale signs of the trauma the province had been through: Houses here and there were missing roofs, some were cut down to their foundations, and many were missing windows.

Still, said James P. “Jock” Covey, the deputy to U.N. administrator in Kosovo Bernard Kouchner, conditions for the ethnic Albanians are improving and will continue to get better.

When the war ended, there was virtually no functioning public electricity system; now, local utilities are generating more electricity than they were a year ago, when Kosovo was showing the effects of 10 years of anti-Albanian policies in the province, Covey said.

The United States has recently committed itself to providing $158 million in aid, and other donors will bring a new assistance package to $1 billion. With that, humanitarian and civil reconstruction aid--to pay for utilities and schools and to winterize homes, for example--will total $2.3 billion.

By U.S. estimate, Serbian forces damaged 125,000 homes in Kosovo, destroying 49,000 of them. The United States and other donors say they are supplying material to repair 76,000 of the damaged homes.

The U.N. troops and international organizations, Clinton said, will stand by the Kosovo Albanians, and “the coming winter in Kosovo is going to be a lot better than the last winter was.”

There will be, he said, “no more days hiding in cellars, no more nights freezing in the mountains and forests.”

Borrowing from a theme he employs in speeches throughout the United States--indeed, wherever he encounters signs of ethnic strife--the president said that the genetic makeup of all humans, regardless of their heritage, is 99.9% the same.

“Children are not born hating those who are different from them, and no religion teaches them to do so,” he said. “They have to be taught to hate by people who are already grown. But all over the world, not just here in Kosovo . . . it is children who bear the burden of their parents’ blind hatred.”

He continued:

“I beg you who are parents to teach your children that life is more than the terrible things that are done; it is how you respond to them. Do not let your children’s spirits be broken. Do not let their hearts harden. Give them the tomorrow they deserve.”

At nearby Camp Bondsteel, an 800-acre encampment for about 4,500 U.S. troops, Clinton entered a large assembly tent from the rear of the hall and spent long minutes working a rope line that had been carved through the crowd of soldiers.

His daughter, Chelsea, followed gamely, posing with one soldier after another as they draped their arms over her shoulders, rifles slung over their backs.

Clinton told the soldiers the example they set--of African Americans, whites, Latinos and Asians working together in the uniform of the U.S. Army--offered the message that different ethnic groups can coexist.

At the mess tent, he filled two plates with a turkey leg, broccoli, stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberries, shrimp and salad.

“We’re real happy to have him,” said Sgt. Robert Reed of Stockton.

As though taunting Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Clinton paid no heed to the fact that he had flown into territory that the United States still recognizes as part of Yugoslavia, although the government in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, exercises no authority in Kosovo. Indeed, the president’s travels since the end of the war could be seen as goading Milosevic: He has touched down in Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and now Kosovo, all once part of the former Yugoslav federation.

Clinton flew to Pristina from Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, aboard a C-17 U.S. Air Force cargo jet because the passenger jet that serves as Air Force One could not land on Pristina’s short runway. He then traveled by helicopter to Urosevac and Camp Bondsteel. Afterward, he began the nearly 12-hour journey back to Washington after his 10-day European tour.