Postwar Is Both Boom and Bust for Kosovo Albanians

In the months before full war broke out in his native Kosovo, Orhan Abdullahu earned up to $110 a month as a civil engineer here in the capital of the province.

At war’s end, he could have returned to his job. But Abdullahu, 38, opted instead to quadruple his salary by working as a guard at the U.S. Agency for International Development office in Dragodan, an upscale hillside neighborhood overlooking downtown Pristina.

“Nobody is pleased doing this,” Abdullahu said as he checked visitors’ identification cards at the gate. “I hope that things are going to get better and engineers will again be engineers.”

Ethnic Albanians still openly embrace the international intervention that halted years of persecution under the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav government. But there is a growing tide of concern, particularly in the capital, over how this postwar, service-based economy will affect the future of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians.

Musa Limani, director of the Economic Institute of Pristina, said he fears that freedom might do what the Serbs couldn’t: create a permanent exodus of educated Albanians from Kosovo.

Before the war, Limani said, staying in Kosovo was an act of defiance against Serbian oppression. Now, he said, leaving would be an act of professional advancement and a chance for a better life for Albanian families.

“At this moment, everyone is interested in staying here and working here,” said Limani, a member of a local advisory board to U.N. administrators. “Many people are back at their jobs in institutions, like education and health, that they hadn’t done in 10 years. But if they can’t support their families, they will leave.”

For a decade, Kosovo’s economy has been buffeted by unusual forces.

In 1990, Slobodan Milosevic, now Yugoslavia’s president, embarked on a campaign to marginalize ethnic Albanians in Kosovo by purging them from public jobs--a key source of employment in a country that maintained a Communist-era strategy of state-owned corporations.

At the same time, questionable Serbian monetary policies and outright looting of Yugoslav bank accounts to finance wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina led to a general collapse of faith in Yugoslavia’s banking system.

The effects on Kosovo and its ethnic Albanian majority were harsher than elsewhere in Yugoslavia, Limani said.

The country’s gross domestic product dropped by 60% between 1985 and 1994. In Kosovo, the decline was even sharper, from $3.3 billion in 1985 to $1.1 billion in 1994, or 67%.

National income similarly plunged by more than half, from $38.5 billion in 1985 to $16.9 billion in 1994. But the income drop in Kosovo was proportionately worse, from $2.2 billion to $800 million, according to the Yugoslav government-issued statistical yearbook.

Yet the Albanians didn’t leave. Instead, they created a parallel economic system fueled largely by cash shipped into the province by thousands of Albanians who had left to work in other European countries.

It was an economy of resistance. Teachers worked for pittances that often went unpaid. University professors, barred from Pristina University, conducted classes in their homes. Doctors often were arrested or barred from treating patients.

Mustaf Gara, spokesman for the Union of Independent Trade Unions of Kosovo, estimated that out of 153,000 union members in the months before the war broke out in late March, only 31,000 were actually working for wages.

Now Kosovo, still formally part of Yugoslavia, has found itself converted to a service economy as industrial workers await repairs to factories heavily vandalized by retreating Serbian forces.

The United Nations alone employs about 1,800 local residents--almost all ethnic Albanians--who are paid $3 to $6 an hour under a policy that sets local pay rates based on the highest prevailing wage. Those higher wages had been paid almost exclusively to Serbs, so the new jobs are a bonanza for the previously underpaid and underemployed Albanians.

But those wages are fueling unease even as the workers are grabbing the cash while they can.

“A driver for UNMIK [the U.N. civil administration] is paid $1,080 a month, and a teacher is promised only $110 a month and doctors $130 a month,” Gara said. “If the teachers would all choose to be drivers, what would happen to our schoolchildren?”