Kosovo Rapper Vents Albanian Anger at U.N.

Memli Krasniqi prefers to sing what he has to say in his native Albanian--except when he has a rap against Kosovo’s foreign-run government.

In the intro to “It’s a Shame,” a hit on Krasniqi’s debut album, released this year, he follows the genre’s customary “Damn, homey. Yo, wassup man?!” with an explanation for his local fans of why he’s suddenly singing in English:

“I gotta speak loud for some of those . . . political fools,” Krasniqi raps. “So they can all understand me, you know what I mean? ‘Cause they keep stressing me. They’re still [expletive] around and messing with me.”

Krasniqi’s anger isn’t an act. Like many of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, the 20-year-old rapper is losing patience with the foreigners who rule the Serbian province as a protectorate in everything but name.

After promising over and again that Kosovo wouldn’t be partitioned into enclaves for minority Serbs, the U.N. administration and NATO-led peacekeepers appear to be doing exactly that, ethnic Albanians complain.

The starkest dividing line is in the northern mining town of Kosovska Mitrovica, where foreign troops, armored vehicles and several rows of razor-wire barricades say more to ethnic Albanians than repeated promises.

Although Krasniqi doesn’t mention Mitrovica by name in “It’s a Shame,” that’s what the song is about, he said in an interview. And the lyrics are a clear warning that ending the division is the only way to avoid more conflict.

“The future’s gonna be the same as the past, if you don’t change your ways very fast,” Krasniqi raps. “ ‘Cause there is no bullet-proof vest to protect when I strike and blast.

“Just another thing, mister politicians,” Krasniqi adds to close the second verse. “To me, my life is more important than your mission. So stop this game of nonsense, or get ready to deal with the consequence.”

Divided City Highlights Ethnic Tensions

A symbol of Krasniqi’s anger can be found in the main bridge across the Ibar River, which has become the biggest wall between Mitrovica’s mainly ethnic Albanian south and the predominantly Serbian north.

But the bridge is also a symbol of a larger problem. The division of Mitrovica has also severed the derelict Trepca lead and zinc mine--once Kosovo’s richest resource--from the smelter, which is still operating in Serbian hands.

The region north of Mitrovica, running about 10 miles to the border of Serbia proper, is off limits to most ethnic Albanians, who once formed the majority there.

After violent protests in February and March, the U.N. declared an area on both sides of the bridge a “confidence-building zone,” to encourage people from different ethnic groups to mingle without fear of attack.

But when Krasniqi tried to step onto the bridge to pose for a picture Thursday, a French soldier guarding the entrance ordered him to leave, with a tone that Krasniqi said reminded him of the Serbian police and soldiers he long hated as “occupiers” of the separatist province.

Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority is still so thankful for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air war against Serbian police and Yugoslav troops last year that no one talks openly about actually attacking the foreign peacekeepers. Even Krasniqi admits he is less radical than the lyrics he sings with partner Enis Presheva Jr., whose day job is translating for U.N. police detectives.

But frustration is mounting.

The U.N. administration, led by Frenchman Bernard Kouchner, is taking the worst flak as it tries to reconcile ethnic Albanian demands for independence with the U.N. Security Council’s guarantees of Yugoslav sovereignty over what is still, officially, a province of Serbia.

A Desire to Drive Out Serbian ‘Militants’

“Mitrovica is not an accident,” Krasniqi said. “NATO troops fought a big regime like [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic’s and took it out, even though that took longer than anyone would have expected. Nobody in the world can explain to me why the biggest army in the world couldn’t take out a small group of [Serbian] militants in Mitrovica.

“If they really want Kosovo whole, and not divided, that would take maybe 12 hours.”

It would probably also set off an exodus of Serbs, leaving the U.N. and NATO with a failure far more embarrassing than their current attempts to stop ethnic and political violence.

More than 200,000 Serbs and other ethnic minorities fled Kosovo after the peacekeeping force arrived in mid-June 1999. An estimated 100,000 Serbs are left in Kosovo, and only a few have registered for local elections, expected this fall.

After more than a year of ethnic Albanian attacks on minorities, the U.N. administration is more openly sympathetic to the Serbs’ fears.

Eric Chevallier, Kouchner’s senior advisor, acknowledged ethnic Albanians’ frustrations but insisted that the U.N. has to move slowly on its promise to unite Kosovo.

“The Serb people feel that the Ibar River is probably the last protection for them, where they feel a bit besieged, so they want to defend this,” Chevallier said in Pristina, Kosovo’s provincial capital.

“And [the Serbs] argue that it’s more and more difficult for them to live in other places in Kosovo,” he said. “It’s not satisfactory, but the only way to try to keep the idea of a multiethnic [society]--or the coexistence--going is with these little, little actions.”

In recent weeks, peacekeeping troops have gone beyond guarding Serbian enclaves and conducting weapons searches to what ethnic Albanians see as direct attacks on their national rights.

For years, the members of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority have embraced the flag of neighboring Albania as their own.

The black, double-headed eagle against a red background was a symbol of defiance against Serbian rule, and a silent demand for independence. Many Kosovo Albanians hung the flag secretly in their homes, knowing that if it was discovered, they could be in great jeopardy.

When the arrival of NATO-led troops last summer made it safe to fly the Albanian colors, the flags went up across Kosovo. Now foreign peacekeepers are starting to take them down. Unofficially, U.N. officials say it’s to keep the peace after complaints from Serbs that the flags are a provocation.

Local officials in the northern town of Podujevo were ordered to lower theirs from the municipal building late last month, but they raised it again in protest Wednesday. Peacekeepers have also confiscated Albanian flags from wedding convoys, to prevent partyers from waving a red flag at Serbs as they pass.

“By our tradition, whenever we have a wedding, we have a flag,” farmer Halil Krasniqi, 47, said through an interpreter. “Norwegian soldiers took one of our flags, threw it in the mud and ran over it with a tank a month ago. They also took the flags down from buses taking schoolchildren on excursions.”

Escape of Prisoners Raises Questions

Ethnic Albanian suspicions of shifting U.N. sympathies were aroused again Friday after three Serbian prisoners awaiting trial on charges of genocide and other war crimes escaped from a northern Mitrovica hospital. Several U.N. police officers were supposed to be guarding them.

The men, identified as Dragisa Pejca, Vlastimir Aleksic and Dragan Jovanovic, were in their beds when a guard checked around 1 a.m. Friday but were gone less than half an hour later, U.N. spokeswoman Susan Manuel said.

Manuel said she assumes that the men headed straight for the Serbian border, so there was little hope of recapturing them. Last month, another Serbian man facing war crimes charges escaped from the same hospital and was not apprehended.

Krasniqi the farmer, no relation to the rapper, lives 20 miles southwest of Pristina, near the village of Klecka, a stronghold of the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army. On June 16, peacekeeping troops discovered two secret bunkers in Klecka filled with 70 tons of weapons, such as antitank rockets, mortar bombs, machine guns and tens of thousands of grenades.

As they watched the weapons being hauled off, and the hiding places destroyed along with several acres of wheat, villagers such as Krasniqi were convinced that Kouchner is starting to look like the old occupiers, the Serbs.

“We don’t trust Kouchner,” Krasniqi said. “Especially when you know that the French, in alliance with other countries like Italy and Russia, are old friends of Serbia. It is clear that Kouchner is hiding something.”