NATO Warning Points to an Even Tenser Kosovo

NATO has put Serbs on notice in the northern part of this divided city that more than 1,500 ethnic Albanians who fled, or were forced out, during recent clashes will be coming home soon.

If the return operation goes ahead as planned, tensions here are likely to rise again, because Serbs in northern Kosovska Mitrovica complain that NATO-led peacekeepers are doing too little to protect them while meeting the demands of the town’s ethnic Albanian majority.

Busloads of returning refugees under NATO guard could create another dangerous confrontation in a city that witnessed violent protests Monday during which peacekeepers fired tear gas to control surging crowds of demonstrators.

The French commander in Kosovska Mitrovica, Gen. Pierre de Saqui de Sannes, informed local Serbian leader Oliver Ivanovic on Tuesday morning that the ethnic Albanian refugees will be brought back to the north of the city soon, Ivanovic said in an interview. About 9,000 Serbs now live there.

“He told me exactly that they will do something to bring back the Albanians who left this part of town over the last few days or weeks,” Ivanovic said. “Of course I agreed. The former citizens of Mitrovica can come back.

“But they must just be the former citizens of Mitrovica, not anyone military or something like that.”

By “military,” Ivanovic meant fighters from the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army, who Serbs believe have been behind many of the attacks on them and other minorities since the international peacekeepers, known as KFOR, rolled into the separatist province in June on the heels of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization air campaign against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Technically, Kosovo remains a part of Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.

Although neither KFOR nor the U.N. civilian administration in Kosovo has publicly announced a plan to return the refugees, Monday’s violent protest by about 70,000 ethnic Albanians here added intense pressure on them to do it within days rather than weeks.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has compiled a list of 1,600 people who fled northern Kosovska Mitrovica, most of them ethnic Albanians, Muslim Slavs and Turks, but the actual number could be 2,000, spokesman Kris Janowski said in Geneva on Tuesday.

Only 17 Serbs live in the southern half of the city, home to an estimated 90,000 ethnic Albanians, Janowski said. The Serbs live under 24-hour guard by the French military near an Orthodox Serb monastery, he said.

Ivanovic said that the actual number of Serbs in southern Kosovska Mitrovica is only seven and that two of them were forced from their homes by ethnic Albanians and then took refuge in a church with the Orthodox priest and his family.

“They cannot go out,” Ivanovic added. “The priest must use an armored personnel carrier to go anywhere. This is no life.”

Hundreds of ethnic Albanian refugees fled northern Kosovska Mitrovica--and in many cases they say they were ordered to leave by Serbs--after a Feb. 3 rocket attack on a U.N. refugee agency bus containing Serbs.

As the violence escalated, a Serb-run cafe was firebombed in the city’s northern part, provoking revenge attacks on ethnic Albanians. At least nine people were killed in the fighting, during which snipers fired on NATO troops.

The fighting between ethnic Albanians and Serbs isn’t restricted to Kosovo. The Yugoslav government says ethnic Albanian guerrillas have stepped up attacks on villages elsewhere in southern Serbia in recent weeks.

Privately, KFOR commanders confirm that ethnic Albanian guerrillas have crossed into Serbia proper to carry out hit-and-run attacks in a 3-mile-deep “security zone” where Yugoslav troops and Serbian police are banned under a peace agreement reached after last year’s bombing campaign.

Extremists on both sides of Kosovo’s ethnic divide have gained from the continuing violence, but Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has put the blame for the latest trouble squarely on Milosevic.

“I think there is no question who’s responsible for it. It’s Belgrade,” Holbrooke told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York on Monday, referring to the government in the city that is capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia.

“The leadership in Belgrade is fomenting trouble north of the Mitrovica bridge” that separates the city’s ethnic Albanians and Serbs, he said.

But many of the Serbs who suffer for Milosevic’s failed policies feel used by him and, like Ivanovic, see the president as no longer a hero but one of their biggest problems.

“I am really afraid of any kind of dramatic change, but I think it would be better for Mr. Milosevic to understand that we cannot fight against the whole world,” Ivanovic said.

“He must do something for the democratization of Serbia. I’m looking for an agreement with the opposition parties, and this population [in Kosovska Mitrovica] needs joint action from both of them to help us. Just one side cannot do it.”

Milosevic has done little to help about 250,000 refugee Kosovars, most of them Serbs, now living in Serbia proper, but neither has NATO, whose leaders never mention the unsolved refugee crisis left over from the war.

“For some reason, the international community doesn’t want to say it publicly, but they understand very well that Serbs are in danger now,” Ivanovic said.

“I am just waiting to see, first, the concrete plan on how to protect the Serbs, and second, how to bring the [Kosovo] Serbs back,” he said. “For eight months, they haven’t come up with a program to do it. Not a single word on paper.”