Kosovo, in Pain

In many ways, it would be simpler if Fadil Bajraj and Tomislav Novovic could just be enemies and get on with their separate lives.

Unlike most of their ethnic brethren, the two men--one a Kosovo Albanian and the other a Kosovo Serb--are best of friends. But nearly a year after NATO began bombing in the name of human rights and lasting peace, they are separated by Kosovo’s chaos.

They are two idealists battered down into dark pessimism, not just by the brutalities of war, but by the hypocrisies and contradictions of peace. They are sick of hearing politicians at home and abroad say one thing, only to watch them do another.

As the March 24 anniversary of the start of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s bombing campaign nears, Kosovo and its people are beset by myriad problems, among them rampant crime, ethnic violence and political corruption. Beneath them all is the failure to resolve a fundamental contradiction between the West’s promises when it intervened and Kosovo’s anarchic reality.

On paper, Kosovo is a multiethnic province with “substantial autonomy” within a sovereign Yugoslavia. On the ground, it looks more each day like an independent state that will be controlled by ethnic Albanians.

The United Nations is trying to define Kosovo’s autonomy in a way to get ethnic Albanians to abandon their demand for independence and live together with Serbs in the same country. Even if international officials succeed, they face another daunting problem: how to return an estimated 250,000 refugees, most of them Serbs, without setting off a whole new spiral of violence.

“NATO and the U.N. said they came here to protect human rights. I don’t believe it,” Bajraj, an ethnic Albanian, said over coffee in a Pristina cafe. “They still do not have any political options for Kosovo, which is shameful.

“Things are worse now than they were a year ago. The Serbs didn’t allow us to go to school, so we set up our own, which to us were legal. What is happening now is that Serb children can’t move from their apartments. As a nation, that is shameful for us.”

Before the airstrikes began, Novovic had spent three years fighting a system designed by Serbs to divide Kosovo’s ethnic groups. He managed projects run by billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and he was the only Serb on a staff of 30.

Now Novovic lives as a refugee in his own country, eking out a living by selling the books of his cherished library from a rusty metal stand on a street corner in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. He is disgusted with people who claim to protect rights he no longer believes in.

“One totalitarian system was replaced by another totalitarian system in Kosovo,” he said. “Only the roles have switched between the victim and the perpetrator. All of my life, I’ve tried to live with [Kosovo] Albanians, side by side.

“I believe in human rights principles that are universal, that are equally applied to everybody,” he continued. “But this experience has proved to me there are very few things in life that we decide ourselves, and that I had a poor understanding of various groups dealing with human rights--even those rights themselves.”

Across the Chasm, a Bond of Faith

Across the ethnic chasm, in Pristina, Kosovo’s provincial capital, Bajraj is one of the few people in whom Novovic still has faith. He is a proud hippie, a Jerry Garcia look-alike with a Bob Dylan button pinned to his vest. He writes Albanian-language subtitles for Hollywood movies.

He also has worked for the Soros foundation and is one of the few ethnic Albanians who sound convincing when they say Kosovo needs Serbs--not the war criminals who committed massacres and other atrocities, but the many people who did not.

On a recent visit to the region, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insisted that conditions are improving in Kosovo and other parts of the Balkans. Her spokesman, James P. Rubin, visited Kosovo this week and bluntly told Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leaders that it is time to rein in extremists who are persecuting Serbs.

Bajraj said Rubin’s message was about nine months too late. He argued that by openly backing former Kosovo Liberation Army leader Hashim Thaci and other ethnic Albanians who have no popular mandate, Washington is trying to impose leaders that most people in Kosovo don’t really want.

The U.S. once supported Ibrahim Rugova, who sought nonviolent change in Kosovo, but dumped him in favor of Thaci and his KLA guerrillas as part of a strategy to force a settlement on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Yet Rugova placed well ahead of Thaci in a recent Gallup poll in Kosovo funded by Washington.

“The West has betrayed Rugova a couple of times,” Bajraj said. “I am not for Rugova, but he is the best of the worst. The West has time to correct its mistakes, but it just pushes harder through our so-called political leaders. They are not leaders. The West has imagined they are leaders.”

Such policies are making Kosovo look more and more like an independent state.

Bernard Kouchner, the U.N. administrator in the province, complained to the U.N. Security Council on March 6 that “continuing ambiguity over Kosovo’s future” was making a bad situation worse.

Even though Kosovo is part of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Yugoslav dinars are worthless here. The U.N. replaced the national currency with the German mark, and this week also approved Kosovo’s own postage stamps. In addition, Kosovo has its own customs service, which is already corrupt.

NATO has made it clear that it won’t deliver on its promise to allow a few hundred Serbian police and Yugoslav troops back into Kosovo to control the national border and guard cultural sites as long as Milosevic remains in power.

But instead of fading, Milosevic is tightening his grip in Belgrade. The West’s problems in what remains of Yugoslavia are also getting more dangerous.

After returning from Kosovo this week, a senior Pentagon official warned that a new ethnic Albanian rebel army of about 500 fighters in Serbia proper threatens to draw peacekeepers, including U.S. troops, into a conflict against their former ethnic Albanian allies. U.S. peacekeepers swept through eastern Kosovo on Wednesday, seizing arms, ammunition and uniforms in an attempt to seal the border with Serbia to insurgents.

Most Serbs Live in North or Are Guarded

Inside Kosovo, most of the dwindling Serbian minority lives in the north--which ethnic Albanians suspect Milosevic is trying to split from the province--or in scattered enclaves heavily guarded by NATO-led troops.

In Pristina, British paratroopers go grocery shopping for Serbian families holed up in guarded apartments. Speaking Serbian in public is enough to get a person killed. French soldiers now do the food shopping for ethnic Albanians living under siege by angry Serbs in the divided town of Kosovska Mitrovica.

The Yugoslav government told the U.N. Security Council on March 6 that since NATO-led peacekeepers took control of Kosovo in June, 811 Serbs and Montenegrins have been slain, while 757 more were abducted or disappeared; an additional 27 people from non-Albanian minority groups also have been killed. Attackers have seriously damaged or destroyed 84 Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries dating back to 1315, often with rockets or other military explosives, Belgrade complained.

Several human rights reports have provided evidence that ethnic Albanians have not only engaged in “revenge attacks,” but also have organized activity by trained guerrillas able to operate under the noses of more than 37,000 troops from some of the world’s best armies.

The toll of death and destruction under NATO’s watch is small compared with about 10,000 ethnic Albanians who were killed--or disappeared in attacks--by Serbian police, Yugoslav troops and paramilitaries in the first half of 1999. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians were expelled or fled Kosovo, but returned after the peacekeeping force arrived.

As the early spring sun begins to warm Kosovo’s killing fields, forensic teams working for the international war crimes tribunal are preparing to start digging for more evidence of Serbian atrocities.

Despite Kouchner’s constant pleas for help, the U.N. still has only a third of the 6,000 foreign police officers it says it needs. Member governments have been slow to come up with the troops, and those who do go to Kosovo often quit in frustration.

Even Kouchner has undercut his badly demoralized police force. On Jan. 6, U.N. police raided the home of Gani Thaci, a brother of Hashim Thaci, and arrested him for firing a gun from an apartment. They also seized weapons and a suitcase containing $791,000 in cash.

Hashim Thaci demanded--and quickly received--an apology from Kouchner. His brother was released without charge, and the money and weapons were returned.

While everyone acknowledges the difficulty of policing Kosovo so soon after a vicious war, the U.N. administration is struggling to provide such basic services as water and electricity. After months of promises that the power system would be fixed soon, it is as bad as ever.

On an average day, the electricity is on for four hours, then off for the next four. The reasons for the chronic power shortages change, but are usually summarized by the phrase “years of Serb neglect.”

Yet when NATO warplanes were continuously bombing the power grid last year, Serbian and ethnic Albanian work crews somehow managed to get the electricity back up within a few hours.

In Belgrade, Milosevic--who was indicted on war crimes charges involving Kosovo--continues to make excellent propaganda from the 11-week NATO bombing campaign and the violence that NATO-led peacekeepers subsequently failed to stop.

The opposition’s credibility is sapped by its own corruption and back-stabbing. Its leaders can’t even agree on a date for a protest march to renew demands that Milosevic quit. Each night, the carefully scripted news reports on Milosevic’s state-controlled television portray him as a builder, and his enemies as destroyers.

Sometimes, it is more than smoke and mirrors. All but a few of the road and rail bridges that NATO bombed last year have been rebuilt. Oil refineries at Pancevo and Novi Sad, which NATO reduced to charred ruins, are producing heating oil and diesel again at a little more than half their capacity.

Despite the rebuilding, Yugoslavia’s economy is still a mess--and not only for the thousands of refugees like Novovic. Industrial output plunged 23.1% in 1999. But Yugoslav authorities claim factories and other industries produce more than twice what they were in June at the end of the bombing.

Serbia’s workers earn on average the equivalent of $38.25 a month at black-market exchange rates--9.3% below what they were earning as recently as December.

Milosevic is doing his best to destabilize the Western-backed government of Montenegro, Serbia’s smaller partner in the Yugoslav federation, with a trade embargo that is blocking even food and medicine.

As the NATO-led force tries to keep the peace in Kosovo, fears are mounting that Montenegro--which has threatened to secede from Yugoslavia--may be the next, and perhaps worst, Balkan battleground. Many of his critics charge that Milosevic stays in power by constantly provoking crises, and Washington has cautioned Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic to avoid giving Milosevic an excuse.

By Djukanovic’s reading of U.S. policy, Washington has promised to defend Montenegro if Milosevic attacks.

“Mrs. Albright reiterated the readiness of the Western democratic world to offer Montenegro help in efforts to preserve peace and to defend itself in the event of possible aggression,” Djukanovic told reporters after March 9 talks with Albright in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Novovic knew what was coming in the final days before last year’s airstrikes began. He had no doubts where it would lead, so he packed up all he really cared about--most of his 3,500 books--and fled north to Belgrade.

His mother returned to the family’s Pristina apartment when NATO troops arrived in mid-June. When Novovic called to check on her, she told him, “There are KLA guys with knives in front of my door,” he recalled. The men gave her one day to leave.

“In a panic, I called a Serb woman in Pristina who runs one of the human rights organizations in Yugoslavia,” Novovic said. “And after I told her my mother was in trouble, she said to me, ‘That’s very nice, but how many Albanians did you save?’

“Probably, she meant, ‘How can you ask for help now when you didn’t help Albanians when they needed it?’ I think if one is fighting for human rights, then it doesn’t matter whether it is the rights of Serbs, Albanians, Chechens or anyone else. I was completely shocked.”

Rather than argue, however, Novovic hung up and called the Kosovo peacekeeping force instead. After a few hours, British soldiers came to guard his mother’s second-floor apartment, which became a virtual prison for her. She finally abandoned it and fled in September.

Novovic’s ethnic Albanian colleagues in Pristina have told him he is welcome to come back to his old job, but he refuses.

“I’m not sure whether it’s fear anymore, or shame because of what was done to some people, because of all that horror and violence that took place down there,” Novovic said. “Not everybody’s guilty, but that doesn’t decrease my feeling of responsibility.”

Like Bajraj, his ethnic Albanian friend with whom he talks at least once a week, Novovic lays much of the blame on NATO’s decision to issue an ultimatum to Milosevic last spring demanding broad self-rule for Kosovo, instead of giving diplomacy another chance.

NATO said Milosevic forced its hand by launching a spring offensive. Military experts from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which includes the U.S., later concluded that the Serbian offensive followed months of provocative cease-fire violations by the rebel KLA.

“What NATO did in these couple of months of bombing was to inflict collective punishment against a whole nation,” Novovic said. “On the other hand, it gave Serbs an alibi for all the crimes that they’ve committed.

“Now every Serb says: ‘We are the victims. Never mind that we were killing, that we were banishing, that we were burning houses, destroying villages and so on. Albanians deserved that anyway, and it’s shown by the way they are treating us now.’ ”

NATO’s failure to make real peace has prepared the ground for the next cycle of vengeance, and many Serbs are already talking about it, Novovic said.

“Whether that revenge will be in a year, five years or 15, it is only a matter of time.”