1 Year After War With NATO Began, Serbs See a World Against Them

Svetlana Nojic spent the first anniversary of the start of NATO’s air war in the compound of a Serbian Orthodox church, not praying, but hiding--and waiting.

Nojic, one of 15 Serbs who have lived under French military guard on the St. Sava Church grounds since last summer, was expecting a visit Friday from Sadako Ogata, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees.

But Ogata canceled her promised stop at the church, a small Serbian enclave in this divided town’s southern side, and hurried instead to speak with ethnic Albanians across the river, in the mainly Serbian northern part of the city.

Ogata sent a deputy to the church to convey her regrets. But everything is viewed through a political prism in Kosovo, and a broken promise by the United Nations’ top refugee official--a week after Kosovo administrator Bernard Kouchner was a no-show--only added to the Serbs’ conviction that the world is against them.

What really bothered Nojic, who is the daughter of the 104-year-old church’s priest, Father Svetislav, is that Ogata denied her the chance to make a political point of her own. “I was going to ask her, as a Japanese woman, ‘Who has been condemned, who has been punished, for those two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?’ ” Nojic said. “Do war crimes have an expiration date?”

A year after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched airstrikes against Yugoslavia in what it called a “humanitarian intervention” to end a brutal Serbian crackdown on Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority, the wounds are far from healed--and critics point to the separatist province’s continuing chaos as proof that the alliance’s strategy failed.

The alliance won the war, and brought 800,000 ethnic Albanian refugees back to their homes, but many of them then turned on Serbs and other ethnic minorities, driving at least 250,000 new refugees from Kosovo. There is no return in sight for most of them.

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson was unbowed during a visit Friday to Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, with the alliance’s supreme allied commander in Europe, U.S. Gen. Wesley K. Clark.

“I’m more than ever convinced that NATO’s action was not only the right thing to do, it was the only thing to do,” said Robertson, who was Britain’s defense secretary during the air war.

“But I also know that the job is only half done,” he said. “The conflict may be over, but the peace is still to be won, and that is a challenge for all of us. The international community, which has already done so much, is going to have to do much better.”

Clark and Robertson were supposed to visit Kosovska Mitrovica, scene of some of the worst violence between Serbs and ethnic Albanians, and clashes between rioters and international peacekeepers, in recent weeks.

But after arriving five hours late in Pristina, the NATO chiefs canceled the trip to Kosovska Mitrovica, insisting that they changed their minds because time ran out, not because the city is dangerous.

“I’m certainly not worried about visiting Kosovska Mitrovica,” Robertson told reporters in Pristina. Kosovo is still technically a southern province of Serbia, the dominant of Yugoslavia’s two remaining republics, but the territory’s ethnic Albanian majority is still as determined to win independence as the Serbian minority is to stop it.

The U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague has indicted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four of his top officials on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Kosovo.

The U.S. estimates that Serbian police, Yugoslav soldiers and paramilitary groups killed about 10,000 ethnic Albanians during the air war. The war crimes tribunal still is searching for hard evidence to support that figure and has suggested that many victims’ bodies may have been burned or removed.

Many atrocities were alleged to have occurred in and around Kosovska Mitrovica, where large swaths of the city were razed in an orgy of arson. But like his daughter, Father Svetislav refused to lay any blame for their own suffering on other Serbs. He chastised only NATO.

“As a priest,” he said, “I ask them if they have a soul, if they have a conscience and if they have honor.”

It has been nine months since the arrival of the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, since Father Svetislav or the other Serbs in the church compound have ventured out in anything but a French armored personnel carrier.

When a French soldier dropped them off just outside the barbed-wire barrier at the church’s front gate last week instead of driving them past the compound’s wall as usual, ethnic Albanians started pelting the Serbs with stones, Nojic said.

Ajshen Maliqi, 31, lives under constant French military guard too, but on the mainly Serbian northern side of the Ibar River that divides the town. She is one of about 210 ethnic Albanians living in three apartment blocks overlooking the river.

Although Maliqi stayed inside throughout the NATO bombing campaign with eight other people, her family abandoned their home nearly two months ago and fled to southern Kosovska Mitrovica after angry Serbs went on a rampage.

The rioters were retaliating for the killing Feb. 2 of two elderly Serbs in an antitank rocket strike on a U.N. refugee agency bus, and for the firebombing of a Serbian cafe in northern Kosovska Mitrovica. At least nine people died in the unrest that followed the attacks.

Maliqi returned with her father, Hyrshid, 65, her 18-year-old son and two other relatives earlier this month on the promise that French troops would defend them. Maliqi’s son goes to school each day in an armored French vehicle.

After speaking with Ogata briefly through the family’s first-floor window Friday--the human rights chief remained on the street--Maliqi said that Serbs never told her to leave but that she was too afraid to stay when the violence exploded in the streets.

“It’s not easy here now because we have no right to leave our homes anymore,” she said, looking out over half a dozen French troops guarding her doorstep. “All day long, we feel like soldiers too.”