Serbs Struggle to Keep Their Place in Kosovo

This small town perched on rolling hills is just a 20-minute drive from Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, but the two might as well be in different countries.

In Pristina, signs are in Albanian written in the Roman alphabet, and the currency is the euro. Here in Gracanica, the signs carry the Cyrillic letters of the Serbian language, and the currency is the Serbian dinar.

These two worlds symbolize the hopes and fears of ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo, a majority-Albanian province of Serbia that has been under U.N. control since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 1999 bombing campaign to stop “ethnic cleansing” by Serbian forces.

The ethnic Albanians want Kosovo to gain independence from Serbia by the end of the year. And international politicians, diplomats and regional experts indicate that is likely, albeit with strings attached.

For Serbian political leaders, who recognize that Kosovo’s future is largely out of their hands, the subject is radioactive. Even mentioning the possibility of the province’s independence is viewed as political suicide.

Their unwillingness to entertain alternative policies all but ensures that the Serbs will be the losers in Kosovo, exerting little influence over the futures of those who still live in the province and reducing their country’s role as a force in the region.

For the Serbs who live in Gracanica and the 240 other isolated enclaves in Kosovo, such an outcome would be a disaster, leaving them as a defenseless minority in a hostile sea of ethnic Albanians.

“We would be absolutely less safe if Kosovo were an independent country,” said Dragan Josifovic, 41, a Serb who sells clothing in a makeshift store and, like most Gracanica residents, never even visits Pristina, let alone considers living there.

“The police, the security would be less for us, the taxes would be higher, there would be even fewer jobs; they would give the jobs to their friends,” Josifovic said. “Everything would be stacked against us.”

Nearly 95% of Kosovars are ethnic Albanian. Barely half of the 200,000 Serbs who lived in the province in 1999 are still here; the rest have fled, mostly to other parts of Serbia.

Over the last six years, there has been a reversal in Kosovo’s power structure. In 1999, it was ethnic Albanians who were fleeing the fertile, mountainous land when Serbian forces under then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic forced nearly 800,000 to flee to neighboring Macedonia and Albania.

The fragility in the region was apparent last month when the prime minister of Kosovo resigned and surrendered to the war crimes tribunal at The Hague. He pleaded guilty the next week to 37 counts of war crimes against Serbs.

This summer, the United Nations will evaluate the ethnic Albanian government’s success in achieving the goals laid out by U.N. administrators. If the world body deems the province to have made sufficient progress, talks will begin on Kosovo’s status.

Kosovars will have the option to gain independence, remain a province of Serbia, or stay under U.N. control until a later date.

A consensus among U.S. and other Western diplomats appears to be emerging around a scenario in which Kosovo would become independent but the international community would still contribute officers to its police force and judges to the judiciary, especially for help in cases involving ethnically motivated crimes. “The focus is now on the theme of sustainable multi- ethnicity -- this is central for the international community,” a senior Western diplomat in Pristina said.

Maintaining multi-ethnicity is a key goal of international policymakers not just in Kosovo, but in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia as well. It means finding a way to persuade religious and ethnic groups to live in peace, despite having spent years trying to kill each other.

In Kosovo, antipathy between Serbs and ethnic Albanians runs deep. The two communities are separated by language and religious barriers. Serbs are Serbian Orthodox, a branch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and most ethnic Albanians are Muslims.

When Serbian President Boris Tadic visited Kosovo in February, he thrilled local Serbs by handing out Serbian flags. Whole towns turned out despite bitter, subzero weather and knee-deep snow. “Kosovo-Metohija is part of Serbia and Montenegro, both according to our law and according to international law,” Tadic told cheering crowds, using the ancient name for Kosovo and the current name for the former Yugoslavia.

Serbian papers covered the two-day visit with headlines that read “No Independence” and “Consolation to the Endangered.” The papers showcased pictures of Serbian villages and churches encircled by barbed wire. Captions described them as “camps” -- playing on older Serbs’ memory of World War II, when Yugoslavia was occupied by the Nazis.

Some of the Serbian enclaves are cordoned off and guarded by NATO troops as well as local police because of the risk of violence against them.

Last March, ethnic Albanians burned and vandalized 4,000 Serbian homes after three Kosovo Albanian boys drowned and a story circulated that Serbs with dogs had chased them into the river. Nineteen people were killed during the riots. International investigators later concluded that there was no evidence Serbs were involved in the boys’ death.

In Belgrade, the Serbian capital, where fewer and fewer Serbs have a personal connection to Kosovo, the region has taken on an almost mythical significance. As the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church and its patriarch, it is the promised land. “People dream and believe that Kosovo-Metohija is some kind of Serbian Jerusalem,” said Cedomir Antic, an advisor to Deputy Prime Minister Miroljub Labus.

Invoking Kosovo has become a way for Serbian politicians to prove their nationalist bona fides without having to do anything. As a result, there has been little effort to come up with policies that would improve the condition of Kosovo Serbs either now or as part of a negotiation over the province’s future.

“Any compromise at all will be seen as capitulation, defeat and political suicide,” said Djordje Vukadinovic, editor of the journal New Serbian Political Thought. He believes that Serbian politicians are uncertain about what policy to pursue in relation to Kosovo but also are eager to ensure that they don’t get tarred with responsibility for Kosovo becoming independent.

“If Serbs caught a golden wishing fish and the fish said it would fulfill one wish regarding Kosovo, the Serbs would not know what to ask for,” Vukadinovic said. “But one thing politicians do know is that from the point of view of national dignity, it is better to lose Kosovo by force than to be part of a negotiation and give it up voluntarily.”

For ethnic Albanians, it’s simple. They want independence, and they want it to happen as soon as possible. Unlike the Serbs, Kosovo Albanians appear to accept that international powers control their future and they will have to play by their rules.

The mood is sharply different from even a year ago, when some ethnic Albanians expressed frustration over the international community’s reluctance to facilitate the province’s independence. Now, there seems to be a willingness to accommodate the requirements of outsiders.

There also is a reluctant but real understanding that the 1999 war, which many Kosovo Albanians viewed as a war of liberation, was only a first step, and that creating a functioning country is far more complicated.

“We still have a lot to do before independence,” said Ahmet Beqiri, 33, who manages a cafe across from the main government buildings in Pristina. “And we need the factories to be open so that there are jobs again.

“We thought after the war that independence would come. Now we found out that it doesn’t depend on the war. The world decides on the fate of small countries like ours, not the people who live here.”

Until last month, Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj was the main force pushing and prodding the Kosovo Albanians into a more open position. However, Haradinaj resigned March 8, when he learned he was to be indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, and surrendered to the U.N. detention unit a day later. He is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, including being a tacit accomplice to murder and rape and forcing Serbs to leave their homes in the run-up to the war.

A former leader of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, he surprised many by his efforts to reach out to Serbs and create an environment in which they could feel secure and look to Pristina, not Belgrade, as their capital. “There’s a battle going on for Serbs’ souls,” Haradinaj said in a February interview in Pristina. “And sometimes they get confused by Belgrade. But what I’ve said is that we need to forgive. We need to forget what someone did to us in the past. We need to look to the future.”

International officials say that without Haradinaj in charge, the process may slow down, but is unlikely to change significantly. The officials expected the province to move forward to some form of independence.

Younger, more liberal Serbs say it is a worthwhile goal to reconcile the two communities.

“If we cannot live together, then at least perhaps we can side by side,” said Aleksandra Jovanovic, 26, who moved from Pristina to Gracanica in 1999.

But even for Jovanovic, a video maker who regularly travels to Pristina, an independent Kosovo would be a bitter pill to swallow. “I see myself like most Serbs here. I cannot see myself living in an independent Kosovo. This is still a part of Serbia,” she said. “I finished high school in Pristina, and the best time of my life is connected to Pristina, but if I consider Pristina not a part of Serbia, that would mean that Pristina is not a part of me anymore.”