Kosovo’s likely future cuts two ways

On a green hillside here in Kosovo, schoolchildren paraded through rows of red tombstones marking the graves of 44 ethnic Albanians killed eight years ago by Serbian forces.

The field trip was organized, their teacher said, so the children would remember the massacre, a turning point that brought the West to the rescue of Kosovo’s Albanians.

“It is important for us to remain united,” Hafiz Mustafa, a whiskered, elderly survivor, lectured the students. Independence for Kosovo is at hand, he said, and long overdue.

“We paid with blood for our freedom,” Mustafa said, before taking a seat on the grass next to his son’s grave.

There is a certain inevitability to the cause of Kosovo’s independence.

Backed unabashedly by the U.S. and much of Europe, the breakaway region dominated by ethnic Albanian Muslims will almost certainly be allowed to secede from Serbia in the coming weeks.

That is great news for the Kosovo Albanians, who for decades waged wars of passive resistance and, later, armed resistance to shed often-oppressive Serbian rule.

It is terrible news for the province’s tens of thousands of Serbs, many of whom have fled while others remain in enclaves scattered about this southernmost part of Serbia, where they live in fear and uncertainty.

Since the U.S.-led NATO intervention of 1999 forced out Serbian military forces commanded by Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic, Kosovo has functioned as a United Nations protectorate.

Among the U.N.-mandated conditions for independence, Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian government is to provide for the return of Serbian refugees and foster a multiethnic society.

But with hatred and mistrust so deeply entrenched, few Albanians or Serbs expect the condition to be met.

For-sale signs (and sometimes just a phone number, implication clear) have appeared on Serb-owned properties in the suburbs of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. The main Serbian Orthodox monastery, a historic structure near Pec, is building a wall around itself for protection.

“Kosovo will be an ethnically pure state, and the United States will have helped create it,” said Budemir Maslar, an embittered Serb who fled his farm and fruit orchards in Kosovo because he was afraid of reprisals from long-suffering Albanians. He left behind his older sister, who was soon killed, probably by Albanian militants; no body was ever recovered.

“I’m the first to want to go back,” said Maslar, 58, who now lives with his wife and son in a 6-by-4-foot cubicle in an old workers barracks on the mosquito-infested outskirts of Belgrade, the Serbian capital. “But if Kosovo is independent, we have no chance, a zero-point-zero-one chance to go back.”

Travel from Belgrade to Pristina already has the feel of a trip from one country to another. At the still-unofficial border, there are military checkpoints, a money-exchange counter and a customs office. Outsiders must show a passport.

In just minutes, the Serbian red-white-and-blue flag is replaced by the Albanian flag, red with a fierce two-headed black eagle; signs in the Cyrillic letters used by Serbs give way to Latin letters forming words in the Albanian language. Mosques begin to outnumber churches.

Agim Avdyli, a former fighter with the Kosovo Liberation Army, acknowledged that the province was independent in all but name. But he said final official recognition was crucial for foreign investment, loans and other boosters needed to raise the still-moribund economy and create jobs.

Avdyli, a square-jawed 44-year-old who looks something like an Albanian Chuck Connors, said he was as confident Kosovo would be free as he was about the return of the Serbs.

“I don’t believe any will be coming back,” he said.

On this crucial question of displaced Serbs, a senior U.N. official in Pristina put it even more bluntly: “There won’t be large returns of Serbs,” he said. “It’s history.”

Zivojin Jovanovic, 76, is one of the Serbs trying to stay. In his village of Caglavica, just south of Pristina, he has watched two Serb families leave in recent weeks after selling their properties to Albanians.

The village was the scene of nasty attacks by Albanians on Serbs in 2004, one of a string of retaliatory incidents over the years.

But Jovanovic, a retired locksmith, said it was not violence he worried about. Kosovo’s Albanian authorities recently widened a road through the Serb village into what is in effect an eight-lane highway, complete with a metal guardrail down the median. This has separated one side of the village, where the school and shops are, from the other side, making it nearly impossible, or at least very dangerous, for residents to cross.

Jovanovic sees the roadway’s construction as an insidious form of harassment to push him and other Serbs into leaving.

“It is not ill treatment. It is not threats. No one has come to me and said, ‘You have to leave,’ ” Jovanovic said. “It’s these conditions. It’s a pressure.”

As he spoke, cars and trucks whizzed by. One villager, loaded with groceries, sprinted across traffic and scaled the guardrail; a woman talking on her cellphone made the same dash in the opposition direction.

The government of Serbia adamantly opposes allowing Kosovo to secede and is relying on its ally Russia to block a separation. Belgrade argues that a U.N.-ushered secession (the plan calls for “supervised independence” with the European Union as overseer) would be a violation of basic international law.

The U.S. and the U.N., by contrast, consider that Serbia essentially forfeited any right to control Kosovo by virtue of its years of repression, discrimination and brutality; in the 1998-99 war, an estimated 10,000 Albanians, most of them civilians, were killed.

From Albanians and Serbs come dire warnings of renewed fighting, terrorism or other bloodshed. The Albanians are losing patience, and Serbs throughout Serbia feel a fervent emotional tie to the southern region because of its place as the “cradle” of their Orthodox Christian faith.

The most volatile area is likely to be the divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica. There, the Ibar River separates Albanian neighborhoods on the southern side and Serbian neighborhoods to the north.

Serbian secret police sit in the Dolce Vita cafe on their side, walkie-talkies and cellphones drawn and ready, keeping watch over who crosses a bridge that spans the river. Campaign posters for Vojislav Seselj, the radical ultranationalist indicted for war crimes, are plastered on the Serbian side of the river; on the Albanian side, Serbian graves have been desecrated.

Marko Jaksic, president of the various Serbian communities in Kosovo, said he was certain Russia would prevent Kosovo’s independence, but that if the ethnic Albanian government declared it anyway, then all bets were off. How will Serbs respond? Declare their own secession? Riot? Attack?

“What we will do, it’s a secret,” Jaksic said.

Back in Pristina, it looks as though the ethnic Albanians are not waiting. Once one of the creepiest cities in the Balkans, with a palpable air of repression and subterfuge, Pristina today is remarkably transformed. Businesses are flourishing; construction cranes dot the horizon as a suburban sprawl of shopping malls and building material supply stores spreads. Problems still abound: Poverty is evident, and unemployment may be as high as 50%.

Young and handsome, Driton Dalipi may well be the future of Kosovo, if it is to succeed as an independent country. During some of the region’s most difficult years, Dalipi, now 28, was in the U.S. studying, earning a master’s degree in international business management. He returned to Kosovo in 2003 and has built a wildly successful company that is teaching firms, new and old, how to operate efficiently and incorporate the latest technology.

“Everyone has been so focused on [independence] but not what will happen next, and I’m worried a lot about that,” said Dalipi, who has married and is expecting his first child. “I have a lot of faith in the future. If I didn’t, I’d leave in a heartbeat.”

wilkinson@latimes.com