Kosovo's a Mess
SCHWARTZ, STEPHEN
Kosovo's a Mess And Milosevic is the problem. BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ Djakovica, Kosovo THE ONCE-LOVELY CITY of Djakovica, in western Kosovo, a major interreligious center for centuries, played host...
...Medvedja has supposedly been cleansed of its Albanian majority...
...for Artemije, it is to keep Serbs in Kosovo...
...The ensuing protest by hundreds of truck drivers blocked the main northern route into Kosovo from Montenegro for weeks...
...Thus, Milosevic has adopted a three-pronged strategy of destabiliza-tion on his southern border...
...Exactly a year after the war to halt the rape of Kosovo began, the province is unraveling...
...The most recent and in some respects most outrageous instance of French peacekeepers' refusing to cooperate with the rest of KFOR came in early March...
...The Hadum mosque, built in 1594, in front of which Rubin delivered his remarks, was partly burned and the top of its minaret shot off by Serb forces...
...The Albanians regard the French as the Serb extremists' best friends, and the Serbs acknowledge as much...
...The main problem is, as ever, Milosevic...
...Violence broke out, and French troops and police repeatedly fired stun grenades into the crowd...
...Meanwhile, the French promised to build a second bridge across the Ibar river to allow Albanians stranded in southern Mitrovica to gain access to their apartments...
...But there is powerful evidence to the contrary...
...Four French peacekeepers were wounded, as were some 22 Albanians including a 12-year-old boy...
...East of Kosovo, in the south Serbian district of Presevo, Milosevic has stepped up repression against the Albanian majority, stimulating the emergence of a new Albanian extremist force, the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medved-ja, and Bujanovac, known by its Albanian initials as UCPMB...
...ambassador Richard Holbrooke, see the bloody events in Mitrovica as caused principally by Milosevic's agents infiltrating from Serbia...
...On March 11, Carla del Ponte, chief war crimes prosecutor for the former Yugoslavia, called for Milosevic's arrest...
...Off the record, American officials in the Balkans keep asking whether there is a solution in Mitrovica, or in Kosovo at large...
...His ambiguous solution: coexistence...
...It was the first of several large-scale clashes...
...This group, the Serb lobby in the rest of Kosovo, is led by a layman and two Orthodox church leaders, Archbishop Artemije Radosavlje-vic and Father Sava Janjic (see "The Cybermonk of Kosovo," The Weekly Standard, December 13, 1999...
...The two agendas are not the same...
...The archbishop and Father Sava stressed this in meetings with secretary of state Madeleine Albright in Washington on February 25...
...The hospital has sunk into an unsanitary and generally wretched condition, even while its doctors, employees of the Milosevic government, are reportedly paid twice the salary of their colleagues in Belgrade...
...at this writing, few of the injured have been interviewed...
...Bus service, on which most people depend, is also irregular...
...After airing his complaints to the media, Adams was relieved of his duties...
...Mitrovi-ca represents the center play...
...For Ivanovic, the goal is to keep Kosovo in Serbia...
...The U.S...
...Food is plentiful and cheap, but there is no telephone service in large sections of the province, and electric power goes out for days at a time...
...Human losses in the area were worse...
...John Adams, a Briton serving as deputy regional commander for the U.N...
...Common wisdom among foreigners holds that the UCPMB must be the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in a new guise...
...When the war ended last summer, Serb miliStephen Schwartz's Kosovo: Background to a War will be published in Britain this month...
...The Serb opposition weekly NIN reported smugly on February 24 that some members of KFOR and the U.N...
...Indeed, for ordinary people in Kosovo, Albanians as well as Serbs, who only want to rebuild their lives, a far bigger problem than ethnic touchiness is the incompetence of Kouch-ner's administration...
...Artemije seeks to protect their dignity, humanity, and civil rights...
...To the southwest, in Montenegro, he is threatening to overthrow the de facto independent government of Milo Djukanovic, who enjoys enough support from his people that a Milosevic coup there is unlikely to succeed...
...It is easy for Rubin to drop by and preach forgiveness, but far more difficult for people on the ground to achieve reconciliation...
...police, claimed the French had barred his officers from the crime scene after dark...
...mission...
...It offered a $5 million reward to anybody with unspecified information about the Butcher of Belgrade...
...After all, unlike most public workers in Kosovo, the Kosovo Protection Corps gets paid, and on time...
...But here, the wounds are still fresh...
...There is no regular system for paying workers, or even for cashing a paycheck...
...NATO forces occupy it, and "the international community" administers it, but it knows neither stability nor security from the continuing machinations of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic...
...Well, information about Milosevic's whereabouts is pretty common in the Balkans...
...even after calm had returned to Mitrovica, the situation was difficult and "symbolic...
...Last October 16, thousands of Albanian students and others demonstrated at the bridge, demanding to cross...
...The main Kosovo university campus is also in northern Mitrovica, and Albanian students fumed at the Serb blockade, which prevented them from going back to classes...
...High-level Americans, notably NATO commander Wesley Clark and U.S...
...administrator in Kosovo, the Frenchman Bernard Kouchner, was celebrating the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the charity he had co-founded, Doctors Without Borders...
...But the Serb militants in northern Mitrovica do not want Albanians living among them...
...An orderly transfer of power in neighboring Croatia following the death of autocratic president Franjo Tudjman has fed the dissatisfaction of Serbs, who are sick of sacrificing their standard of living, their reputation in the world, and their day-to-day sanity to advance Milosevic's obsessions...
...police to investigate...
...About time...
...Ivanovic heads the Serb National Council of Northern Mitrovica, which he has flatly refused to allow to merge with the broader Serb National Council...
...Kouchner himself was more circumspect...
...In one particularly ill-considered move, Kouchner decided to raise money for his cash-poor budget by levying a fee on trucks bringing commodities into Kosovo...
...Ivanovic's refusal to cooperate with the Kosovo-wide council brings with it a refusal to join the Kosovo Temporary Administrative Council set up by Kouchner...
...another 100 Albanians required treatment for their eyes...
...After a street battle between Serbs and Albanians injured 40 people, including 16 French soldiers, French forces inexplicably refused to permit U.N...
...Ivanovic and his master in Belgrade treat the Kosovo Serbs as bargaining chips...
...But in addition, Milosevic is under pressure, from within and without...
...First, Archbishop Artemije favors allowing Albanians to return to their homes in northern Mitrovica...
...The rank and file of the KLA and their former commander, Agim Ceku, instead have been transformed into the Kosovo Protection Corps, which seems to have adopted a posture of assiduous obedience to Kouchner and NATO commanding general Klaus Reinhardt...
...Civilian flights into Pristina's airport are routinely suspended by the U.N...
...State Department recently took the somewhat laughable step of issuing a wanted poster (in English, not Serbian, let it be noted) depicting Milosevic and his Bosnian henchmen Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic...
...Ethnic reconciliation, he conceded, in one of the great understatements of all time, remained out of reach...
...The Mitrovica demonstration showed what big challenges confronted him and his colleagues, he said...
...second, Ivanovic is Milosevic's man, and it is in Milosevic's interest to keep the pot boiling...
...The very day of that first big demonstration, the chief U.N...
...Daily chaos continues to afflict ordinary Kosovars...
...Oliver Ivanovic, the engineer and karate aficionado who speaks for the Serbs, rejects multiethnicity in northern Mitrovica...
...Although the Americans remain popular among the Albanians, numerous Albanians are disillusioned with the failure of the broader international community to restore a minimally normal existence, and they object to the political heavy-handedness of the former KLA...
...police occasionally let the Serbs have their way in confrontations with Albanians...
...BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ Djakovica, Kosovo THE ONCE-LOVELY CITY of Djakovica, in western Kosovo, a major interreligious center for centuries, played host last week to State Department spokesman James Rubin...
...One reason Milosevic wants to hold on to northern Kosovo is the presence of a large mineral-industry complex near Mitrovica...
...Western cynics who think Nobel prizes are used to glorify failing or controversial humanitarian projects suggested the prize was meant to divert attention from the weak performance of Kouch-ner's Kosovo mission...
...Predictably, he called on local Albanians to forgive their Serb neighbors and former oppressors for the suffering visited on them before last year's NATO intervention in Kosovo...
...tants seized the northern half of Mitrovica, isolating a handful of Albanian residents in a few apartment buildings, and barred Albanians from crossing the bridge over the Ibar river from the predominantly Albanian southern half...
...But Paris insisted the Albanians were equally at fault...
...There are two obvious reasons for Ivanovic's hard line...
...Whether coexistence meant accepting separate Serb and Albanian zones in Mitrovica or attempting to reestablish a mixed town was left unad-dressed, until shocking news hit the American media in mid-February: French troops had withdrawn from the scene rather than assist American police attempting to rescue Albanians from a deadly Serb pogrom, in which several families were attacked in their homes...
...In the region, the disagreements among the peacekeepers are public knowledge...
...Inside Serbia, increasing lawlessness, epitomized by the assassination of indicted war criminal Zeljko Arkan Razna-tovic, threatens his rule...
...Ever since, rioting, arson, shootings, bombings, and stonings have plagued the city...
...If the United States and NATO really want to pacify Mitrovica, keep Montenegro out of trouble, and prevent a new bloodbath in southern Serbia, the solution is obvious: Deal with Milosevic the way President George Bush dealt with Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega...
...In the northern industrial city of Mitrovica, a persistent Serb-Albanian confrontation has produced a dangerous split between the French and American wings of the peacekeeping forces, known as KFOR...
...In the logic of Milosevic and his dupes, if Albanians are permitted to live in Serb-dominated neighborhoods, they will soon expel the Serbs...
...In a particularly repulsive act of ethnic cleansing, the Serbs expelled Albanian medical personnel and patients from Mitrovica's main hospital, in the northern zone...
...The Albanian media report that a curfew has been imposed in the Presevo-Medvedja-Bujanovac area of Serbia, and some 10,000 refugees already have fled into Kosovo...
...Its library, which dates from 1733, and the local archives of the Kosovo Islamic Community were destroyed...
Vol. 5 • March 2000 • No. 27
