Posted on 10/18/2003 7:28:42 PM PDT by Pikamax
Angry Kosovars call on 'colonial' UN occupying force to leave
The international force's fall from grace in Kosovo is a stark warning of what could happen to peacekeepers in Iraq. Helena Smith reports
Sunday October 19, 2003 The Observer
The first chant came from the back of the crowd. 'Go home!' yelled a youngster, as he stood in Pristina's dusty Mother Teresa Square, the site last week of Kosovo's first post-war demonstration. 'Out with the UN!' screamed an elderly woman, producing a placard that conveyed the same message. 'We don't need you here!'
Four years ago, Kosovar Albanians were liberated from their Serbian tormentors by the West. The international bureaucrats who arrived to administer the benighted territory after Nato forces made their triumphant entry were hailed as heroes by a populous as grateful as it was grief-stricken.
But now Kosovo has become angry again. As the eyes of the world have been elsewhere, another battle has erupted in the heart of the world's 'most successful' UN peacekeeping mission. After around 1,500 days of receiving more money, aid and support than any other war-ravaged country, Kosovars are angry. But this time their venom is reserved for the very people who came to protect and reform them.
As locals grapple with price increases and worsening poverty, it is the 'internationals' who have become symbols of the contradictions threatening to tear the UN protectorate apart. Across the province, men and women appear disgusted by their foreign guardians' 'corrupt' beneficence and depraved 'colonial' ways.
'They came to keep the peace and now they're causing tensions,' said Qamile Blakcori. 'We are very grateful that Western forces saved us from the Serbs, but now it's time they go.'
Sophisticated and determined, Blakcori is the embodiment of Kosovo's return to normality. Without the iron hand of Belgrade to silence them, she and her artist husband soon set about realising their 'life dream' of opening a gallery in Pristina.
Because of this, she has only 'good words' for Unmik (UN Mission in Kosovo) and K-for, the 20,000-strong multinational peace force that has restored law and order. But as a mother of four, she says, she is also 'sick to the bone'.
Over half of Kosovo's two million people are living on or below the poverty line. Unemployment is rampant, and after four years of governance by 'white men' the province - a net exporter of electricity under the Yugoslav regime - is still suffering daily from debilitating power cuts. All this as the perception also grows that many internationals are only in Kosovo for 'their fat-cat salaries and CVs'. If they cared so much about locals, why were there so many abandoned babies who had reportedly been sired by Westerners?
'I'm really fearful for my children,' sighed Blakcori. 'What are they going to do? The internationals have done good things, but they have also brought bad habits. Now there is a lot of drugs and prostitution. In the Balkans when people have lots of time and nothing to do they tend to become radicalised.'
'Last week's protest, timed to coincide with the start of historic but widely unpopular reconciliation talks in Vienna with the Serbs, is just the beginning,' says Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi.
'Being ruled 5,000 miles away from New York is simply not working,' he snapped. 'With no road maps, or political deadlines, or sense of resolving their unclear international status as a non-state entity, Kosovars are fast losing hope.'
'We don't like to see those protests or those placards,' said the leader, who will hold talks in London on Tuesday. 'But if Unmik continues to ignore our needs, if it refuses to transfer more power to us, then internationals here will face big demonstrations and everyone will be crying "Unmik go home".'
'What was especially galling to Kosovars was the brazen "corruption" within the mission,' said Rexhepi, who was elected in March 2002. He added that not only was the UN refusing to grant his people more self-rule, it was also abusing power 'at the highest levels,'.
The malpractice - reluctantly confirmed by Western diplomats - had made him 'feel very ashamed'. A lot of the misplaced funds, he suspected, were local taxes. 'Unmik claimed it has zero tolerance for corruption and organised crime, but there is serious corruption involving huge amounts of money right at its core,' he lamented.
As a surgeon who risked his life serving as a field doctor with the Kosovo Liberation Army (the guerrilla group whose uprising against Serb rule set in motion the events that led to Nato's air bombardment in 1999), he had 'other visions for Kosovo'.
'There are many internationals who also use these services of trafficked women. People will think I am revealing these things because I am politically frustrated. But it's not that. I've had enough! Over a year ago I asked that a team of investigators be sent from New York, and I still haven't got an answer.'
Since then, Kosovars have seen the imprisonment of a German bureaucrat, Joe Trutschler, for embezzling 4.5 million euros as chairman of the supervising board of the Kosovo Electric Company. He believes there are similar cases at Kosovo's telecoms company, customs service and airport - utilities that Unmik had control of.
'I don't want to mention names but I suspect it is happening at the highest level [in collusion] with locals,' said Rexhepi. 'I am not saying we are angels, but these people think they are untouchable because they have corrupted others, so they're all in it together.'
If his government had control over the police and security services, it would be able to investigate these things itself. 'This is our greatest problem, the West won't let us be ourselves,' the Prime Minister complained. 'People voted me into office and instead I find myself with my hands tied behind my back. It's a total contradiction.'
What the West fails to appreciate, he said, was that it was impeding Kosovo's development. Without independence, the territory, which still comes under Serbian jurisdiction, could not even receive credit and loans. Lack of financial incentives have been widely blamed for the tiny number of refugee returning to the province.
'Ours was the first village to return to Kosovo after the Nato campaign,' said Sonya Vukovic, a 26-year-old Serbian paediatrician in Osojane, a Serbian enclave. 'There were 60 young people at first, but they have all gone as there is no work in Kosovo and life is so hard. We can't even go to the next village without being escorted by K-for.'
Privately, UN officials concede that it would have been better if Kosovo's status had been settled when the organisation drew up a mandate to run the province. Without it being defined their mission is like 'walking on eggshells'. After all, how can Kosovo be decolonised when no one is sure what its real identity is?
Instead, Unmik has set out eight benchmarks - under the title 'Standards before status' - that it says must be met before the question is settled.
Officials readily admit that any of the alternatives - independence, partition, continued international stewardship - are unlikely to satisfy everyone.
'It's just like Iraq, whatever we do is going to affect the entire region,' said one senior EU diplomat.
'Kosovo is a perfect example of the confusion the West is likely to get into if it doesn't think through the political implications of its military strategy. If we go on like this we're going to have to set up a colonial service.'
If Kosovo has taught the world anything, it is that nation-building is neither cheap nor easy. Prominent women's rights activists in Kosovo sent a two-page missive to Baghdad about the perils of foreign occupation days after US administrators arrived in the Iraqi capital.
Does Harri Holkeri, the former Finnish Prime Minister who recently took over as UN executive, agree? 'Absolutely not. This is not Iraq. It's a civilised place, the people are well educated,' he said. 'Kosovars should have the opportunity to decide their future when they prove they can govern themselves. I would like to make myself disappear. That is the mission of the entire international community in Kosovo.' Kosovars clearly can't wait.
We could use a few hundred people like that in New York...
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Prayer and Politics
Serb fears grow as Albanians dynamite churches.
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Friday, October 17, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
GRACANICA, Kosovo--The ceremony was elaborate. First came espresso cups, filled with sweet, viscous coffee. Then glasses of faintly cloudy water. Finally the priest who was serving us--a bearded giant about 6-foot-4, sheathed dauntingly in a black cassock--brought us thimbles of plum brandy. He must have seen eyes light up (it was four in the afternoon, well in advance of cocktail hour), for he allowed himself a brief, toothy smile. "Please!" he said to our small group, beckoning us to partake. He then withdrew to a corner, where he stood sentinel, an adamant Serb statue.
The little old man presiding nodded his head hospitably, and once we'd each reached for our liquid of choice, he began to speak his mind. "They killed two of our boys recently," he said, in the clipped sentences of a dignitary accustomed to an interpreter. "Shot them while they were swimming in a river." He shook his head mournfully, and his acolytes murmured their revulsion. "We asked parliament to have a minute's silence in their memory. They refused. They refused!"
The emphasis in the little old man's last words was disconcerting. Until that moment, he, Bishop Artemije--Serb Orthodox bishop of the Kosovo region of the former Yugoslavia--had seemed only to whisper. Now he appeared to want to be heard. The boys were Serbs, his parishioners; their killers were Kosovar Albanians, Muslim separatists who are hell-bent, Bishop Artemije believes, on driving the Serbs out of Kosovo, where they now constitute only a small minority in a demographic sea of Albanians--the same Albanians who dominate Kosovo's parliament, where a technicality, that the rulebook only allows silence for dead legislators, was used to frustrate Bishop Artemije's plaintive request for a formal, public mourning for the murdered Serb boys.
"This is what I spend my time doing," the bishop said ruefully, as if apologizing for the temporal nature of his business. His measured tones were in contrast to the feelings of some of the parishioners present at the meeting, who, it was clear, saw their lives as an irreducible conflict between Christian Serbs and the Albanian Antichrist. The gloom in their hearts was palpable, as if they knew that their days in Kosovo were numbered and that their only option now was to stage an elaborate theater of outrage--in hopes of getting the outside world to come to their aid. "They will dynamite everything, even our church in Gracanica," one told me. "They" are the Albanians; and the church is one of a score of Serb Orthodox churches, dating from the 13th to the 18th centuries, whose presence imbues Kosovo with near-mystical importance for many Serbs, making Kosovo, as one Serb told me, "like our Judea and Samaria."
Gracanica is five miles from Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and is the bishop's seat. He lives in the monastery adjacent to the church, a haunting place--now afflicted also with that contagious Serb gloom--built in 1321. The Byzantine frescoes inside the church are stunning and, as Edith Durham once described them, "old-world, barbaric, and decorative," with gaunt saints, their cheeks made more sunken still by the ghostly light. The iconography even explains, in a curious aesthetic way, the Serbs' stubborn atavism. Ars longa, vita brevis, Serbia forever.
History is but a flash to the Serbs, for they still kindle themselves with fuel from the 14th century. They were defeated in battle by the Turks in 1389--in a place near here, called the Field of the Blackbirds--and have turned that defeat into an elaborate myth, a kind of Balkan "nunca más," or "never again," an eerie, vengeful national myth of regret and reprisal. "Losing" Kosovo to the Muslim Albanians today is unthinkable because it evokes the loss of Kosovo to the Muslim Turks 600 years ago. So when prayers are conducted at Gracanica, they are not so much an attempt to transcend political conflict as an extension of existential polemics. Orthodox prayer is politics in Kosovo.
Albanian extremists have only heightened Serb fears by blowing up numerous churches since 1999, when NATO intervened to put a stop to Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of ethnic terror against the Kosovar Albanians. That said, there is now a groundswell in Albanian civil society that offers hope of a way forward. Many nations have their spiritual roots left behind in other territories: the Iranians in Najaf and Karbala; the Turks all over Central Asia; the Greeks in Istanbul. If the Albanians can make promises to protect Serb shrines, and the Serbs can bring themselves to believe those promises, there should be no reason why Bishop Artemije and his flock cannot arrive at a modern way of living with reality.
And then perhaps the year 1389 might cede, at last, to the present.
Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.
And here I thought drugs and prostitution was how they always financed their terrorism, I guess what really bothers them, is that now the whole world knows.
KOSOVSKA MITROVICA -- Friday – An elderly Kosovo Serb has died of starvation because he was afraid to go out into the street alone, Beta reports.
Sixty-five year old Zivorad Velikinac was taken to the Mitrovica hospital on Wednesday where one staff member described him as looking like a prisoner from Auschwitz.
“Although he lived in central Urosevac, he had not eaten anything for more than fifteen days because his Albanian neighbours stopped bringing him food and he did not dare go into the street alone,” said physician Nebojsa Srbljak.
The president of the Serb National Council, Milan Ivanovic, accused UNMIK of being responsible because Serbs and other non-Albanians still had no freedom of movement in the province.
Ivanovic, who is also a physician in the Mitrovica Hospital, confirmed that Velikinac had died of starvation.
Only about fifteen Serbs live in Urosevac today, down from ten thousand before the 1999 war.
No worry, Socialist UN only thing keep you from direct Serb rule, it also only thing that keep drug runners and murderers free.
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