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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Unfortunately for the Albanians, however, Kostunica isn't the convenient boogeyman that Milosevic was. While Milosevic reigned, Kosovo automatically had the world's sympathy. Not anymore. It's easier to argue for independence when you're trying to separate from a war criminal.
When the Serbian politician is done talking, the monk shows me the Orthodox chapel some 200 feet from the monastery. He is perhaps 23 or 24, with gentle eyes and a light brown beard. He wants to leave the monastery to teach theology, so that he won't always be the youngest monk he knows. The church, he tells me, was built around 1320. In 1950, Marshal Tito honored it with a visit. A small stone structure that couldn't hold more than 20 worshippers, it's simple, beautiful, powerfully holy.
As he talks, an American soldier strolls by. He looks about 18, and his machine gun, which is about half his height, bounces against his hip as he walks.
I have come to Kosovo on the eve of the U.N.-sponsored municipal elections, which will be held Saturday, in the aftermath of Yugoslavia's. Touring the countryside, I can see why the Kosovars are so angry. The Serbs destroyed about one in four homes in Kosovo, and the landscape is pockmarked with house after house reduced to piles of rubble -- roofs gone, interiors decimated, maybe a wall or two partially intact. These were solid, durable homes made of brick, stone and cement. The Serbs knew their business.
One answer to the resulting housing problem was for returning Albanians to seize Serbian homes, but that has only perpetuated the hatred. An American diplomat told me of a Serbian man who fled Kosovo during the war, then returned to find his home occupied by an Albanian family. When they refused to leave, he asked an official at the U.N. Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) for an armed guard. To protect you while you try to get your home back? the official asked. No, the Serb said, to protect me while I burn it down.
More typical, however, is the sight of Albanians building, building, building. Everywhere you look new houses are springing up, surrounded by stacks of red brick and piles of the saplings the Albanians use as floor supports.
But the Albanians are also constructing walls of division, and these days it is the estimated 100,000 Serbs who remain in Kosovo who live in fear. Though international visitors can rarely tell a Serb from an Albanian by sight, Albanians can -- and in most of Kosovo Serbs dare not walk alone. Not if they want to live.
After the bombing, under KFOR's guard, some Serbs remained in Pristina, but the Albanians did their best to expel them. In one two-towered apartment building, Albanians lived on one side, Serbs on the other. Last winter the Serbian side was always dark, because the Albanians who run the power plant cut off its electricity. (Other Albanians cut the Serbs' phone lines.) Winters in Kosovo are brutal. So the Serbs huddled in freezing apartments, because to step outside meant risking their lives.
Most of Kosovo's Serbs have taken refuge in Serb-only enclaves scattered throughout the countryside -- ghettos, some people call them. The enclaves are safer than Pristina, but they're not really that safe. Albanians can drive through the enclaves, and a few weeks ago an Albanian man aimed his car at a group of Serbian children and hit the accelerator. He killed one and tried to kill another before speeding away. Not long after that, in a municipality called Obilic, someone threw a hand grenade into a Serbian playground, wounding several children.
Such acts may seem like random, arbitrary violence, but they aren't. Murdering Serbian children is both an expression of the enduring hatred and a blow against the Serbs' future in Kosovo. But ask an Albanian about such terrorism, and he is likely to explain, in all seriousness, that Serbs are killing their own children to make Albanians look bad.
