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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
As Serbs mark their historic defeat at Kosovo Polje 610 years ago, the future doesn't look much brighter.
Jun 28, 1999 | Ten years ago, on the 600th anniversary of the defeat of the Serbs by the Ottoman Turks at the battle of Kosovo Polje, 2 million Serbs gathered to rally around then Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic's call for a greater Serbia.
Today, 10 years later, Milosevic has been indicted by a United Nations tribunal for crimes against humanity, more than half of Kosovo's 200,000 Serbs have fled the province in the wake of Serbia's capitulation to NATO airstrikes and only some 20 Serbs came to Kosovo Polje to witness the 610th anniversary of the battle.
"It's pretty sad," Aleksander Mitic, a Serbian journalist for a French news agency, said Monday. Mitic attended the grim ceremony at Kosovo's "field of blackbirds," as the name of the village is translated. "It was mostly journalists who came," Mitic observed.
The marking of the Serbian defeat at Kosovo Polje came as violence has gripped the Kosovo capital, Pristina. On Saturday, someone ransacked the media center at the Grand Hotel, which is currently home to most of the world's Kosovo-based press corps. They broke down doors, ripped out computers and telephone lines and terrorized the center's Serbian staff, who fled.
Then on Sunday, some 20 ethnic Albanians stormed the hotel and demanded their old jobs back. The hotel's Serbian staff, which has run the Grand since Milosevic revoked the rights of Kosovo's Albanian majority in 1989, called in units from the NATO-led Kosovo peacekeeping force, KFOR, who prevented a firefight. Now only those with KFOR accreditation can enter the hotel, which also runs the only restaurant in this city.
Also on Sunday, an international staff member with the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and his translator were killed, although the details of who killed them and why are not clear.
An eerie atmosphere of unrest bordering on lawlessness has descended on Pristina, which formerly was gripped by an oppressive fear of the Serbian police. People are looting stores, sometimes in plain site of KFOR forces and the international press. KFOR is beefing up its 250-member military police force to 500, but is calling on the United Nations to rapidly ramp up an international civilian policing program.
Currently the U.N. is due to deploy some 3,000 international police, and to recruit local ethnic Albanian police, including 2,000 former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, to keep law and order in the province.
Monday also marked the first day of organized refugee resettlement in Kosovo. But while some 400 Kosovo Albanians living in Macedonian refugee camps boarded official U.N.-secured buses to Kosovo Monday, more than 300,000 have already returned on their own, against the advice of the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, over the past three weeks.
