NATO Aim of Multiethnic Kosovo Slipping Out of Reach

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia —  After nearly four months of military occupation and tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid, U.N. officials are facing the cold reality that one of their mission’s key goals in Kosovo--a multiethnic, integrated society--has slipped away.

Bernard Kouchner, who as U.N. mission chief has ultimate authority in the war-torn province, admitted in a recent interview that peacekeepers have yet to find a formula for salving the fear and anger of ethnic Albanians and Serbs.

The result, he said, is the kind of partitioned society that peacekeepers said they wanted to avoid.

“I hope that we will go back from this,” Kouchner said, visibly frustrated over the peacekeepers’ unwanted role of enforcing divisions between Serbs and Albanians. “For the moment, it is better to protect the people. . . . There is no doubt that it will take years to extract the hatred from the hearts of the people.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s inability to stop the ghettoization means that the Western force’s two stated goals in involving itself in the separatist province remain unmet.

Serbian paramilitary groups and security police made a mockery of NATO’s first goal--halting the persecution of ethnic Albanians--by embarking on a campaign of terror that left at least 11,000 people, mostly ethnic Albanians, dead and 100,000 homes heavily damaged or destroyed.

And now, nearly four months after NATO-led troops took control of the province, the goal of a multiethnic society is far from reach. Peacekeepers are in charge of a sharply segregated province, with the remaining Serbs hardening into defiant enclaves surrounded by Albanians with attitudes like those of Naile Dobruna, 48, whose village was nearly destroyed by marauding Serbian forces.

“The Serbs,” she said angrily, “don’t have a place here anymore.”

Pajazit Nushi of the Council for Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms in Pristina, the Kosovo capital, said the complicity of ordinary Serbs in the “ethnic cleansing” of Albanians makes it difficult for the latter to now accept them as neighbors.

“No one opposed the crimes,” said Nushi, an ethnic Albanian. “Still, now, there is no single Serbian political voice that has condemned the crimes.”

Peacekeepers themselves enforce the division in a province where an accent can carry the stain of sin. Soldiers at a British checkpoint outside Gracanica, the site of a key Serbian Orthodox monastery, warn travelers that Serbs have their own checkpoint a few hundred yards farther on.

Last week, soldiers moved in the predawn hours to dismantle Serbian and Albanian blockades that were choking east-west travel in the province.

A day later, Albanians reburying bodies found in a mass grave near Kosovska Mitrovica attacked a Serbian convoy escorted by Russian troops. In the ensuing riot, one Serb was killed and scores of Serbs, ethnic Albanians and peacekeepers were injured.

In Kosovska Mitrovica itself, a divided city that has become an international symbol for the dire complexities NATO forces face, French troops occupy the town’s main bridge over the Ibar River to keep Serbian and ethnic Albanian crowds from attacking each other.

On a recent morning, a fear-stricken middle-age woman tried to get French soldiers to escort her to a YugoBank branch on the northern, Serbian side to check on her ethnic Albanian husband’s pension, months in arrears. The YugoBank branch on the south side is now a U.N. office.

“This is partition,” the woman said, declining to identify herself out of fear of reprisals. “There are no Albanians over there. This [river] is the border now.”

Across Kosovo, the divisions have been forged by fear.

In the months leading up to last spring’s NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, ethnic Albanians in Pristina stayed home at night to avoid the masked men who routinely shot up or bombed Albanian bars and other businesses, killing dozens of people.

Now it’s the Serbs who hide indoors, while the streets and cafes of Pristina are jammed each evening with mostly young Albanians, European dance music providing the soundtrack to their expressions of newfound freedoms.

Nine floors above the throbbing cafes of the city’s downtown Dardania neighborhood, Razumenka Stojanovic, 64, lives cloistered in fear. The Serbian woman hasn’t left her apartment since a few days after the bombing ended in June and has relied on international aid workers to bring her food and other necessary supplies.

A friendly Albanian neighbor and the only other Serbian family in the building--a mother and adult daughter--watch out for her, but they can’t stop the threatening telephone calls telling her to leave.

And they were helpless last month when someone cut Stojanovic’s telephone line, then threw a gasoline-drenched carpet against her door and ignited it.

Stojanovic jumped through the flames to escape, suffering second-degree burns on her legs and first-degree burns on her arms. She doesn’t dare journey to a medical center for treatment. So a British army doctor comes to her apartment to change the dressings on her legs and deliver pain medicine and antibiotics.

“I’m very scared,” Stojanovic said as a Serbian telephone repairman, protected by two heavily armed British soldiers, fixed her phone. “This is all I’ve got. I don’t have anywhere else to go. If I had a place to go, I would go.”

Most have gone. One U.N. report estimated that half of the 200,000 Serbs--compared with nearly 2 million Albanians--who lived here in 1998 remain, although many observers reject that number as too high.

It’s clear that the Serbs who remain have undergone a critical shift in attitude.

In the early days of NATO occupation, many Serbs who stayed were optimistic that they could forge a future with their Albanian neighbors. But a wave of retaliatory killings of Serbs by Albanians enraged by wartime atrocities has calcified emotions.

Father Sava Janjic, secretary to Serbian Orthodox Bishop Artemije, said U.N. officials must tailor their policies to the reality that has emerged here in the ashes left by retreating Serbian army, paramilitary and police units.

“Kosovo already is a divided society, unfortunately,” Janjic said, adding that fear fuels the partitioning. “If elderly people are not safe in Pristina, then how can you encourage Serbian parents to send their children to Pristina schools?”

War is always a disruptive force. But throughout the fighting last spring, Ljubica Karadzic did her job uninterrupted, traveling each day from her Serbian village to Pristina’s main hospital to nurse the sick and the wounded.

For her, it’s the peace that’s disruptive. Days after NATO forces occupied Pristina, she said, her Albanian boss fired her.

Now Karadzic spends her days praying at the Gracanica monastery. She spends her nights behind locked doors with her husband, listening in confused fear to the sporadic percussion of stones bouncing off their home, one of about 20 Serbian houses left among 300 ethnic Albanian families just outside Gracanica, a Serbian enclave.

“I thought that when the bombing stopped, everything would be OK,” Karadzic said, fingering a small wooden cross dangling from a chain around her neck. “It became a catastrophe. I knew [ethnic Albanians] would come one day, but I hoped they would come with peace.”

Others lost jobs because they don’t dare go to work.

In Kosovska Mitrovica, ethnic Serb Vladislav Kovacevic, 25, lives on the north side of the river. His job was in a battery factory on the Albanian-controlled south side. He was last there during the bombing and doesn’t even know if the factory is operating.

“Serbian people are afraid to go on the streets,” Kovacevic said. “The Albanians can point to you and say, ‘He killed people.’ They can just point and accuse you, with no proof, nothing.”

Elsewhere, residents in the Serbian village of Robovce, about 10 miles southwest of Pristina, wait for twice-weekly NATO-protected caravans so they can run household errands in the nearby village of Lipljan.

“Every time we want to go shopping, we have to ask NATO to escort us,” said Zoran Spasic, 29. “It’s like living in a ghetto.”

He said the scope of Albanian reprisals has surprised him. Before and during the bombing, he said, the area around his village was peaceful. Since NATO peacekeepers arrived, he said, three men have been kidnapped and two houses burned.

“I don’t know how long this will take to get settled,” Spasic said. “No Serbs will be left if something doesn’t improve.”