Where ‘No One Is the Enemy’

VITINA, Yugoslavia —  The enemy is rarely easy to see if you’re a peacekeeper in Kosovo, especially when it is yourself.

The U.S. Army’s “rules of engagement” tell troops when they can shoot. But the soldiers are on their own when it comes to a more difficult choice: whether to care about the people they are assigned to protect.

And compassion comes with many risks in Kosovo, where a tangled web of politics, ethnic hatred and deceit can trap those who get too close.

By ordering a “top-to-bottom” review of the U.S. military this month, President Bush revived the debate about whether troops trained to fight wars should spend years keeping the peace in open-ended missions such as those in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.

There is no political solution in sight to the ethnic Albanian majority’s demand for independence for Kosovo--which is technically still a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic--so peacekeeping troops must walk a fine line as they patrol where the Serbian minority is just as determined to remain part of Yugoslavia.

Lt. Col. Kenneth Ward constantly reminds the military police under his command that no matter where their sympathies lie, they can’t give anyone good reason to accuse them of taking sides.

“You’ve got to guard against giving [ethnic] Albanians the impression you favor Serbs or Serbs the impression you favor Albanians, or we’re going to start losing this,” Ward tells his MPs.

It is hard to be coldly detached in Kosovo, where everyone is a victim and any soldier who stops to listen will hear endless reasons why the other side is to blame.

The U.S. soldiers “are just people. They’ve got hearts,” said Ward, 41, of Montezuma, Ga. “They relate a lot back to their own lives, and they feel the pain. It would be easier if we came and everybody was the enemy, but here, no one is the enemy. The enemy can be complacency. The enemy can be you.”

At their most harmless, the risks are reprimand or disillusionment for the good-hearted who go too far.

But the coming of spring heralds new violence, and the real dangers increase. The peacekeepers, with no clear political objective and exit strategy, are caught in the middle of an unfinished civil war waged by killers on both sides.

On Feb. 16, a bomb killed 10 Serbs and injured 40 others. They were traveling in a bus convoy guarded by Swedish troops, and Kosovo’s Serbs faulted NATO-led forces for failing to stop ethnic Albanian extremists.

No Combat Casualties

Although U.S. peacekeepers have suffered no combat casualties, they have come under sniper fire, been stoned by angry mobs and almost gotten killed in a double blast in the village of Kolkot that leveled a Serbian house.

Ward’s MPs play a central role in efforts to get U.N. and civilian police forces in Kosovo to shoulder more responsibility for maintaining law and order and to gradually open the exit door for the peacekeeping force. It is tough slogging.

The 5,300 U.S. soldiers of Task Force Falcon make up 13% of the peacekeepers in Kosovo. The Pentagon has mapped out rotation schedules for at least five more years.

During last year’s U.S. presidential campaign, Condoleezza Rice--then an aide to candidate George W. Bush and now national security advisor--used the deployment here as an example of how prolonged peacekeeping missions with ill-defined goals undermine the military’s main purpose: fighting wars.

“This comes down to function,” Rice said. “Carrying out civil administration and police functions is simply going to degrade the American capability to do the things America has to do. We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.”

Yet that it precisely what soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division have been doing since Feb. 8, when they took over responsibility from the 101st Airborne here in Vitina, a hot spot in eastern Kosovo.

In an interview before he rotated out, Sgt. Douglass Turner, 22, of the 101st Airborne agreed with Rice’s assessment--in part. But like many U.S. soldiers in Kosovo, he saw nothing wrong with working like neighborhood cops.

The 101st trains its soldiers to leap into combat from hovering choppers and look for a quick kill, to work and think as parts of a lethal machine. War-making skills aren’t in high demand in Kosovo, so Turner and his fellow soldiers in Company A carried out a much different mission in this town of about 3,800 people, about 15% of whom are Serbs.

Some of the soldiers were assigned to escort a small busload of Serbian children to school in Vitina each day and stand guard outside the classrooms so that ethnic Albanian extremists wouldn’t attack. Others camped out next to Serbian Orthodox churches, providing 24-hour protection against bombers and arsonists.

A few U.S. soldiers admitted to bending the rules by bringing milk and bread from the Army mess to feed Serbs who fear being shot if they leave their houses.

The Serbs have good reason to be afraid. Last May, 8-year-old Ivana Dragic was playing on her front lawn with a friend when someone opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle, wounding both Serbian girls.

Army surgeons at the main U.S. base in Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel, operated on Ivana three times to screw a metal plate inside her arm and graft bone from her hip to mend the splintered limb.

On Dec. 13, a gunman killed Miroslav Krstic, 49, a Serbian security guard for the U.N. administration in Vitina, in the streets. U.N. police said Krstic was well liked by ethnic Albanians and Serbs, but no witnesses came forward.

Slobodan Jovanovic, a 55-year-old ethnic Serb, was killed Nov. 2 while buying grapes in Vitina’s market. His widow refused to flee the town and told 1st Lt. Karst Brandsma that she was afraid someone would come and slit her throat one night.

“As a Christmas gift, I bought her a padlock and a piece of chain,” said Brandsma, 24, of Seattle.

While on foot patrols, the soldiers of Company A were like cops walking the beat, getting to know each face and watching for people on their arrest list. During house calls, they were almost social workers in bulletproof vests, armed with M-16 assault rifles.

“My job, by definition, is to close with and destroy the enemy,” Sgt. Turner, of Clarksville, Tenn., said as he led his squad along a muddy street last month. “But I can also see the need for this [peacekeeping mission] at the same time. Sometimes I think we get misused, or used too long, but here I think there’s definitely a need for it.”

Turner took his patrol across an empty lot, through ankle-deep muck, to visit the Shefkius, an ethnic Albanian family whose members have been virtual prisoners in their home for almost two years.

Hamza Shefkiu, 54, was head of the Serbian secret police in Vitina until June 12, 1999, when North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops forced Serbian police and Yugoslav army units to leave Kosovo after 78 days of alliance airstrikes carried out to stop a cruel civil war.

Ethnic Albanians in Vitina consider Shefkiu a traitor and an accomplice to the crimes committed by Yugoslav and Serbian forces during the war.

Shefkiu never leaves the house. He lives with nine relatives, including his mother and two infant nieces, who rarely risk going out. The outside walls are pockmarked with bullet holes.

At its peak last year, the violence was so bad here that three U.S. soldiers and an armored Humvee were posted on 24-hour guard outside the Shefkius home. Now the family is protected only when patrols like Turner’s pass by.

Fearful for the Shefkius’ lives, the soldiers of Company A took the unusual step of writing to their superiors, on Department of the Army letterhead, to ask that the family be moved to a safer country.

“We believe it is your and our responsibility to ensure human rights and freedom for all persons,” Sgt. Scott Weaver and Cpl. Jason Cleary wrote to commanders in a “Memorandum for Record” dated Jan. 18. “If we cannot ensure these rights for the Shefkiu family in their country of origin, then it is our duty and responsibility to relocate them to a stable, free environment, where the Shefkiu family can enjoy the human rights they so well deserve.”

The letter has to work its way up the chain of command, and even if it receives attention from the brass, any decision to move the Shefkius would be made by civilians, probably in the U.N. administration.

Shefkiu is not an easy person to help. Despite the risks, he accuses the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, which officially disbanded after the war, of carrying out attacks on his family with assault rifles and Molotov cocktails.

And although he’s thankful for help from American soldiers, he blames U.S. policy under former of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

“She talked to the [KLA] terrorists--the wrong people,” he said.

The American forces’ commander in Kosovo, Brig. Gen. Kenneth Quinlan, says the men of Company A were right to follow their consciences and didn’t step over the line when they urged superiors to do the same.

“They are not just faceless robots,” he said in an interview. “They are great Americans, and they bring American values with them. And American soldiers always have.”

Quinlan, of Warwick, R. I., started out in the Army 28 years ago as a rifle platoon leader in the 101st Airborne and sees new leaders emerging from the ranks of his soldiers in Kosovo.

“I can tell you that U.S. soldiers are making a difference here every day,” he said. “Someone once said, in reference to peacekeeping, that it is a helluva business for soldiers, [that] this is not something soldiers should be doing, but it takes soldiers to do it. That’s probably true.”

U.S. guns and armor aren’t all that are saving lives here each day. Army doctors and medical equipment provide care that civilian hospitals still can’t match more than 18 months after the war.

The tent hospital at Bondsteel accepts any civilian with injuries that threaten “life, limb or eyesight.” Only 40% of the patients are soldiers, said Maj. Gary Cameron, 46, of Joplin, Mo.

The civilian patients have included a baby abandoned at the gate last April, and Bytyqi Grevist, a 9-year-old ethnic Albanian boy brought to the base Jan. 10 by his parents.

A week earlier, Bytyqi had suffered severe burns when he touched an electrical transformer while trying to catch a bird. Doctors had to amputate his right arm at the shoulder.

Few Social Services

Dr. Mel Harris, a reservist who took leave from Loma Linda University’s emergency medicine department to serve here, finished his three-month tour in late January frustrated by how little is being done to develop local health care and other basic services.

“There are hospitals that don’t have running water. There are hospitals whose infrastructure has been destroyed,” he said. “To me, that’s very solvable, very rapidly. You bring in the money, you bring in the physicians from around the world and give [ethnic] Albanians and Serbs good health care.

“They may leave the hospital and shoot each other outside, but in the sanctuary of that hospital, they get good health care,” he added. “To me, it’s unconscionable that those basic things are not being supplied instantly.”

In a war, Col. Daniel Nolan’s specialty would be directing field artillery fire, but in Kosovo he is deputy commander for civil affairs, which puts him in one of the peacekeeping mission’s most difficult battles: winning hearts and minds.

“What I’m really good at is creating smoking holes,” Nolan said. “But on this battlefield, I have to change perceptions. I have to influence people.”

To do that, the military mounts what it calls psychological operations, or “psy-ops.” In Kosovo, Nolan insisted, it’s simply a matter of telling the truth to counter prejudice or propaganda.

One of the trouble spots that civil affairs officers have concentrated on is the Serbian enclave of Strpce, a former ski resort with 90% unemployment and regular power outages that leave people shivering in the dark.

About 1,300 of the town’s 9,400 Serbs are refugees from elsewhere in Kosovo, and there is constant friction along an ethnic “fault line” about six miles outside Strpce, said Maj. David Miller, 38, of Appleton, Wis.

Civil affairs’ arsenal includes an annual budget of $5 million to fund development projects. About 10% goes to efforts in Strpce, such as repairing the water system and upgrading a clinic.

But efforts to win over the Serbs suffered another setback this month when a local man was killed when a busload of Serbs going shopping with an armed escort of Ukrainian troops was attacked. Three ethnic Albanians were arrested in the ambush, which sparked a three-hour riot by at least 500 Serbs in Strpce.

Days like that leave Kosovo’s peacekeepers feeling trapped on a dead-end street, like one that Command Sgt. Maj. Jerry Bennett has been down many times.

Bennett, 45, of Oxnard, is a military police officer who arrived in Kosovo in July 1999, just weeks after NATO’s bombing stopped and ethnic Albanians were killing and expelling Serbs. That fall, Bennett was on patrol down a dead-end street in the eastern town of Gnjilane when angry Serbs shouted at him. But when he returned last November, all the Serbs on the street had fled except for two elderly women, Leposava Zarkovic and Desanra Dosic.

Bennett tries to visit them at least once a week to make sure they’re still there and to offer them an escorted walk. Once in a while, his wife, Kyong, sends the women a care package from the U.S. with items such as snow boots, sweaters blankets and powdered milk.

Bennett could have forgotten about the two women long ago and left them--and Kosovo--to their fate. But he returned to the province Nov. 25 because of something Zarkovic said on the first, bitter day that they met.

Her words stuck in Bennett’s mind and pulled him back.

“She told me, ‘I appreciate your help, but a bird cannot stop the wind.’ ”