Albanian Students Take On Milosevic

Filed at 8:35 a.m. EDT
By The Associated Press

VELANIJA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Ethnic Albanian students in Yugoslavia's restive Kosovo
province are definitely ready for school to start. They've mapped their routes, mailed their pamphlets and contacted about every human rights group they can think of.
    For weeks, student union leaders have been meeting daily at their office -- a crumbling
red-brick house with paper taped over the windows that blocks the light but not the chill --
preparing for a massive protest to demand access to a better university.

Diplomats have tried to stop them. So have local leaders.

   Nevertheless, on Wednesday -- the first day of the fall semester -- 23,000 students and
their families are determined to storm the streets.
    For seven years, some 16,000 Albanian students have held underground classes,
organized in private homes and financed by Kosovo residents.
    Last year, President Slobodan Milosevic signed an agreement with the Albanians'
outlaw president, Ibrahim Rugova to allow the return of the Albanian students to Serbian
schools. But it has never been implemented.
    Instead, the Albanians' campus is a village, with no real classrooms, no laboratories and
no libraries. Students learn in living rooms, basements and attics, sitting and writing on
wooden planks instead of desks.
    Meanwhile, just a few miles (kilometers) away in the provincial capital, Pristina, Serb
students study at a sweeping state school, with extra room and plenty of facilities.
    The universities are just one example of a schizophrenic society where everything is
separate and nothing is equal.
    Street signs in two languages. Separate shops and restaurants. Separate health clinics
for giving birth to children, who will grow up going to separate schools.
    One set is for the ethnic Albanians who make up 90 percent of Kosovo's 1.9 million
people; the other is for minority Serbs, whose leaders control the government.
    It has been like this since 1989, when Milosevic yanked away the province's autonomy,
the first blow in his fight to create a greater Serbia -- the fight that started Bosnia's war.
    He dissolved Kosovo's government and fired Albanian civil servants. Doctors and
teachers either walked off their jobs or were forced out.
    In response, Albanians established a parallel administration in Kosovo -- including
health and education systems -- that has been tolerated but always watched by Serb
police.
    Last year, Milosevic agreed to let Albanians return to state schools starting Oct. 1, 1996,
with classes to include Albanian language and history.
    Nothing changed, and students are sick of waiting. Inspired by last winter's huge
demonstrations in other parts of Yugoslavia, they say their protest will last until Milosevic
hears their complaints or sends police to silence them.
    "We're not asking the Serb students to leave. We want them to stay," said student union
president Bujar Dugoli, a history major. "But we're 90 percent of the people here, and we
want 90 percent of the rights, and 90 percent of the space."
    The students insist the protests will be peaceful and non-political, by which they mean
that -- unlike other Albanians -- they aren't asking for the region's independence. But this is
Kosovo, and everything is political -- a contest of wills between a government that wants
these 80 square miles (207.2 square kilometers) for Serbs and 1.8 million Albanians who
aren't about to go away.
    Depressing in its poverty and bizarre in its parallel societies, Kosovo already feels like
the separate country many Albanians wish they had. Across the invisible border, minarets
pierce the horizon, and brick farmhouses are surrounded by walls, protecting Muslim
women from prying eyes.
    At Pristina University, the library has clusters of white domes, an architectural reference
to the distinctive cap worn by Kosovo's Muslim men. Just next door, an Orthodox church,
representing the religion of most Serbs, is being built.
    "They don't need to come back to our university," said Dejan Karalovic, a 21-year-old
Serb student walking across the campus. "They have their own country in Albania."
    Of 18,000 Serbs at the university, only 5,000 are Kosovo natives. The rest come from
Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia's Montenegro republic. That still doesn't fill the five
dormitories, so one has become housing for refugees from Bosnia's war -- another way to
swell the province's Serb minority.
    "The situation with schools is absolutely unbearable," says Fehmi Agani, a 69-year-old
former sociology professor. "Not even fascism took such measures here. It's the most
evident discrimination."
    In 1990, the Albanians elected a shadow government, which Milosevic promptly
banned. Agani is the vice president, and despite his sympathy, his government doesn't
support the student protest.
    In a last-ditch effort to stop it, Rugova met with student leaders on Monday, along with
diplomats from the United States, Russia and other European countries.
    The last big anti-Milosevic rallies here were in 1989, when at least 25 people were killed
in clashes with Serb police. Fearful the student protest will cause similar unrest, Rugova
stressed the need for Kosovo to stay calm -- particularly now, with the possibility of new
talks with Serbian authorities.
    The students declined. After the meeting, they resumed what they call their daily "walks"
through Pristina and its suburbs, tracing the steps of a protest they hope -- against the
odds -- will be peaceful.