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LLAUSHE, Yugoslavia-Beneath a sky streaked with
blackbirds, mourners wound the
muddy path to pay respects to the village teacher
who was killed when a Serbian grenade
exploded in a school for Albanian children.
Women paused from fetching water and milking
cows to hold coarse hands over their
hearts. Men and boys with ripped shoes and runny
noses whispered of the newly formed
band of mountain guerrillas who have begun terrorizing
the Serbian police forces that
torture and kill Albanians.
"Even though we are empty-handed we will fight,"
said one Albanian villager. "I would join
the guerrillas if I could find them."
In another unfinished ethnic struggle in the
frayed Balkans, the two million Albanians who
make up 90 percent of Kosovo province are seeking
independence from the Serbian
republic, which makes up most of Yugoslavia.
The Albanians have protested, mostly
peacefully, for eight years. But in recent weeks
the Kosovo Liberation Army has claimed
responsibility for ambushing 11 police stations
and shooting down a Serbian military plane.
Little is known about the KLA, except that it
is well hidden in a rugged land of horse plows
and haystacks. In some villages, the existence
of armed guerrillas in ski masks is more
mythical than real. But Western diplomats fear
the group has captured the imagination of
an angry people who could tip the Balkans into
another war.
"I'm convinced the KLA exists," said Hamid Geci,
the cousin of Halit Geci, the teacher
killed in the grenade blast last month. "For
me the KLA is the base for the liberation of
Kosovo. I would join and so would every young
person who thinks Kosovo should be free."
"The situation is decidedly . .. tense," said
one Western diplomat, adding that at least
40,000 black-market weapons are circulating in
Kosovo. "People are frightened. There is a
real danger this could blow up very badly. .
. . Kids are pretending to be KLA terrorists in
street games." Until recently, independence-minded
Albanians practiced a Gandhi-like
strategy of civil disobedience. They boycotted
Serbian stores, hospitals and other
institutions. They staged protests at Pristina
University. They tried to set up a parallel
society-their own schools and water authorities-but
the attempts generally failed for lack of
money.That changed on Nov. 28, when the KLA made
its first public appearance: A
masked man in a fatigue jacket addressed 20,000
people at Geci's funeral. Since then
Albanians from all over Kosovo have daily flowed
into Geci's village to show support for
the KLA. The group-supposedly funded by working-class
Albanians in Switzerland and
Germany-has taken responsibility for ransacking
police stations and downing a training
plane that crashed this month, killing five Serbian
army pilots.
Serbian authorities fear more attacks and have
suspended night patrols in some villages.
The U.S. delegate to Serbia, Richard Miles, visited
Kosovo recently to ease tensions.
Ibrahim Rugova, who was elected by Kosovo's Albanians
to oversee their self-proclaimed
government, said romantic images of guerrillas
faxing ultimatums and battling a superior
military power could be disastrous.
"If it comes to violence, we will see extermination
of Albanians," said Rugova. "The
balance of brute force is against us."
KLA is mysterious
Western officials know little about the KLA's
size and tactics. Some even suggested the
KLA may be a fictional creation of the Serbs,
an excuse for using more force. "It was really
odd that not one policeman was killed in all
those supposed raids on police stations," said
one diplomat. Whether the organization consists
of 30 or 300 guerrillas, the KLA is the
creation of unresolved ethnic turmoil in the
former Yugoslavia. For decades, the
Communists allowed Kosovo-which is 90 percent
Muslim Albanian-to remain relatively
autonomous with its own language and government.
But when Yugoslavia splintered in the
1990s, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic claimed
Kosovo as part of Serbia. About
200,000 Serbs live in Kosovo, which contains
many of Serbia's Christian Orthodox shrines
and natural resources.
In the ensuing years, Kosovo has become more
divided. Mosques and cathedrals battle
for space. Young Serbs in BMWs smoke black-market
cigarettes hawked at stoplights by
poor Albanian teenagers. Albanian farmers with
scythes and pitchforks work in fields
watched over by armored Serbian police vehicles.
Few places show the separateness
more starkly than an elementary school with two
names in the city of Pristina. The Serbs
call the school Milos Crnjanski; the Albanians
refer to it as Dardanij. As if out of the pages
of a dark fairy tale, a wall with metal doors
has been built in the middle of the school to
keep the children apart. The Serbian side is
larger and holds 500 students. It is warm. An
aquarium bubbles in the foyer. Plants sit on
windowsills, and hallways are decorated with
portraits of Serbian kings and crayon drawings
of swans and unicorns.
Albanians are deprived
On the Albanian side, 2,065 students-some sitting
on each other's laps-cram into filthy
classrooms. There are no computers, projectors
or chemistry equipment. Parents donate
chalk and erasers. The cold hallways smell of
urine and are dotted with gray pencil
drawings-one of a warrior swinging a bloody ax.
"There was total silence for three days when
the wall was put up" in 1993, said Demirjanka
Bedzija, a teacher on the Albanian side. "It
was difficult for the children to cope. They tried
with feet and hands to break through the wall.
But the Serbs patched it up. Hatred was
introduced into the children's heads. "The Serbian
principal of the school, Bogi Gogic, built
the dividing wall after the Albanians started
their own curriculum. If the Albanians wanted a
non-Serbian education, he said, they could stay
on one side-and pay for it themselves. But
with an unemployment rate among Albanians of
more than 50 percent, most families can't
afford the $5-a-month school tax. Gogic, a bearded
man who sat beneath a painting of
Jesus Christ, described the situation as "democracy."
Walking to his window, he pulled
back the lace curtain and looked down at the
garbage blowing over the dirt field where
Albanian children were kicking a ball. "Look
at how they live," he said. "It's normal we've
had to isolate ourselves, like you would from
contagious diseases."
Downstairs from Bogic's office, Luka Kovaceviz
stood near the aquarium. She's been a
teacher on the Serbian side for 10 years. Because
she married an Albanian, her children
are in class on the other side of the wall. She
knows they walk over broken glass and
share two bathrooms with more than 2,000 students.
Asked if she agreed with Bogic's
wall, she just walked away.
As snow blew across cabbage fields about 20 miles
northwest of Pristina, men and
women from all over Kosovo gathered in Geci's
village to continue the vigil for the fallen
teacher. Many arrived on horse carts and tractors
and in caravans of rickety cars. Women
wrapped in long dresses and scarves waited in
line amid a scatter of chickens to comfort
Geci's widow.
The teacher died, according to villagers, when
Serbian police were retreating from a clash
in the mountains with KLA members and Albanian
farmers who refused to pay taxes. Geci
started sending students home, but as the firefight
came nearer, a Serbian grenade was
fired into the school. Some mothers were worried;
they knew that if the KLA was growing,
sooner or later their sons might be called. "The
children are very scared," said Fatime
Geci, the mother of a 12-year-old boy and a relative
of the dead teacher. "They're scared
of the police. The torture. The killings." Down
a bumpy path from the mourning women,
men and boys huddled outside around a framed
portrait of Geci. Many of the men hadn't
worked in months, relying instead on selling
eggs and whatever their meager fields bore.
"Here," said one man, "we buy cows small and
sell them big. . . . But we have nothing."
One man mentioned the KLA.
The others drew closer.
"Yes, yes, the KLA exists," said several men.
"The KLA's presence at the funeral was an inspiration
to us," said one man, who wouldn't
give his name after his friends tried to hush
him. "We don't have any way out except to
give our souls. We have only our lives left.
If I could find the KLA, I would join them."
Many of the men nodded, some smiled, a few boys
shimmied into the group to listen.
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