THE VIRTUAL COUNTRY. The initial euphoria of many returning Kosovo Albanians is fading, as the hard work of rebuilding a real life and viable society gets under way. Iso Rusi in Pristina reports.
WELCOME TO IWPR'S BALKAN CRISIS REPORT, NO. 57, 16 July 1999HOMELESS IN PEJE. Returning Albanians are finding a new period of chaos, as the pace and scale of assistance required lags far below the need, and many fear the prospect of winter months in the open air. Fron Nazi and Anthony Borden report.
THE VIRTUAL COUNTRY. The initial euphoria of many returning Kosovo Albanians is fading, as the hard work of rebuilding a real life and viable society gets under way. Iso Rusi in Pristina reports.
THE MEDIA WAR CONTINUES. Belgrade maintains is firm grip on information within Serbia, shutting down independent media and pumping out such propaganda even Seselj has complained. Milenko Vasovic in Belgrade reports.
THE LOST CITY. Four years on, Srebrenica is still in despair. Its Serbian residents do not wish to live there and its former Muslim citizens will not return. Zoran Tmusic in Srebrenica reports.
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IWPR's network of leading correspondents in the region provide inside analysis of the events and issues driving crises in the Balkans. The reports are available on the Web in English, Serbian and Albanian; English-language reports are also available via e-mail. For syndication information, contact Anthony Borden <tony@iwpr.net>.
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Editor: Anthony Borden. Assistant Editing: Christopher Bennett, Alan Davis. Senior Balkans Editor: Gordana Igric. Internet Editor: Rohan Jayasekera. Translation by Alban Mitrushi, Mirna Jancic and others.
"Balkan Crisis Report" is produced under IWPR's Balkan Crisis Information Project. The project seeks to contribute to regional and international understanding of the regional crisis and prospects for resolution.
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HOMELESS IN PEJE
Returning Albanians are finding a new period of chaos, as the pace and scale of assistance required lags far below the need, and many fear the prospect of winter months in the open air.
By Fron Nazi in Peje and Anthony Borden
Feather-helmeted Italian soldiers now patrol the streets of Peje (Pec) and international agencies are in place. But the returning Albanians are finding a new period of chaos, as the pace and scale of assistance required lags far below the need, and many with destroyed homes fear the prospect of cold months in the open air.
Peje, Kosovo's second city, spreads out below the graceful hills heading south towards Albania and north to Montenegro. A wealthy town of industry and trading, its 100,000-plus population was relatively mixed, including Serbs, Montenegrins and 85 per cent Albanians.
Rivalled only by Prizren, it was perhaps the most beautiful of the Ottoman cities in Kosovo, with red-roofed houses and the famous Qarshia E Gjate, the old cobble-stoned quarter of jewlery and other traders to rival Sarajevo's old town. In its history and its business, some considered it the single most important trading street in old Yugoslavia.
Now, the old market does not exist, shops and houses throughout the town are entirely destroyed, and just about all the Serbs are gone. It bears the ugliness of Mostar or Vukovar-open evidence of extreme, almost comprehensive violence. Everywhere rubble, with much of the work done (including the destruction of the old streets) in the chaotic days as the Yugoslav forces departed and the Italian NATO troops hesitantly took up their post.
Now because of the slow take-up of the international organisations, Peje faces new problems.
"We are headed for a major disaster this winter. More than 90 per cent of the Albanians are without homes, and plastic sheeting is not enough," warns Tahir Lajqi, Peje coordinator for the Mother Theresa humanitarian aid organisation.
"We will be able to provide people with basic food, but nobody from the international community has seriously thought how these people will make it through the winter," says Lajqi. The Mother Theresa organisation, ten years' old and with thousands of volunteers throughout Kosovo, lost all of its trucks during the war, and according to one UN relief worker, its own work has been hampered by squabbles with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) over the distribution of aid.
At the Peje office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Skender, 55, distributes parcels of aid: one kilogram of bread, one kilogram of oil, and two tooth brushes and toothpaste for a family of four.
"The demand for food and other items is greater than what we have," he says. "We have plenty of bread, but we lack other items such as cheese, butter and plastic coverings."
To receive this aid, families in need are asked to register with their respective UNHCR headquarters. But with no functioning media, the UNHCR and other aid organisations are unable to inform the general public about their programmes, and people can only learn about them by word of mouth. "We know that there are more families that need our aid but we have no way to get to them," Skender says.
Zec Cocaj, 25, has just re-opened the family-owned bakery. Business has been slow, and he has increased the price of bread from 2.5 dinars to 5 dinars. He has signed a contract to bake bread for UNHCR food program, which provides him with flower and salt to cook 2,000 loaves, but will not continue it for long.
"I will be able to do this for UNHCR for one month. But after that, I can't afford it because the formula that UNHCR provides does not cover my overhead," Cocaj says. "In order to meet their need alone I would need to hire four more people. I can't afford them."
Sitting in the office of the Jewelers Association, overlooking Qarshia E Gjate, Rexep Mulhmxha, the secretary of the association in his early 60s, looks out the window at the destroyed shops and tries to bring the past to life. Within his own burned office, he pulls out old photographs of the market, holding them up to the window to compare the rubble outside with the cobbled streets and tiled roofs of the more than 200 shops, cafes and restaurants that used to fill the area. At the end of the street stands the shell of an ancient mosque, gutted.
"We don't know anything about plans for rebuilding," says Mulhmxha. "We were hoping the international community would provide us with some assistance. But so far nobody has been here to assess the situation."
In the mist of the burned-down shops, a post-war flea market has sprung up, selling everything from brooms, door locks, sneakers and jeans to lighters, cigarettes and various soft drinks-most brought in from neighbouring Macedonia and Albania. The market is filled with people, but in the only market function in Peje now, there are few buyers.
Just outside the centre of town, Ilir has returned with his wife and 14-year-old son to what remains of his burned-out house, one room on the second floor. There are no doors or windows, and only half a roof.
"Like most of my neighbours, I built my home with my own hands. But we can only rebuild if we have the material," Ilir says. Like others, he hopes to receive glass and doors from the international organisations. But the UNHCR does not expect reconstruction to begin until spring, so at best Ilir and many like him can hope for plastic sheeting.
UNHCR representatives offer concern, but little else. Indeed, because of the sudden boom in small businesses, UNHCR and other international humanitarian organisations are planning to scale back their food programs. But materials will take time.
"The Kosovars want to do everything overnight--rebuild their homes and shops and at the same time receive aid," says one UNHCR representative, who declined to be named. "At best we can provide them with food. They just have learn to be patient when it comes to rebuilding their homes."
Some others have houses, but cannot stay in them. Isa Balaj, 40, a butcher, lives near the centre of town, and remained in Peje throughout the war, providing haven for his brothers' family when other neighbourhoods were ravaged and up to 90,000 Albanians expelled.
Now he is cleaning and restoring his two-story house, but feels he cannot remain. He is scrubbing down not burn marks but blood-stains--from his own children.
In the second week of June, after the end of the bombing, Serbian paramilitaries charged into his house, demanded 7,000 German marks payment, and then lined up and shot his brother, sister-in-law, two nieces and two of his own children. At the last moment, he and his wife and a third child were able to escape and flee out a window.
Now as his wife recovers from several gun-shots wounds, he scrubs and paints but cannot cover over the horrible scenes that happened there.
"That night, just before the Serbs came, my son said, 'Father, I want to sleep with you,' and I said OK. Twenty minutes later he was dead. I don't have anything to live for anymore, and I can no longer see the place where my family was executed."Fron Nazi is IWPR Kosovo Project Director. Anthony Borden is IWPR executive director.
THE VIRTUAL COUNTRY
The initial euphoria of many returning Kosovo Albanians is fading, as the hard work of rebuilding a real life and viable society gets under way.
By Iso Rusi in Pristina
The euphoric days of June have given way to a calmer, more reflective July across Kosovo, now that the queues of tractors and trucks packed with refugees have finally reached home.
People who spent weeks on the run, in fear of their lives or separated from their loved ones, often unaware of their fates, seem happy and almost unaffected by their experiences.
But just below the surface of Kosovo society the outward calm gives way to chaos. The province lacks even the semblance of civil society, and neither the local populace of the international administration appear able to do anything about it.
The British soldiers serving with the NATO-led KFOR contingent are finishing up their tasks with now familiar efficiency, but the newly arrived members of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), are confused as if suddenly dropped out of the sky. They hardly seem to know where they are, let alone what to do.
In the weeks since the heady days when the Serb forces pulled out and NATO moved in, the streets have become unnaturally crowded and the cafes and restaurants are open.
Only the NATO street patrols interrupt the café reverie, and the rolling British tanks which shake up the streets and set off the alarms on the fleets of expensive cars that are ever more common here.
Then come the problems. There is no regular safe supply of water, and the phones don't work, unless you have a mobile and the money to pay 10 marks a minute to the Braca Karic company to route your call through Serbia's Yu Telecom.
Lack of civil authority turns the prosaic into purgatory: a death in the family requires a coroner to rule on cause of death, a notary to issue a death certificate, a health offical for a permit for a burial and the men to do the actual digging. Yet none can be found.
The rubbish is being cleared, but as the streets grow ever more packed, the number of road accidents increase and the people fume. Amidst the frustration and the broiling summer heat, people are fighting and killing each other again, not in war or out of race hate, but out of bad temper, in sudden angry brawls, pretty much like almost anywhere else. A kind of normal life has returned to Kosovo.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has announced a five point plan for Kosovo, with the most trying problem put first: "Consolidation of authorities and administrative structures, including assigning civil police and plan for economic rehabilitation and development".
But Kosovo Serb leaders have already said they will boycott a special transitional council to advise the United Nations' special representative in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, who takes over from Brazilian Sergio Viera de Mello this week.
De Mello had been taken by surprise by the Serbs' boycott, called to protest the UN's failure to stop Albanian reprisals against Serbs who remain in the province.
The NATO troops--with the exception of the hapless Italians and the much disliked Russians--are doing a seamless job now, but will soon be assigned to security tasks. Kosovo needs efficient civilian rule, but this appears to be the one thing that the soldiers cannot unload from their trucks.
From the very start UNMIK has run into problems it cannot solve. For example its efforts to restart broadcasts by Radio and TV Pristina have foundered against a row over the future of its Serb staff.
Kosovo Albanian reporters who were fired to make way for state-approved Serbian journalists at the end of the 1980s want their jobs back. A UNMIK proposal to split the jobs 50-50 has been rejected by the Albanians, who say this fails to reflect their majority in the province.
The same problem exists everywhere, in education, the health services, local government, in the disputes between the 'old' Albanians from before 1989 and the 'new' Serbs from the years since.
Today the Serbs in Pristina are quieter. In the hours after the arrival of KFOR, they were defiant, speaking loudly and without apparent fear on what used to be the 'Serb side' of Pristina's famous promenade.
The city's misnamed Grand Hotel is almost empty, the famous faces from the world media who clustered there when the city opened up to NATO having moved on to other datelines. Also gone are the Serbian paramilitaries and armed gangs, among them the notorious Tigers led by Zeljko ("Arkan") Raznatovic.
Other famous hangouts, such as the Café 23 in front of the one time HQ of the Communist provincial committee, are under new management. 23's owner is gone and a Kosovo Albanian has simply taken over.
Yet for all this activity, Albanian politics seems moribund.
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) commander and self-declared prime minister Hashim Thaci seems to limit his time to having his photo taken with foreign dignitaries. It seems that much of the support he enjoyed during the Rambouillet negotiations seems to have abandoned him.
Others are suspicious of his links with the leader of the Albanian Democratic Party (DPA) in Macedonia, Arben Xhaferi, who set up a ground-breaking meeting between Thaci and Macedonian Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski.
They are concerned at the Macedonian Albanians' future influence in Kosovo. Notably, Xhaferi accompanied Thaci when he returned to Pristina on board a German Army helicopter.
There is little news either of Adem Demaci, the KLA's former political representative or Rexhep Qosja, chairman of the Democratic Union League and another key player at Rambouillet.
As for former president Ibrahim Rugova, the leader of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) came back to Pristina Thursday to mixed opinions. Some had warned that he could be killed for his decision to appear on state TV in Belgrade with Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic while war raged in Kosovo. Others cited the enthusiastic reception accorded to him in the giant Stankovic refugee camp in Macedonia. In the event, his first press conference was rather sad: he made a few general comments about being willing to cooperate with anyone, and brushed off a question about the Belgrade visit. In any event, as he noted, with the international presence Albanian politicians will not hold real power for some time to come.
Another key player at Rambouillet, now seeking a role in a post-conflict Kosovo, is the increasingly popular newspaper editor Veton Surroi. On of the four Kosovo Albanians who signed in Paris, Surroi protests that his aim is to concentrate on reopening his newspaper Koha Ditore, not politics.
He professes to be more interested in opening a new print works, then starting a radio and TV station. He would also like to become Kosovo's first internet provider. Perhaps with this in mind he told a foreign TV interviewer who quizzed him on his political ambitions that most of all he would like to be the internet president of a virtual country. He may get his wish.Iso Rusi is IWPR's correspondent in Skopje.
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