KOSOVAThe Children Who Love to Hate
What does a 9-year-old Kosovar Albanian child want to do when he grows up? 'Kill Serbs.'
By Rod Nordland
It was a feel-good scene in post-war Kosova. British NATO troops had just finished fixing up the Our Happiness Kindergarten in Prishtina. Soldiers of the 7th Signals Regiment put on a barbecue. Ethnic Albanian children ages 4 to 7 joined hands and sang, in English, "I'm a free, free child in this free, free world." The headmistress, Afërdita Mulla, looked on approvingly. An ethnic Albanian fired from her job at the school a decade ago as Kosova began its spiral into ethnic strife, Mulla is clear about her goals: "We must teach children not to hate anyone." So when classes open this week, there will no longer be separate playgrounds or separate entrances for Albanians and Serbs. "The doors," said Mulla, "are open for everybody."
And yet not a single Serb has come through those doors to register a child. Partly that's because there are precious few Serbs left anywhere in Kosova. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees puts the total number of Serbs still in Kosova at 50,000, less than one fourth of the pre-war number; many experts believe the real number is much lower. Only a few weeks ago the shabby apartment blocks that surround Our Happiness were full of Serbs and their children. "Some went on their own, and some we forced out," bragged a 7-year-old Albanian girl. In the playground, the children howled with pleasure as KFOR soldiers clambered over the brightly decorated slides and monkey bars they had built for the kids. "I don't have words to describe the happiness I feel when I hear these children laughing," said Mulla. Then 9-year-old Laurant, a serious-faced redhead, pulled a gun-metal gray automatic pistol out from under his T shirt; it was only a toy, but it looked large and frighteningly real in his hand. What are you going to do with that? an adult asked him. "Kill Serbs," he replied without hesitation.
The armies of Albanian children who harbour that kind of attitude are part of the reason Serbs continue to leave Kosova. While many of the kids' parents, and most of their leaders, pay lip service to the idea of a multiethnic society, children act out what perhaps many adults feel. "Now it should only be Albanians here," said Vlora Halili, an 11-year-old girl with a hard edge to her voice, "because [the Serbs] wanted it to be only Serbs and they lost." Her mother, Buki, disagreed: "For me it's possible for Serbs and Albanians to live together," she says. Her daughter would have none of it. "It's their turn to leave their homes," she says.
Many children act on those convictions. The attitudes of Serbian kids can also be harsh — though there are so many fewer of them these days. During the war, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report, Serbian teenagers hanging around the notorious prison in Mitrovica were invited inside to participate in torturing ethnic Albanian inmates. Among Albanian kids, according to KFOR officers and human-rights workers, there have been numerous recent incidents of youth gangs stoning elderly Serbs. An Albanian human-rights worker said that Kosova Liberation Army officials were encouraging children 10 and even younger to systematically harass Serbs. When she and a Serb colleague were walking down a street in Prishtina recently, a group of six Albanian 10-year-olds converged on them and started shoving them. When the kids realized one of their prey was Albanian, they stopped, but warned her they would report her to the KLA for speaking Serbo-Croatian.
In Podujevë, in north-eastern Kosova, children have made life a torment for the two remaining Serbs. With no surviving family, two friends, Jelica Cimbrovic, 87, and Jelica Milanovic, 72, decided to remain in Podujevë when the rest of the Serbs followed their withdrawing troops. Recently a group of Albanian kids banged on their apartment door, shouting — as so many Serb policemen did when they were banishing Albanians — "You have one minute to leave." The kids were 10 years old.
At the toy store in the Cimic Centre, Prishtina's main shopping concourse, mock Colt M-19 automatic pistols fly off the shelves at a dozen a day. The price — five German marks (about $2.60) apiece — is high by local standards. Tom Jones, a Texas policeman on the U.N. force, said incidents of stoning Serbs and shooting at them with the air pistols were commonplace among the kids in Prishtina. "Children are products of their environment," he says. "Their parents hate, and they're going to hate."
Still, the parents may know how to control that hate a little better. They speak Serbo-Croatian, and grew up going to school and working together. Then when Slobodan Milosevic stripped autonomy from Kosovar Albanians in 1989, the Albanian community responded by creating a parallel society, boycotting most Serb institutions from hospitals to schools and creating their own underground community. That meant that kids younger than 15 or so rarely intermingled. "Children didn't know Serbs who were not cops," said Shkelzen Maliqi, a liberal ethnic Albanian philosopher and writer who runs the Soros Fund for an Open Society in Kosova.
It got worse. During the war, ethnic Albanian children came to know Serbs as their implacable enemies. Flamur Dushnaku, 15, remembers vividly the hardship of the war months. Kicked out of two different apartments by Serb police, his family fled into the hills around Podujevë and lived by scrounging in the fields, most of the time sleeping in a wagon pulled by a tractor. He seems like a nice boy, and plays fondly with his little brother Afrim, but when it comes to Serbs, his attitude is hard-bitten. "They did everything to us," he said. "They put guns to the heads of children smaller than me, and if I was them I would be afraid too. Everything they did to us, we will do to them." As long as such a vengeful hatred prevails in young minds, there's little hope for reconciliation in Kosova.With Zoran Cirjakovic in Prishtinë and Juliette Terzieff in Podujevë
Newsweek International, September 6, 1999
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Betreff: [ALBANEWS] AP News: NATO commander meets KLA leader in Kosova
Datum: Wed, 1 Sep 1999 01:47:31 -0400
Von: Haxhi Haxhaj <hhaxhaj@IDT.NET>NATO commander meets KLA leader in Kosova
By MELISSA EDDY
PRISHTINË, Kosova (August 31, 1999) - NATO's commander in Kosova pressed the leader of ethnic Albanian rebels in the province Tuesday to abide by an agreement requiring the Kosova Liberation Army to honour its pledge to disband by mid-September.
In closed door talks, Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson urged the KLA's political chief Hashim Thaçi to meet the deadline, sources close to Thaçi said. They also discussed terms to end an eight-day-long stalemate between ethnic Albanians and Russian soldiers in the southern city of Rahovec, the sources said on condition of anonymity.
On Wednesday, Thaçi plans to address the hundreds of ethnic Albanians who have been blocking roads to the town for more than a week, refusing to allow Russian peacekeepers to enter.
Thaçi has said in the past that he will abide by the disarmament agreement reached with international officials in Kosova in June.
Under the deal, the KLA must demilitarise by mid-September. While international officials insist the group is to be disbanded, KLA commanders say they will continue as a defensive force.
In Washington, State Department spokesman James Foley said the agreements are unambiguous on what the rebels. must do. By Sept. 19, he said, "the KLA must place all automatic small-arms in secure weapons storage sites and must cease wearing military uniforms and insignia."
In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Army Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's top commander in Europe, said demilitarisation of the KLA "seems to be very much on track."
Also Tuesday, the top U.N. official in Kosova, Bernard Kouchner, swore in seven new judges and two prosecutors in the divided northern town of Mitrovica, flanked by a Serb translator and an Albanian translator.
The law officials, who are both Serb and Albanian, will be part of a new legal system that is being set up by the United Nations to replace the Serbian law that previously ruled the province.
"It is very important to build the judiciary system in Kosova ... to write the law according to international conventions, including that on human rights," Kouchner said.
He said doctors and lawyers were fired under the previous law 10 years ago, so they shouldn't be expected to accept the same law that was used unjustly against them.
International officials are eager to have a judicial system under which criminals can be prosecuted up and running in the province. The entry of about 40,000 international peacekeepers, which started arriving on June 12, has not been enough to prevent revenge attacks and criminal acts from taking place in the province.
In Prishtina on Tuesday, NATO peacekeepers moved a tank to the site of a suspected mass grave in the Kosova capital, but plans to begin digging were postponed amid heavy rain.
About 20 bodies are believed buried at the site, near Prishtina's hospital, and a local newspaper cited relatives of victims as saying the victims were ethnic Albanians who died from ill-treatment by Serb troops during their 18-month-long crackdown in Kosova.
The heavy rains also led U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke to cancel his planned flight to Albania, said his spokeswoman, Mary Ellen Glenn. Instead, Holbrooke, who arrived in Kosova on Saturday, left for Macedonia, and then for Bosnia, the last leg of his first trip abroad since confirmation earlier this month as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
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