September 2, 1999Serbs Driven From Kosovo Live Bitterly in Exile
By STEVEN ERLANGER
KURSUMLIJA, Serbia -- Srbislav Bisercic, a competent, bluff and imposing figure who always wore a pistol when he ran the Podujevo municipal administration in Kosovo, is now a broken man, ashamed to be in a jobless exile and hunting for a cheap apartment.
"Yes, I'm depressed," he said. "How could I not be? I left everything down there, everything, my flat, my house, 20 acres of land, my cattle, pigs and tractor."
Stopped on the street, Bisercic is all smiles at first, but his mood quickly darkens, and at one point his eyes become red and wet.
"My biggest problem is being jobless, not having work," he said. "I get my salary, late like everyone else, but I don't know what the state will do with us, since they haven't made it possible for us to go back" home to Kosovo.
Kursumlija, a southern Serbian town of 14,000 people just 15 miles north of Podujevo, is now struggling to absorb 7,000 displaced Serbs from Kosovo.
With the school year starting, Serbs who had been living in Kursumlija's schools are being moved to a tattered local cultural center; thousands more live with host families or relatives or in any apartment they can find.
"Eighty percent of Podujevo's Serbs are looking for a flat here," Bisercic said. Most Kosovo Serbs are getting only 60 percent of their regular salaries from a state with a severe shortage of cash, its industry smashed by NATO bombs and 10 years of sanctions.
"Everyone is depressed," said Milivoje Mihajlovic, a Serbian journalist from Pristina whose parents now live here. "My wife says, 'I dream every night, and my dreams are in Pristina.' And I'm the same. I spent my whole life, 40 years there, and psychologically that's the biggest problem. Everyone asks everyone else, 'When can we go back?' "
Bisercic, humiliated and distraught, vows to return to Kosovo soon. Mihajlovic knows better. "It will take years, if ever, for the pressure to go out of Kosovo," he said. "Everyone needs to calm down, the Serbs and the Albanians." And both need to find less aggressive leaders, he conceded.
According to Vesna Petkovic of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, by last Friday 133,737 displaced Serbs and Gypsies from Kosovo were registered in Serbia, having left Kosovo since February, but the agency estimates the true total was 173,000.
In all of Yugoslavia, including Montenegro, 157,259 people were registered as displaced, and the total was estimated at 196,500.
With 500,000 to 700,000 other Serbs displaced from Bosnia and Croatia, Yugoslavia has more refugees and displaced people than any other country in Europe.
The policies and nationalist wars of Slobodan Milosevic have been the prime source of the refugee burden, which the United Nations refugee agency is working to relieve. This year, it will spend some $60 million to help those in Yugoslavia.
Mira Nikolic, Deputy Minister of the Yugoslav Ministry for Refugees, Displaced Persons and Humanitarian Affairs, said in a telephone interview that the refugees "need almost everything: food, shelter, beds, blankets, hygiene products -- it's better to ask what don't they need." She said that the agency was providing important help, but the biggest problem now would be fuel for heating in the winter.
Host families, with whom some 85 percent of the displaced are living, cannot afford the burden, Ms. Nikolic said, so Belgrade is looking more toward collective housing. The United Nations is ready to help prepare buildings for the winter with construction material, beds and heating fuel.
Ms. Nikolic and Ms. Petkovic agreed that Belgrade's policies toward the Kosovo Serbs had softened. At the beginning, they were urged to return immediately to Kosovo, and Belgrade refused to register them or let them enroll their children in local schools. That has changed, with nearly all students registered for school, but the displaced are encouraged to live near Kosovo and are actively discouraged from trying to settle in Belgrade, where they would be more visible.
Kursumlija is a pleasant but isolated town in the middle of an agricultural area. There is one large company, Drvni Kombinat, making wood products, but salaries average only 200 dinars a month, or $20 at the official rate of exchange. A beer at a cafe costs 50 cents, a sixth of the price in Belgrade.
There is no cellular telephone service as there is in bigger towns.
At the shops, people buy 200 grams, or 7 ounces, of meat at a time. "If you buy a kilo," or 2.2 pounds, Mihajlovic said, "they think you're a millionaire."
If anything, the influx of Kosovo Serbs has pushed up prices a little here, especially for housing, and because the new arrivals are generally better educated they are often seen as a threat to the jobs of the locals.
In the small main square, surrounded by parking, there are many cars with license plates indicating that they are from Pristina and Podujevo and Pec and Prizren.
"I'm lost," said Caslav Bojovic, 44, who was the principal of a school for 367 children in Podujevo. "I feel terrible. I don't know who I am, where I'm going, what I'll do tomorrow."
"We are 'temporarily dislocated people,' " he said bitterly, "and no one cares very much for us, and there is no chance to go back."
He shrugged and said: "We all feel like this. Whatever I had was in my work of 20 years, and it's gone. I was on good terms with my Albanian neighbors. That hurts me, because my neighbors call me and say I should not come back, and I know they are right."
Still, he is angry that Kosovo's Albanians are driving out Serbs, no matter the provocation by others, under the eyes of NATO. "Why don't they indict Thaci as a war criminal?" he demanded, referring to Hashim Thaci, the leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Bojovic is now looking for a building here to try to reopen his school, and says the local authorities are open to the idea. "I can't leave the kids," he said. "And we need to work."
Down the street, at the shabby Evropa Restaurant, the Kosovo Serbs line up, shamefaced, for a free lunch organized by the local Holy Trinity Church, with help from Belgrade and international organizations like the World Food Program. A section of the restaurant is set aside for the refugees, and Radovan Rajovic, the chef, provides a balanced meal, usually a meat and vegetable stew of some kind, salad and bread. Today, the choice was paprikash, a Hungarian-style veal stew that actually had chunks of veal.
The restaurant serves 1,000 meals a day to the Kosovo Serbs in a program that began Aug. 16, said Radoje Milanovic, the restaurant manager.
Registered refugees have cards that entitle them to the meal, and their names are checked off. But 80 percent take the food away with them rather than sit and eat in a group, Milanovic said. As they leave, their heads are down.
"I wouldn't come at first, but we have to eat," said a woman in her 50's who asked to remain anonymous. "Of course I'm ashamed."
Bisercic, the Podujevo official, had insisted that he would stay in Podujevo. But in the end, he left, on June 21, 11 days after Yugoslav forces pulled out in long columns from the city, creating a vacuum that NATO forces did not move in to fill.
"Those Serbs who stayed there are dead," Bisercic said. "I took three of the last out with me." United Nations officials in Kosovo confirm that only three Serbs remain in all of Podujevo, women too old and alone to leave.
Bisercic faults NATO for the vacuum of power, but he also considers the Belgrade Government erred in allowing one. "They should not have signed anything until they filled the territory with international forces," he said.
But asked if he blamed President Milosevic, Bisercic bristled, even more upset. "I voted for Milosevic," he said. "Don't touch me there."
Velisa Malevic, 37, was head of the Podujevo tax police. On the square, wearing shorts and flip-flops and a two-day beard, he said he and his mother and brother and their families -- 14 people -- had all moved here, where his wife was born. In Podujevo, they had two houses and an apartment, with 10 acres. But the apartment has been taken by Albanians and the two houses burned, he said.
"I get a salary but I'm not working," Malevic said. "That's the worst thing."
He said he dreamed about his life before. "It's the biggest wish in my life to go back." He laughed, then said sardonically of Kosovo's new rulers, "I believe in the United Nations and the United States."
He, like the others, insists that the Albanians of Podujevo were his finest friends and that he protected them as best he could. "The K.L.A. attacked the Serbs, and the Serbs defended themselves with guns, and then NATO came and disarmed the Serbs but not the Albanians, and that's the whole story," Malevic said.
When told how ridiculous his version would seem to an Albanian whose family was murdered by Serbs or who was driven out of Kosovo by force, Malevic laughed bitterly. "The Albanians are no angels," he said. "You in the West will find out soon enough."
His wife, Sladjana, worked at the Fagar factory in Podujevo. Here, she is back to being dependent on her father while trying to care for three young children. "I feel ashamed," she said. "It's very unpleasant."
She said the people from Kosovo were overwhelming the town. "The people here are more kind to us, since I was born here," she said. "But they are very distant with the others."
She buried her nose in the hair of her son, Lazar, 4, named after the Prince who led the Serbs in the famous battle of Kosovo in 1389. She lifted red eyes and said softly, "We had everything, and now it belongs to someone else."Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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