Betreff: [ALBANEWS] NYT: These New Invaders Have the Old Prishtina Preening
Datum: Sun, 5 Sep 1999 19:25:12 -0400
Von: Haxhi Haxhaj <hhaxhaj@IDT.NET>These New Invaders Have the Old Prishtina Preening
By CARLOTTA GALL
PRISHTINË, Kosova -- All over Prishtina, there is building and the noise of electric drills and cement mixers from every direction. Pedestrians walk an obstacle course over and around piles of sand, boards and scaffolding.
No one is rebuilding the handful of burned and bombed buildings that stand as silent witnesses to the Serbian purges of the city's Albanian stores and homes a few months ago, and to NATO's bombs. Instead, people are repairing the buildings that survived more or less intact. The main aim seems to be to redo a house and rent it to foreigners.
There are thousands of foreigners here, not just the peacekeeping troops but armies of aid workers, advisers and diplomats. The journalists are gradually disappearing but the long-term development people are only just arriving.
Already the international organizations are changing the look and the feel of the city, most evidently in a suburb called Dragodan, on a hill overlooking downtown Prishtina. Dragodan's spacious houses are favoured by the international agencies and diplomats. Going further than the rest, American Government officials are taking over the entire top street.
Between them, the United States Agency for International Development and the American mission here have leased 11 houses and plan to seal off both ends of the street to create a secure compound with guards at either end. To achieve this, the Americans have pushed several aid agencies from their offices, including Mercy Corps International and Save the Children.
Jim Kenney, spokesman at the American mission, admitted that the aid agencies had not had much choice. "We asked people politely to move," he said with a slightly embarrassed smile. "It was all done in diplomatic language."
The local director for Save the Children, Steven Rifkin, bowed to the inevitable and says he will now simply have a longer walk to work. "We are all here for the same thing," he pointed out.
There are nearly 200 private organizations in Kosova, as well as the big United Nations agencies, all employing dozens of foreigners and local residents. The American mission will eventually be the equivalent of a medium-size embassy, employing some 50 Americans and about 150 local workers. The United Nations mission already employs nearly 150 strong, and will grow over the months. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is up to 250 now and will reach 500. The international police force will number 3,000.
The foreigners' presence is being felt most immediately on the streets, because many of them drive big four-wheel-drive vans, outdone in size only by the NATO force's armoured vehicles.
So far, the Albanians do not seem to mind the foreigners. For Prishtina residents, the much more startling change is the influx from the villages. This city originally had 200,000 people but may now hold almost double that, local journalists say.
They came when NATO troops arrived in June, and the Serbian community left en masse, following their own army and police forces to Serbia. Albanians, back from the refugee camps and down from the mountains where they hid from the Serbian forces during NATO's bombing campaign, flooded into the city to occupy the houses and apartments abandoned by the Serbs.
It was a swift smash and grab. "The law of the strong arm," one man said, as he barricaded himself and his family into the house he had taken. By now, virtually every apartment is full to the brim. In one apartment block by the main police station, only two occupants are the original owners. Albanian names are scrawled on the doors of what had been an exclusively Serbian building. Some of the new occupants have rented from the departing Serbs; others have just moved in.
"Don't touch" is written in Serbian and in Albanian on various doors, presumably first directed against Serbian paramilitaries and then against Albanians. Ardita Uka, 17, says she can tell the youths from the countryside by their accents and their clothes but laughs at the invasion.
"It's funny when I go to my friend's apartment," she said. "It was always very quiet there. It was all Serbs and they had no children. Now it's really noisy with lots of children, and lots of shoes outside each door," she added, referring to the Albanian custom of removing shoes before entering a house.September 5, 1999
senden