UN Police Have Hands Full in Kosovo
 

Associated Press, Oct. 18, 1999

UN Police Have Hands Full in Kosovo

By George Jahn
Associated Press Writer
Monday, Oct. 18, 1999; 2:23 a.m. EDT

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia –– Serb police are long gone, but Pristina's ethnic Albanians still fear that late-night knock on the door. Now, the threat comes from fellow Albanians.
     The knock could be a neighbor looking for candles during a brownout lingering from the NATO bombing – or it might be a caller with a more sinister agenda.
     Get out of this flat – leave, or you're dead, he'll tell residents, showing a gun to back up his threat.
     Or he'll flash phony ID making him an official who decides where people can live.
     Members of the international police in Pristina relate such cases to illustrate their struggle against burgeoning crime. They say a claim to someone else's flat is sometimes linked to three letters – KLA.
     The Kosovo Liberation Army was formally disbanded last month. But the cops of 38 nations trying to police Kosovo say they still deal with criminals trying to muscle people out of their homes by invoking the authority of the former guerrilla army.
     Leaders of the banned KLA have distanced themselves from such crimes, and U.N. policemen can't say whether any part of the former organization exists in another form, as part of Pristina's organized crime scene.
     "It's too early to tell," says Michael Jorsback, the Swedish deputy commissioner of the 1,700 U.N. police assuming an increasingly large role from the NATO-led Kosovo Force of soldiers. "Using the name does not necessarily mean the (former KLA) leadership is supporting these activities."
     Trying to force people from their homes is only one piece of the action in Pristina, a noisy, dirty city of teeming back streets and bazaars, where Serb police – although hated by the Albanian majority – kept a lid on murders and other visible crime.
     Now, with the Serb police out, the Serb legal system discarded and the police all foreign, Pristina has turned into "an Eldorado for different criminal activities," says Jorsback.
     "This is a very closed society," he says. "We don't have the network, we don't speak the language. You cannot get undercover to penetrate, so the criminal element has the upper hand."
     Invoking real or phony affiliations comes in handy to muscle people from their homes, a lucrative activity in a city where a huge influx of refugees has nearly doubled the original population of 280,000.
     And then there is the other crime.
     "We have intimidation, occupation of flats, harassment of minorities, plus the traditional crimes – thefts, car thefts," says Jorsback. "We have two to four people a week dead in Pristina."
     Confidential records for October show more than 200 crimes a week, including murder, kidnapping, arson and burglaries, registered with U.N. police – most unsolved. Many hundreds more are unreported.
     Some of the violence remains ethnically based. Much of it is committed by Albanians targeting the dwindling Serb minority in revenge for the bloody 18-month Serb crackdown that left 10,000 dead before NATO bombing ended the Kosovo conflict in June.
     Increasingly, however, crimes – capital or otherwise – are driven by the profit motive. In a city where few people have jobs, crime is a way of survival.
     Jorsback speaks of "the huge influence of organized crime" – local, or imported from Albania.
     Ron Starling, a hulking police captain from Fayetteville, N.C., says smalltime criminals "are being directed by people to do certain things – they're into a little bit of everything."
     "We're getting thefts of fuel trucks, produce trucks," says Starling, as he negotiates his red-and-white U.N. police SUV through a twisting Pristina back street on a late-night patrol. Criminals stole Pristina's official seal to make phony documents, he says, and now, "we have ... a bogus customs police making out-of-province truck drivers pay a fee."
     Starling stops briefly to talk to a British military patrol asking for guidance on a switchblade found on a passerby – one of several stops he will make this evening to back up NATO soldiers or U.N police enforcing the law.
     "If it has a locking blade, its worth confiscating," he tells them, before resuming his tour – and tales – of Pristina at night.
     "Seventy percent of these vehicles, the documents don't match up," he says, pointing to a line of cars ahead of his vehicle. "We stop them and ask, 'Where did you buy it from?' They reply: 'I don't remember.' I've seen two Mercedes 500 SELs, a new Jaguar, a Lexus – all without plates."
     "This is not policing, it's guesswork," he says of the challenges and frustrations of working Pristina.

© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press

Mail senden