Kosovo: Field of sorrows

Date: 27/03/04

Renewed violence raises troubling questions over Kosovo's future

NOBODY hides his bitterness. Exactly five years ago Javier Solana, NATO's then boss, ordered air strikes to end Serb repression and killings in Kosovo. Five years on Mr Solana was back, as the European Union's foreign-policy head, fulminating at “appalling” and “intolerable” behaviour that led to 28 deaths, the ethnic cleansing of 4,000 Kosovo Serbs and Roma (gypsies), destruction or damage to 366 houses and attacks on 41 Orthodox churches and monasteries.

Some 100,000 Serbs live in Kosovo, amid a population of some 1.8m ethnic Albanians. Half live in the north, abutting Serbia proper; but the rest are in enclaves scattered across the province. It was Serbs and Roma living in the most vulnerable spots who were chased out in two days of violence on March 17th and 18th. Their stories are grim. One lady taking refuge in a school gym in the Serbian enclave of Gracanica told how schoolchildren rampaged through her house before hitting her with a hammer. Her 50-year-old son, a victim of childhood polio, was beaten with his crutches by Albanians screaming: “What are you waiting for? Get out!” Their house, in the once mainly Serbian town of Obilic, was burnt. No Serbs are now left in Obilic.

In 1999, after 78 days of bombing, the Serbs gave in. Serb rule was replaced by the UN. Some power has been devolved to an elected government, whose prime minister, Bajram Rexhepi, calls the violence a “disaster”. He has set up a government fund to rebuild destroyed houses and churches. But this conciliatory move got short shrift from Kosovo's Serbian Orthodox bishop, who scoffed that sending experts to examine damaged churches would be “like bin Laden sending experts to examine the Twin Towers”.

Harri Holkeri, the UN boss in Kosovo, declares that trust has been destroyed. One UN staffer who worked in the northern town of Mitrovica says she has seen all her work literally go up in flames. Now western policymakers face some tough choices. Billboards in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, display pictures of a road leading to hills behind which hovers an EU flag. They are advertising the idea that, if Kosovo and its local institutions adhere to high enough standards, a European future is just over the hills and not that far away.

Until this violence erupted, there were hopes that talks on Kosovo's final status might start in mid-2005. Now, says Mr Holkeri, that target is no longer realistic. But discontent with the UN, Kosovo's unresolved status and the stalled economy may just win the extremists behind the violence more support - as happened in the 1990s, when the policy of peaceful resistance to Serb rule seemed to bring no results. Veton Surroi, an influential commentator, says that the UN must understand this dynamic: “We are now in for a rough ride.” On March 23rd, one UN policeman and one local one were killed when their police car was attacked. If western officials were now to speed up final-status talks, they would be seen by many to be giving in to violence.

Oddly, relations between Kosovo's politicians and Serbia's nationalist prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, may not be quite as glacial as they would have their voters believe. In the two days before the violence erupted, one of Mr Kostunica's top advisers met his counterparts from the offices of Mr Rexhepi and Ibrahim Rugova, Kosovo's president, in Switzerland.

Mr Kostunica has talked of “cantonisation”; in UN parlance, this is “decentralisation”. Whatever the label, it means some form of autonomy for Serbs in parts of Kosovo. For many Serbs it points to eventual partition. Both Serbs and ethnic Albanians have been looking at how fighting ended in Bosnia and Macedonia, hoping for lessons for Kosovo. If they hold open lines between Serbia and Kosovo, the violence may even galvanise their work. But that is the hopeful scenario.

Renewed violence raises troubling questions over Kosovo's future.

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