AFP, June 11, 2003
Four years on, Kosovo is still a mess
BELGRADE, (AFP) - Four years after the end of the Serbo-Albanian war in Kosovo, the southern Serbian province is still wracked by violence and ethnic hatred overseen by a United Nations mission which is losing the respect of all sides to the conflict.
A crackdown on the ethnic-Albanian majority by forces of then-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was the initial justification for NATO's 1999 intervention. But now it is the Serbs who are living in fear of Albanian extremists.
More than 200,000 Kosovo Serbs have left their homes as a result of extremist violence or fearing bloody reprisals from Albanians. The 80,000 to 120,000 Serbs who remain live in isolated enclaves, sometimes as small as a single apartment block, "protected" by NATO troops.
That security -- a key obligation of the international community if it seriously wants to build a multi-ethnic, democratic Kosovo -- proved to be tragically absent last week when an elderly Serb couple and their son were brutally murdered.
The victims were asleep in their home in Obilic, just north of the capital Pristina, when they were hacked to death with axes by unknown attackers, who then set their home on fire. The slaughter came after several days of threats, according to relatives.
No one has claimed responsibility for the homocide, the worst violence in Kosovo in more than a year, but few are in any doubt that it was a hate crime by Albanian extremists bent on driving Serbs out of the province.
When the chief of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), Michael Steiner, rushed to the scene to offer his condolences, he was jeered by angry and frightened Serb villagers, many of whom have now fled their homes.
Twenty-three Serb families, all residents of the same street in Obilic, decided to leave the province and join the ranks of refugees in Serbia, Beta news agency reported. They accused NATO, which has 30,000 troops in Kosovo, of ignoring their pleas for extra security.
"The Serbs of Obilic don't want to ask anything more from UNMIK and KFOR (the NATO-led protection force), which have demonstrated over the past four years that they have no intention of protecting the Serbs," said local councillor Mirce Jakovljevic.
"The people are desperate."
Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic, Belgrade's pointman for Kosovo, has said he does not want to give "false hopes" to the province's Serbs because the authority of the Serbian government was suspended with the UN takeover in 1999.
Always walking a tightrope between the frustrations of the Serbs and the need to maintain good relations with UNMIK, Covic said he hoped the Obilic families would return to their homes because their departure only handed victory to the Albanian "terrorists".
The events in Obilic are just a further blow to the credibility of the UN mission in Kosovo, which has failed to fulfil its promise of securing the return of the refugees or win the support of either of the two opposing ethnic communities.
For their part the Albanians are impatient to declare independence and take control of the province once and for all, but the UN says the time has not yet come to decide Kosovo's "final status" and when it does it will be a decision for the Security Council.
Earlier this year Steiner banned ethnic-Albanian politicians from attending two international conferences because they passed a motion in parliament recognising the Kosovo Liberation Army -- seen as terrorists by Serbs -- as heroes.
"The bureaucrats in Pristina, Belgrade, Brussels, New York, they talk a lot but they do very little," said Zoran Masic, a Serb who fled his home in Pristina after the war.
"I no longer have any illusions, no hope that anything will change."
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