The Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2008
Young Serb Killed in Embassy Riot ared His Nation's Rage at U.S.
Last Thursday night, a mob ransacked the U.S. embassy in Belgrade. The next day, Milan Vujovic went to a police station downtown to look at a charred corpse pulled from the blackened building. He was able to identify the body, that of his 21-year-old son, only by a gold chain and a piece of his belt.
Zoran Vujovic, a lanky, outgoing, sports-crazy college student, was the only person to die in the attack on the embassy. His death was a family tragedy. But the history of violence that has engulfed families such as the Vujovics also helps explain the burst of anti-American anger now sweeping Serbia.
This latest spasm to wrack the Balkans began with Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia on Feb. 17. The U.S. and much of Europe quickly supported the Kosovars, enraging many Serbs. But their anti-Western grievances have deeper roots.
Zoran and his family were part of the Serb minority in Kosovo, a province dominated by Albanian Muslims tucked between Serbia proper and Macedonia. They fled their home in the Kosovar capital of Pristina in August 1999, after Zoran's 82-year old great-grandmother, Ljubica, was found strangled in her bathtub. Serbian troops and police had just been driven from the province by the U.S.-led aerial bombing campaign of that year, designed to halt dictator Slobodan Milosevic's brutal attempt to drive out the province's ethnic Albanian majority.
Revenge was swift for Serbs left behind, including Zoran's family. "A British captain investigated, but no one was ever prosecuted" for the murder of Ljubica, says Zoran's uncle, Dragisa. Two years later, Zoran's grandfather, who had found Ljubica's body, committed suicide by throwing himself under a train, according to family friends who still live in Kosovo.
The memories are still raw, and the Vujovics see themselves as victims of Washington and Brussels. "The family is angered by the mention of just the word 'America,'" says Dragisa.
Yesterday, a spokeswoman for Serbia's court service confirmed that DNA tests showed the body found at the embassy was Zoran Vujovic's. Results of an autopsy are expected today, and should answer rumors that Zoran was shot before being burned. No embassy staff were injured in Thursday's attacks, but the embassy has ordered the evacuation of nonessential personnel from Belgrade.
Standoff's Deep Roots
The standoff over the fate of Kosovo, with its deep roots in the past, is unlikely to be resolved soon. Serbia, backed by Russia, shows no sign of giving up in its drive to discourage additional countries from recognizing Kosovo's independence.
"The U.S. must annul the decision to recognize a false state on the territory of Serbia," Serb Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said yesterday. "Continuation of the policy of force will deepen the crisis that undermines the foundations of the world order."
Russia is set to reaffirm its support for Serbia when its likely next president, Dmitry Medvedev, visits Belgrade today. He is coming to sign an agreement to build part of the planned South Stream natural-gas pipeline through Serbia, and to seal the purchase of Serbia's national oil company, NIS, by OAO Gazprom, the Russian energy giant. But the timing is sure to be seen in the international community as a show of support for Belgrade.
The tussle over Kosovo increasingly is focused on a small piece of Serb-dominated territory in the north of the province. Serbs have focused a series of protests on border posts between Kosovo and Serbia, in order to keep the border open. Serbs in the enclave have said they won't recognize Kosovo's independence and will continue answering to Belgrade.
Enmity between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo dates back centuries. The two groups have lived side by side, jousting over political and economic primacy while sharing neither language nor religion. Serbia ruled Kosovo in the Middle Ages until all of Serbia fell under the Ottoman Empire. It recovered the province in 1912, after Balkan wars that drove the Ottomans out and led to the creation of new, ethnically based nation-states. By then, Kosovo's Muslim Albanians were already the majority population in the province; Serbs are Orthodox Christians.
The Vujovic family's history traces that of modern Kosovo. From around 1920, Serbia's government encouraged Serbs to move to Kosovo, to boost the Serb population there. The Vujovic family arrived from Herzegovina in 1937, said Zoran's uncle, Dragisa. Dragisa Vujovic opened up a restaurant, Romansa, outside Pristina in the Serb-dominated town of Caglavica. He owned a large villa. His brother Milan -- Zoran's father -- was a successful businessman in Pristina, according to friends of the family in Caglavica, who declined to be named for fear of retribution for talking to a Western reporter.
Zoran grew up playing basketball in Kosovo's sleepy, ramshackle capital with his brother Lazar. But the 1990s brought the end of the communist regime that had ruled Yugoslavia as a multi-ethnic state since 1945. Under Serbian strongman Milosevic, repressive policies by Belgrade raised tensions between ethnic Serbs and Albanians to new heights.
Albanian militants began to fight back, using guerrilla tactics the regime described as terrorist. Mr. Milosevic launched a large-scale military offensive. Thousands were killed, mostly ethnic Albanians, and hundreds of thousands of Albanian Kosovars fled across the borders.
With just 10% of the province's population, Serbs in Kosovo felt insecure despite Belgrade's backing. Since the mid-1960s, many Serbs had been moving north. Life there was more secure and jobs more plentiful. NATO's 1999 bombing campaign changed everything.
Milan Vujovic took his family from Pristina to the relative safety of Caglavica, where his brother lived. When the bombing stopped, 82-year-old Ljubica and her sister went back to Pristina, to protect the family's apartments from looting. It was a fatal decision.
The family left Kosovo and made a new life in Novi Sad, a town north of Belgrade. Zoran's favorite haunt there was Club Address, a smart bar with around 20 tables, soft yellow leatherette armchairs, two flat-screen TVs and a bright red British phone box made of plywood in the corner.
"Zoran was personally upset about what happened to the family and its property in Kosovo, but we never talked politics," says 18-year-old Nenad Vezmar, a law student who works at the bar and is friends with Zoran's younger brother Lazar.
Mr. Vezmar and others describe Zoran as a gregarious sports fanatic. Zoran still played basketball in Novi Sad. He also got into soccer and joined a small local club called Ajax. "He was one of the best players in the neighborhood, an all-rounder," says 17-year-old Nikola Kish, a regular at the Garden Cafe just a few steps from the family's apartment.
Whenever Serbia's national team won in any sport, Nenad and Zoran went out to celebrate. Soccer, however, was the big passion. Zoran rooted for Partizan Belgrade, one of Belgrade's big soccer teams.
Last Thursday, Zoran and Lazar went to Belgrade, most likely on buses organized for students at Novi Sad University, where Zoran was studying management. The government had closed schools for the rally. Serbia's nationalist parties provided free buses and trains to bring Serbs to the capital to show the world their hurt and anger over the U.S.-led decision to partition their country.
Looting McDonald's
Many of the other young people who protested outside the U.S. and other embassies last Sunday were also soccer fans. They came back on Thursday, breaking away from a demonstration of at least 150,000 people to attack embassies. Then they rampaged through central Belgrade, smashing and looting 90 shops, including McDonald's franchises.
Serbia's soccer fans are notorious. A small hard core of fans of some clubs are violent and frequently get in fights after games. They also tend to be avid supporters of Serbia's ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party, whose leader, Vojislav Seselj, is currently on trial in The Hague for alleged war crimes. The party is the largest in Serbia's Parliament, although a coalition of more liberal parties has formed the current government.
Zoran was a member of Partizan Belgrade's Southern Front fan club. A picture of Zoran on the Partizan soccer club's Web site shows him with his hands spread in the pro-Serbian three fingered salute, and with a black and white banner with a skull in the background, spelling "Serbia."
"He wasn't ashamed of his roots. He was part of a generation that doesn't think everything that's valuable can be found in credit cards" or going to Western Europe, says a tribute on the Partizan Web site.
No evidence has emerged of violence in Zoran's past before last Thursday. Dragisa Vujovic said he knew his nephew was going to the demonstration in Belgrade, but that his role in the embassy attack was entirely unplanned -- another fatal decision for the family.
"He was a guy to respect, not a hooligan," said Goran Coprivica, a family friend from Kosovo who also made the move to Novi Sad in 1999. "What he did was a patriotic deed."
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