Cover
story Kosovo - Left with issues bombs could not resolve
By PATRICIA LEFEVERE
Special Report Writer Pristina, Kosovo
European journalist tells of asking
her Kosovo Albanian interpreter if he can show her any place in his land where
Albanians and Serbs live at peace with one another. The interpreter drives her
29 kilometers southwest of this capital city to the town of Stimlje.
Here, he says, pointing at an asylum for the insane, here
Serbs and Albanians live in peace, laughing all the time.
If the story is grim, so is the landscape. Mosques and churches
that once pushed their minarets and domes heavenward now lie in ruins - towers
toppled, icon screens scarred by fire, bullet holes, excrement. In Djakovica,
not far from Stimlje, entire blocks of Albanian shops, houses, mosques and the
marketplace have been gutted by Serbian army, police and paramilitary forces
during the 78-day NATO bombing attack last spring.
Those who were able fled in terror. Almost overnight 860,000
displaced Kosovar Albanians swarmed across neighboring borders. Most of the
displaced found shelter in hastily built tent cities or with families in
Albania and Macedonia. Several thousand others climbed the mountain road into
Montenegro by foot, mule, on tractors or in a convoy of cars and buses.
Just weeks after the Serb forces withdrew from Kosovo - in the
wake of the NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia - the secessionist Kosovo
Liberation Army drove the remaining Serbs from Djakovica and other centers.
Many Serbs had already fled, fearing reprisals for the executions of Albanians
and the looting and burning of their homes, crops and businesses. Ordinary
Serbs, who took no part in the terror, ran too as Albanian revenge spread like
spilled gasoline and, once ignited, destroyed areas previously populated by
Serbs, Gypsies, Slavs and Muslims.
One year later - after the aerial pounding, after the procession
of exiles, after the carnage of Serbian ethnic cleansing and the retribution of
returning Albanians, Kosovo remains a display of human horror. In a land where
Serbs and Albanians have coexisted - not without tension and bloodshed - for
800 years, an army of 40,000 international peacekeepers, a force
referred to as KFOR, now has the job of keeping the two peoples from any
further killing.
This is the peace beyond understanding in Kosovo one year after
the bombing by Nato forces started last March 24. Three European and one U.S.
journalist recently traveled throughout the region to view the tensions and
fallout from the war, the issues that bombs could not resolve.
Interviews with religious leaders, with KFOR officials, with
refugees, displaced people and with representatives of the church and other
nongovernmental agencies assisting them raise powerful questions: Why should
anyone care about these Balkan madmen and terrorists,
as theyve been called? Are they indeed our brothers and sisters? Was the
U.S.-led bombing to save them from the abuses suffered under Yugoslav
Federation President Slobodan Milosevic a misguided strategy that may require a
partitioned Kosovo under global management for a generation?
We have to care, said Alexander Belopopsky, Europe
secretary of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, who helped arrange the
weeklong trip. There are 10 Kosovos waiting to happen in Europe
alone, Belopopsky said. He pointed to the war between Russia and
Chechnya, to conflicts in neighboring Dagestan, unresolved ethnic claims in
Armenia and Azerbaijan, internal struggles in Georgia and tensions between
fundamentalist Islamic elements in many of the former southern Soviet states
who want to govern these republics according to Sharia (Islamic
law).
In the Balkans no one addresses the current instability without
first unfolding centuries of history. The past lives on here, no matter how
disturbed and violent. Southeast of Djakovica is Prizren, the 14th-century
Serbian capital, a city steeped in religious history. Today it stands as
witness to a deep betrayal of religious instincts and testament to the
viciousness of religion when it is placed in service of hatred. Here Serbian
homes have been plundered and burnt, as have those of the once-large Roma
(Gypsy) community. Prizrens Serbian Orthodox churches, many of them
dating to medieval times and having withstood five centuries of Turkish rule,
are today necklaced in barbed wire and guarded by KFOR troops and tanks.
German soldiers sit behind sand bunkers in front of Ss. Ciril and
Methodius Theological Seminary. They guard the handful of elderly Serbs and
Gypsy families and the lone monk who still inhabits the spacious dormitory and
classroom building. Fr. Miron Kosach, a Serbian Orthodox monk, tells
NCR, Everyone in the house lives like Salman Rushdie.
Tables have turned
The tables have turned in the wake of the bombing. Months earlier
Miron might have said that the Serbian Orthodox church had stayed neutral, the
way the minority Catholic church had tried to conduct itself during the crisis
leading to NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia. Serbian Orthodox Patriarch
Pavle, who was bishop in Kosovo 34 years before being called to head the church
in Belgrade, had appealed for an end to violence. But in a land without a free
press, Pavles statements were not widely known. When the patriarch
appeared on television with Milosevic at a New Years event, many saw the
Serbian Orthodox church as anything but neutral.
In a land of rumor and conspiracy theories, Miron confirms that a
German Jesuit and a German Catholic bishop visited the seminary in March,
assisting in the removal of its students and professors to Nis, Serbias
second-largest city.
Miron resembles an anorexic Rasputin. His dark eyes sit deep in
his sunken face. His hair is disheveled. If he wants to leave the seminary he
needs a KFOR escort. Miron says he seldom ventures out because the townspeople
insult him in the streets. Last June 15 - a week after Milosevic capitulated to
NATO, Fr. Hariton Lukic was reported kidnapped by the KLA in Prizren. He has
not been seen since. German troops say theyve heard no insults when
escorting Miron, but that people point curiously at the monks
eyes.
Outside the seminary, hundreds of people - most of them under 30 -
cross Prizrens picturesque Ottoman Bridge. Everyone seems to be holding a
cigarette in one hand, a portable phone in the other. Conversations, in
Albanian, swirl in the air like tobacco smoke. To speak Serbian in a public
place in Kosovo today is to invite death.
In October a Bulgarian national was attacked and murdered by a
group of Kosovar Albanian teenagers who had asked him the time in Serbian. The
multilingual Valentin Krumov was spending his first day in Pristina as a United
Nations peacekeeper. Fresh from having received his Ph.D. from the University
of Georgia in Athens, Ga., he was walking down Pristinas main avenue -
Mother Teresa Street - near the Grand Hotel where many U.N. and other
international workers meet. When he answered in Serbian, the youths beat him
with their fists before killing him with a single shot to his head. None of the
teenagers, said to be 16- and 17-year-olds, has been captured.
The lack of a functioning legal and judicial system in Kosovo has
meant few if any deterrents to those bent on wrongdoing, whether they commit
crimes of ethnic hatred and vengeance or simply drive recklessly. Locals from
both ethnic communities as well as foreign nationals claim that 40 percent of
Europes drugs now flow through Kosovo. Mafia deal making, car theft and
prostitution are rife.
Under the current NATO protectorate, U.S. soldiers have become the
cops on the beat in Kosovo. An officer from Washington told NCR that
efforts are underway to create a local force, hold trials and enforce
sentencing. A Canadian KFOR press officer credits the policemen and the U.N.
troops with cutting Kosovos murder rate from 50 per week in the months
after the war to four or five per week now.
Violence continues
Recent U.S. police arrivals have been dispatched directly to the
troubled city of Mitrovica, where barbed wire divides Serbs on the north side
of the Ibar River from Albanians on the south side. Since February violence has
erupted in the north where about 800 Albanians still reside among the Serbs.
Before the war some 4,000 Albanians lived among an estimated 43,000 Serbs in
the north. The entire citys pre-war population was put at 300,000 - about
14 percent of it Serbian. The overwhelming majority of the rest of the
population was Albanian.
Some two-dozen French troops, assigned to protect Mitrovica, have
been injured by shrapnel from grenade attacks. Combatants on both sides have
been killed. Recently it took 21 armored vehicles and 1,000 troops to return 40
Albanians to their houses on the northern side.
The shooting, stone throwing and grenade assaults involve more
than ethnic conflict. They represent issues of access to economic, medical and
educational facilities. Nearby and inside the northern area of Mitrovica are 42
mines, processing and production plants that form the Trepca Conglomerate. For
years the lead-, zinc- and silver-producing mines figured prominently in
Kosovos revenues.
Strikes by Albanian miners in 1988 and 1989 - in protest of
Milosevics proposals to revoke the autonomous status of Kosovo and his
dismissal of ethnic Albanians from Communist Party leadership roles - resulted
in Albanian miners losing their jobs. The mines continued to be administered
from Belgrade, the Serbian capital, and Serbs made up the majority of the work
force. While some Kosovars report that the mines have been largely exploited,
others view them as the richest fields in Europe and suggest that
Belgrade would wage war to keep Kosovo part of Serbia, if only to retain the
mines.
Albanians also want entry into the university in Mitrovica where
they have not been permitted to study since 1989. The north also houses a
hospital where no Albanian has been granted entrance since last August and
where no Albanian doctors can work. Serbs counter that the university and
medical facilities in Pristina - 55 kilometers (about 34 miles) southeast of
Mitrovica - are adequate for the citys majority Albanians.
Meanwhile no Serbian doctor can work in an Albanian hospital
anywhere in Kosovo. Earlier this year Josif Vasic, a gynecologist in the
multiethnic town of Gnjilane, in the east of Kosovo, was gunned down near his
home by a killer in a parked car. Vasic, who had long treated Albanian women,
had recently set up a makeshift clinic for Serbs near the local Orthodox
church. KFOR clinics and field hospitals have now become the main health
facility for Serbs and other minorities.
Mitrovica is a microcosm of Kosovo - violent, partitioned, dirty
and driven by the desire of each ethnic group to have done with the other. On
the surface it appears as though the rivals would rather destroy the houses of
the other than rebuild their own. The grinding wheel of hatred and human
enmity, of revenge and mistrust of neighbor, of frequent crime and rare
punishment and of no declared war, yet no evident peace comprise the quality of
life in Mitrovica and across Kosovo today.
But as generals discover, war has a way of dictating a new script,
one that no amount of smart bombs and precision aircraft can
foretell. Those in Washington, Brussels, Belgium and London who predicted that
flexing military muscle toward Belgrade would help the peoples of the Balkans
and would prevent the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo that had occurred in Croatia
and in Bosnia- Herzegovina surely miscalculated.
They never anticipated 860,000 Albanians being expelled in
addition to the 300,000 to 500,000 that had been run out or escaped during
Kosovos undeclared civil war in 1998 and 99. Human rights monitors
from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe documented
massacres, atrocities, mass graves and some 2,500 deaths during the civil war.
A further 10,000 lives were reportedly lost in the wake of the NATO
aggression.
KFOR officials point out that ethnic cleansing was stopped a few
weeks after the bombing halted, even if random murders continued for many more
weeks. They add that no one starved or froze to death among the masses who
quickly reentered Kosovo. But they found their homes empty or demolished. Most
returnees had to cope with no power or frequent and sustained electricity
outages. Many had to deal with land mines and poisoned wells.
In the late 1990s, Kosovos population was estimated at just
over 2.5 million - about 2 million Albanians; 200,000 Serbs, most of them
Orthodox; the rest Catholics (of both Serbian and Albanian ethnicity), Slavs,
Roma and Turks. While mosques and churches dominate the landscape, religion
appears more historic and symbolic than practiced in Kosovo. Im
Muslim. Would you like a beer? is the greeting of a displaced Albanian
living in a refugee settlement in Plav, Montenegro. An Orthodox priest tells
NCR he has 10,000 baptized Serbs in his area, but only 20 attend the
Sunday liturgy.
Dozens who spoke with NCR said that they had been raised as
atheists, communists or never heard religion mentioned. NATO was our
God, at the outset of the war, said one Albanian, who fled to Montenegro.
But when he could get no news from his parents who had stayed in Pristina, he
started going into both mosques and churches to pray.
Perhaps we havent suffered enough, said Fr. Sava
Janjic. We need personal and collective repentance. Only by returning to
God can we have a change. Sava is secretary to Serbian Orthodox Bishop
Artemije Radosavljevic of the Raska and Prizren diocese. Artemije is viewed by
Washington and by some in the Balkans as one of the few moderate voices in
Kosovo today.
Sava compares the tragedy of Kosovo to the tragedy of Gods
son. Like Artemije, he believes that the cross on which Kosovo was
crucified has been carved in Belgrade. In an hour-long interview at the
Monastery of Gracanica, Sava blames both Slobodan Milosevic and the
radical elements in Albanian society for the tragedy. Peace and ethnic
coexistence will stand no chance, he said, until Milosevic goes, until KFOR
isolates and disarms Albanian radicals and until the West seeks out and
cooperates with moderates across ethnic and religious lines. Only after such
changes will extremists be marginalized and their armed offshoots in the KLA
disbanded. Then can Kosovars develop democracy and work toward unity with the
European Community, he said.
Recently Sava and Artemije moved to the 14th-century monastery
outside Pristina, finding it too dangerous to stay in Prizrin. Artemije was in
Bulgaria the day NCR visited. Outside Gracanica, Swedish soldiers and a
tank kept watch on the monastery.
Inside, Sava dispatched his daily e-mail updates on the situation
that have earned him the nickname cyber monk. Without power for
much of the past nine months, Sava carries his laptop from town to town,
hunting for electricity. Today his computer is up and running. Nuns at the
monastery are using an automatic washer to do the laundry. While it spins they
bring Turkish coffee to visitors, who include an Orthodox priest in fatigues.
He is Father Antonios of Rhodes, chaplain to the Greek KFOR troops.
Although Sava said he could understand that damage and desecration
happen in wartime, he was shocked that so much plundering and torching occurred
after KFORs arrival. Theres something more than revenge going
on here, more than an effort to destroy all that is Serbian. The goal is to
destroy all that is not Albanian, Sava said.
In his view communism is responsible for much of what ails
Yugoslavia today and for what alienates it from the world. Milosevic is
an atheist but he tries to ideologize religion.
In a normal
and healthy society, a Milosevic could never be a political leader.
Meeting with Albright
Extremists in both camps have knocked the bishop, who was critical
of Milosevic before the war and continues to criticize him. Serb radicals call
Artemije a traitor and the disgraced bishop for having
met with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. And Serbian radio has
asked that he be defrocked, then hanged.
Thats why we went to Washington to say that we need
some improvement on the ground so that our position gains credibility and
strength, Sava said, referring to the Feb. 25 meeting he and Artemije had
with Albright and Congressional leaders. Artemije and Albright endorsed Bernard
Kouchners Agenda for Coexistence as the basis for both Serbs and
Albanians to move toward democratization. Kouchner, a Frenchman, is the special
representative of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in Kosovo.
Kouchner has made three seats - two for Albanians, one for a Serb
- available on the Interim Administrative Council. Artemije, by virtue of his
leading the Serb National Council, has claimed the place reserved for Serbs on
the council.
The administrative council represents a kind of provisional
government with 19 departments charged to govern Kosovo until the country is
ready for national elections. No one will hazard a guess about when such
elections can be held, noting that the Serbs took the passports and identity
cards of thousands of Albanians when they fled Kosovo during the bombing. Local
elections to town councils are slated for the autumn.
Artemije and Sava vehemently reject partition of Kosovo and want
its status frozen as a province of Serbia to which all former Serb
inhabitants can be assured a safe return. But de facto partition has happened
with the sectioning of the province into five areas under U.S., French,
British, German and Italian KFOR commanders. Soldiers from the 14 other NATO
members, as well as Russian and other U.N. peacekeeping contingents, assist
with checkpoints, patrolling, land mine removal, weapons confiscation and with
nonmilitary jobs.
Sava dispenses wide praise for the role churches abroad have
played during the crisis. Anglican chaplains from Britain as well as Lutherans
from Norway and Sweden have helped Serbian Orthodox priests visit their
communities. He also lauded the moderate position of Orthodox Bishop Anastasios
of Tirana and all Albania, and the neutral stand taken by the Catholic church
in Kosovo and Macedonia.
The cyber monk had special thanks for Caritas, the emergency
network of the Catholic church and for ACT - Actions by Churches Together. ACT
groups more than 75 U.S., European, Canadian and Asian church and humanitarian
agencies together, under the leadership of the World Council of Churches and
the Lutheran World Federation. In December, ACT issued a $53 million appeal for
the affected populations following the Kosovo crisis. To date it has raised
just over 10 percent of its target, said a worried Thorkild Hoyer, the Danish
human rights lawyer who is directing ACTs Balkan efforts.
Its hard to miss the trucks and vans that bring the
churchs assistance to this beleaguered land. The International Orthodox
Christian Charities delivers 30,000 to 40,000 food and hygiene parcels monthly
to refugees and to the internally displaced in Montenegro. Catholic Relief
Services feeds 240,000 persons monthly.
Thats how it should be, said Fr. Shan Zefi,
vicar general to Bishop Marko Sopi of the Catholic diocese of Skopje-Prizren.
Zefi, an Albanian, is ebullient. He greets this reporter with I love
Americans. He follows this with a hug and an invitation to the Ash
Wednesday Mass he will say later that day. Zefi believes that churchmen ought
to be moral leaders, not politicians. Thats his way of saying
he does not like what Artemije has been doing.
He said he regretted that Kosovos religious leaders have to
go abroad to meet and to sign statements. He was referring to declarations made
in Vienna, Amman and in February in Sarajevo and signed by Artemije, Sopi and
Dr. Rexhep Boja, mufti and president of the Islamic Community of Kosovo. In
their most recent Statement of Shared Moral Commitment, the three
affirm the fundamental human rights of each person. They condemn acts of ethnic
and religious hatred, desecration of holy places and objects, abuse of the
media for the purpose of spreading hatred, the expulsion of people from their
homes and the obstruction of their return.
Leave politics aside
Zefi said he hoped that Artemije would stop acting
politically. If we want to succeed as religious leaders, we must leave politics
aside. Albanian Catholics and Muslims dont approve of
Artemije, the Serbian Orthodox bishop, Zefi said, and some see him
as almost synonymous with Milosevic. Zefi and Artemije represent
polar opposite approaches. They also embody the kind of persistent differences
that have made peace, even among religious leaders, virtually impossible.
Zefi included thousands of years of history in his analysis of the
current situation. Albanians, he said, have been in Kosovo for from 2,000 to
4,000 years. As for Catholics, they could trace their episcopal sees to the
fifth century. Despite pressures from the Byzantine, Bulgarian and
Turkish empires, the church has not been destroyed. Five percent of our
people remain faithful to Rome, he said. Today some 100,000 Kosovars are
Catholic, about 50,000 in Kosovo, 12,000 in Macedonia and the remainder in
Europe and the United States.
Zefi, who was trained in Rome and turned down a faculty post to
return to Kosovo, praised Ibrahim Rugova, leader of the Democratic League of
Kosovo. He suggested that Western leaders promote the Kosovar Albanian for the
Nobel Peace Prize. If any Albanian looks like Mother Teresa, its
Rugova, the priest said. For 10 years Rugova tried to keep Albanians
within his movement for equal rights and the restoration of Kosovos
autonomous status. But the KLA and its supporters gradually undermined his
leadership, finding his non-violent approach ineffectual against Serbian
repression.
Unlike Artemije and Sava, Zefi wants the international community
to announce and recognize Kosovos independence immediately. Kosovo
is as indivisible as the Trinity. Mitrovica is the heart of Kosovo, the
priest said. Albanians want no more than what Macedonia, Bosnia and
Slovenia have, he added. The Serbian military has lost. They
cant come back as occupiers or police, Zefi said, but Serbs can
return as citizens.
Zefi said he couldnt imagine a Kosovo without Serbs. Once
Serbs - and preferable Artemije - ask forgiveness for what they did to
the Albanians during the war, they can return, he said. Well
help them to rebuild their houses.
Col. Alexander Bommarius is much less sure that the two ethnic
groups will be able to coexist anytime soon. Im very
pessimistic, the German KFOR chaplain said.
So many Albanians are possessed by this hatred. He
said that the Pristina apartment block owned by an Albanian lawyer and his two
sons, who were murdered by Serb police during the war, has now become a
monument for Albanians. There are so many shrines to hate all over this
land. A further destabilizing factor is that Albanians make no
distinction between Serbs and other non-Albanians, he said, noting how Romas
have faired badly at the hands of Albanians even though Serb police forced the
Romas to bury the murdered Albanians, the chaplain said.
Bommarius also doubts that the fall elections can be democratic.
Only candidates of the Albanian parties and their clients will be on the
ballot. He does not hold out hope for Artemije as a peace broker either.
After meeting with the bishop in January, Bommarius left convinced that Aremije
was only concerned about the past and about the return of the Serbs, not
about the future of Kosovo.
Milosevic is a bad guy for Artemije because
hes a communist and an atheist, not because he killed thousands,
the German Protestant cleric said.
Bommarius assists Rabbi David Zalis with the administration of
some 50 KFOR chaplains; 15 of them - including Zalis - are American, many of
them Catholic. The fact that Bommarius, a German, and Zalis, a Jew whose
wifes family was killed by Germans in the Holocaust, can work and live
together is incomprehensible to people here. They have another
mentality, the colonel said.
Ironically, it is the soldiers of the international force who
provide a model for getting along. They try to show the local people that even
though they are strangers from 37 different lands, and that many come from
nations that fought each other in two world wars or were enemies during the
Cold War, they are working together day and night.
We recognize that there is a way to cooperate.
Although he has been in Kosovo four months, Bommarius said he still
couldnt understand the hatred he sees. He pointed to the killing on Nov.
28 of a Serb professor by Albanians at which hundreds of Albanians stood
and applauded. Only the quick action of the Green Jackets -
British troops who served in Northern Ireland - saved the mans two female
companions, he said.
While KFOR soldiers donate blood to the wounded, buy and deliver
toys for children and even change the diapers of an elderly Serb woman too ill
and too frightened to leave her home, they cannot force the two sides to put
down their hatred and their history and live in peace. That job belongs to
parents, teachers and children. It will take 30 years for this hate to
end, said Sgt. Pascal Bobbe, a Dutch KFOR peacekeeper. A whole
generation must first experience nonviolence, he said.
Bobbe doubts that KFOR can remain in Kosovo that long. The 2,000
Dutch troops will leave in May, many to be redeployed to Bosnia. The future of
many other NATO contingents, including U.S. forces, seems cloudy. Funding to
pay for the Kosovo project is proving far from certain in Congress, where many
want Europeans to provide more support so that the United States can provide
less.
Despite Milosevics and the Serbian press efforts to
manipulate tensions between the religions, the Kosovo conflict is
not a religious conflict, Islamic leaders insist. The last thing
religious leaders have to lose is our hope, said Qemajl Morina, senior
representative of Kosovos Islamic Community. Morina, along with Xhabir
Hamiti of the Islamic Studies Faculty of Pristina University, believes strongly
in the clergy statements signed in Vienna, Amman and Sarajevo.
Nothing like this must ever happen again, Hamiti said,
noting that interreligious dialogue will be the key to conflict resolution in
the 21st century. He believes such dialogue will be more frequent and
more frank, because we know how important religion is for
civilization. Religious figures must lead by example, he said. We
must show that its possible to get on with our lives.
Morina said he hopes that Artemije would remove his political garb
and instead act as a religious leader who asks forgiveness for the wrongs
committed by Serbs against Albanians.
Without this gesture, it will be too hard to shake his
hand, Morina said. Our people will say How can you work with
him? when they destroyed 210 mosques, killed 30 Imams and theology
students and jailed an estimated 4,000 Albanians. Morina estimated the
war dead at 10,000 to 15,000 Albanians with 5,000 to 7,000 missing.
Bishop Joakim Herbut, in charge of Macedonias Latin-rite
Catholics, said that Pope John Pauls March 12 apology for the harm
Catholics had inflicted on others over the centuries could serve as a powerful
example to religious leaders in the region. If every person acted like
the pope, then we would have a more peaceful Balkans, Herbut said.
If the churches can find a common language, then we can do
many things. The fact that a number of Catholic families and convents
hosted displaced Albanians during the war is proof of both religious good will
and of strong human ties in the Balkans, he said.
Transcending chaos
Despite the enmity and carnage, many people hoped that Kosovo
could transcend its crisis and chaos. After centuries of turf-claiming, of
forced conversions and the expropriation of each others land and holy
places, the way out of the de facto segregation and aggression of the past
decade could yet prove the greatest battle of Kosovo.
Much will depend on how committed the international community
remains to the NATO-U.N. mission in Kosovo and whether conditions can be made
right for economic investment in the region. But the provinces political
and financial future remains unknowable under Milosevic. Until he leaves or is
ousted, sanctions will remain in place. Many in Montenegro complained that the
international economic blockade has hurt ordinary Serbians and Montenegrins far
worse than it has punished Yugoslavias political leaders.
Although she would walk back tomorrow from her
displaced persons shelter in Berane, Montenegro, to her former home in Pec, in
western Kosovo, Zorka Buric, a Kosovo Serb, doubts that conditions will ever be
right in her lifetime for return. At 77, she admits, Im too old,
and the cemetery is too close.
Despite having a debt of about a half million dollars, Binak
Dabigaj and his four brothers - Nezie, Adem, Hajdar and Ilim - wish to stay in
their village of Prilep in western Kosovo. They want to rebuild the homes Binak
had constructed for 33 members of his Albanian family and the nearby shoe
factory that gave work to his 70 employees. Binak, 51, who worked 30 years near
Stuttgart, Germany, for Daimler-Benz, returned before the war to build homes
and industry with his large investment in construction equipment. He showed
NCR the tracks in the road leading to his house where Yugoslav tanks
demolished all that he had built. Although his wife and children remain in
Germany, Binak said hes not moving. Im not interested in a
better living standard, but in the freedom for Kosovo.
One year after the bombing, it is spring in Kosovo. Amid rubble
and ruin some flowers poke shoots heavenward. Winter wheat seed provided some
months ago by Catholic Relief Services is sprouting in the fields near Prizren
where grain has been harvested for two millennia. Wheat has the ability to
reproduce even in the harshest soil. Those who want peace pray that it can
emerge from the cracks in this broken and embittered society.
In Mitrovica hundreds of thousands have marched in the streets,
demonstrating the demand of the two communities to live in peace - a fact
seldom reported in the Balkan press or foreign press.
Paco Ardje, a visitor from Spain, writes in a guest book at the
entrance of Gracanica Monastery a message that fills many hearts: My best
desire is to come back to a Kosovo in peace for all Serbs, Turks, Albanians,
Roma, for all.
National Catholic Reporter, April 7,
2000
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