COURTESY BOB JONES
Two women walk across the bridge between the Serbian and Albanian sides of Mitrovica. Violence erupted in Kosovo last week after two boys drowned in this river trying to get away from a dog set on them by a Serbian man.
Violence flares once again in Kosovo,
continuing a 600-year-old tradition of hatred
between Serbs and ethnic Albanians
Editor's note: Veteran journalist Bob Jones traveled by road for three weeks last fall through all of the former Yugoslav republics. Jones is a MidWeek columnist, a former KGMB news anchor and a former NBC News foreign correspondent in Africa and Asia.Hardly anyone anticipated Kosovo unraveling overnight the way it did last Wednesday. Certainly not because of one alleged drive-by shooting of a Serb by an Albanian Kosovar -- not even a fatal shooting. Nobody went berserk last year when two elderly Serbs were hacked to death in their beds in a Kosovar village. Or when three Serbian teens were ambushed and shot by Albanian Kosovars at a swimming hole.
Yet here we are, facing an enormous setback in the work that the United Nations, NATO and the State Department's U.S. Office in Kosovo have done since 1999 to tamp down ethnic hatred and resettle Serb families in the Kosovar villages they fled during and after the NATO-American intervention from March 24 to June 10, 1999, against the Serb ethnic cleansing.
Everyone expected occasional flare-ups in the northern Kosovo town of Mitrovica. It's a split municipality, with Serbs north of the shallow Ibar River and Albanian Kosovars on the south side. French troops man the bridge between them. Albanian Kosovars don't go north. Serbs who go south on urgent business in the capital city of Pristina or to visit relatives in southern Serb enclaves move only with military escorts. How does anybody know who's who? The Serbs insist on having Serbian plates on their cars; the Albanians have Kosovo plates.
Some minor cross-river shooting in Mitrovica isn't unusual. But this time, the claim is that a Serbian man set his dog or dogs on some Kosovar boys who'd gone to the north side of the river. We don't know why they went north. Innocent? Stealing? They tried to swim across to southern safety and drowned. The small French bridge contingent was caught in a Serb-Kosovar mid-bridge confrontation with indiscriminate shooting into crowds.
That incident fired up Serbs and Kosovars across the province. The 670-year-old Serbian Orthodox church in the southwest Kosovo city of Prizren, a wonderful piece of architecture and a treasury of Orthodox art, was mortared and set afire Thursday morning by Muslim Kosovars. Eight Serb church people were evacuated.
From there, the intelligence reports by Kosovo Forces (NATO) Command became increasingly grim:
>> Albanians are trying to enter U.N. Mission to Kosovo buildings in Pristina and have been repelled. Protesters are targeting U.N. civilians. UNMIK is trying to evacuate international personnel from offices. One protester is rumored to have been killed by UNMIK police. UNMIK vehicles are being targeted, with three reported burning near the Grand Hotel in Pristina.
>> Decani monastery is under siege by a mob of 2,000. Mortars have been fired into the compound. Kosovo NATO Forces vows to remain in place as long as possible. Efforts to persuade the monks to evacuate have been unsuccessful.
By Friday morning, more than 30 people were dead and 500 wounded in the ethnic fighting and the property damage was immense. NATO sent in another 1,000 troops Friday night to back up the Americans, French, Germans, Danes, Lithuanians and others of the 17,500 troops scattered across the province.
That day, my daughter, Brett Jones, America's chief refugee coordinator for Kosovo, was evacuated along with her Danish husband, one of Kosovo's civilian administrators, to the State Department compound, on a hill overlooking Pristina and heavily defended by private American security guards. There was too much gunfire around their central-city apartment.
So that, briefly, is what's happened during the past few days. More important is why, and whether America is stuck in another religious war with no exit strategy.
Kosovo's history goes back to medieval times under Slav rule, although probably under Bulgarian and Byzantine control before the Serbian clan moved in and came to call it "the cradle of our civilization." The Roman pope was shoved out, but the Catholic Church remained in nearby northern Albania for a time. Yes, some Albanians were in Kosovo then, but as a small minority.
Then came 1389 and the Turk victory over the Serb army at Kosovo Polije, south of today's Pristina. The region from Serbia all the way to Belgrade became part of the Ottomon Empire along with Albania, Macedonia and southern Bosnia. The Serbian people still resent that loss 615 years later.
At the end of World War I, Turkey's empire was dismantled. The new nation of Yugoslavia was formed by the Allies to include Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Slovenia. Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia were Christian Orthodox. Croatia and Slovenia were Roman Catholic. Bosnia was a mixture of everything. Kosovo was heavily Muslim, but the Allies made it the southern province of Serbia because of that "cradle" business.
Kosovars became very European Muslims -- convenient Muslims who had converted mostly to do business with the old Turks. They drink and smoke, and prostitution flourishes at motels on main highways where male travelers can overnight with women smuggled in from Albania. They love Western CDs and DVDs and make pirate copies by the zillions. Generally, only elderly people go regularly to a mosque.
Serbs ruled, but more and more Muslims from neighboring Albania moved in across the porous border. Albania is as poor as it gets in the West. Kosovo was poor but had much more opportunity in the days of Marshal Josep Broz Tito's Yugoslav rule and the cross-wooing by Soviets and Americans.
All might have gone on with accommodation forever had it not been for the death of longtime autocratic leader Marshal Tito and the rise of the Serbs' Slobodan Milosevic in the 1980s. Right after World War II, Tito issued a decree banning former Slav colonists who'd fled Kosovo from going back to claim land. That lasted only until Tito was pressured by Soviet dictator Joe Stalin to rescind it three years later. Serbs flooded back to their "cradle of civilization." They found Albanians firmly entrenched.
In 1987, Slobodan Milosevic found an issue he hoped would ignite Serbs to take over all of Yugoslavia. He went to Kosovo and gave an incendiary speech that Serbs should prevail everywhere they lived. He broke up Yugoslavia. In 1991, Milosevic led Serbia into war against Croatia and the non-Serb areas of Bosnia, which killed 250,000 people. He agreed to a U.S.-brokered peace in 1995, but three years later he began an ethnic cleansing of Kosovo after Kosovo Liberation Front Muslims attacked a Serbian police station and demanded independence.
In March 1999, NATO, at America's insistence, began bombing Serb forces in Kosovo and then the main cities of Serbia proper. Serbia capitulated in three months. Kosovo became a U.N.-administered province of Serbia but has not been granted independence. Most Serbs fled, except for the hard-core who armed themselves and formed small enclaves like the one at Mitrovica. They are financially supported by the Serbian government. Most of Kosovo flies the Albanian flag. Enclaves such as Serbian Mitrovica fly the Serbian flag. Most of Kosovo uses the euro as its currency. The enclaves such as Serbian Mitrovica use the Serbian dinar.
The Kosovars and the Serbs hate each other. In Kosovo, both tend to be under-educated, steeped in religious dogma and still living 615 years of unmitigated animosity. Americans may find that hard to understand. We also don't understand why Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq want to kill each other, or Hindus and Muslims in India. We have this maddening tendency to ask, "Why can't they just get along?" Well, why can't we? Why can't we just let anyone marry anyone else? Why the snit about that cross atop Camp Smith? Why do we argue about the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance?
During the past year, my daughter and the nongovernmental agencies she funds with about $15 million a year have resettled many Kosovo Serb families who had no grievance with their Muslim neighbors before the 1999 war and wanted to come home to where they've always lived. It's a delicate process. The carrot is that if the Muslims take back the Serbs, the villages will get development aid. Brett Jones has not had a single resettled family killed on her watch. The previous year, she was the municipal elections overseer for Kosovo and taught Muslim office-seekers that providing water, electricity and garbage pickup was more crucial than killing Serbs. Things were really looking up -- until Wednesday.
The stakes in Kosovo are more than the potential deaths or fleeing of some resettled families. America has about 1,500 troops there and many more in neighboring Bosnia. We can't even think about pulling them out. Kosovo has become a sinkhole for the U.S. dollar. It's another Iraq and Afghanistan and Haiti. We are $540 billion on credit and looking downhill.
But how do we leave a place we took over? A place where the main street in the capital is called Bill Clinton Boulevard? A place with 70 percent unemployment that is dependent on our money and protection? What about all those Serbian families my daughter helped resettle? Does she tell them, "You're on your own now. I'm out of here to some nice, safe, sane place"?
And how do you deal with two groups of people who will burn their artistic heritage and think nothing about it other than, "A-ha, I gotcha!"?
Was Erich Maria Remarque right in his novel "All Quiet On The Western Front," when his soldier suggested giving opposing leaders clubs and letting them duke it out with the winner taking all?
