Kosovo: Sara' ancora lunga la strada verso la vera riappacificazione...

[Paola Lucchesi <paola.lucchesi@mail.inet.it>]

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20001101/wl/yugoslavia_kosovo_dc_6.html

Wednesday November 1 6:38 AM ET

Kosovo Shows Moderate Face, Extremism Still Lurks

By Mark Heinrich

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - Ethnic Albanian moderates will take the
helm for the launch of democracy in Kosovo, but the road to racial
co-existence will be hard as long as speaking the wrong language out
loud can get you killed.
     Elections for municipal councils last week yielded thumping
victories for the largest Kosovo Albanian mainstream party over radical
guerrilla war veterans -- a relief for the province's U.N. authorities
who have parliamentary polls in view.
     Minority Serb leaders and the Yugoslav government, which once ran
Kosovo with an iron fist, welcomed the result given Albanian moderate
leader Ibrahim Rugova's public commitment to conciliation and
cooperation with minorities.
     But ordinary Albanians and Serbs live in two estranged worlds that
overlap only when peace supervisors corral local leaders in NATO (news -
web sites)-guarded U.N. compounds to defuse an ethnic incident or
revisit grievances that defy compromise.
     Since NATO waged an 11-week air campaign to drive Serbian forces
out of Kosovo in mid-1999, you risk your life here by speaking Serbian
in public outside the scattered Serb enclaves.

Shot For Speaking Serbian

A Bulgarian U.N. staffer was shot dead on a main street in Pristina last
year after he was asked for the time and replied in Serbian. A Serb
translator for the U.N. was murdered last spring after being recognized
by former Albanian neighbors.
     The 250 Serbs hanging on in Pristina after the post-war flight of
40,000 others have British NATO troops billeted round the clock in the
ground floor of their apartment block.
     Days before the elections, it was hit by an anti-tank missile fired
by Albanian radicals, who escaped. No casualties occurred only because
the rocket missed a row of windows.
     Talk to any of the more than one million ethnic Albanians who were
shelled or burned out of their homes by Belgrade's anti-guerrilla
legions, who killed thousands of civilians too, and most will insist
Serbs have no right to live among them.
     ``There is no way we can live together with Serbs again in Kosovo
after what they did,'' Hafiz Mustafa, 59, said on election eve in Racak,
tearfully holding up the identity card of a son killed in a notorious
massacre of 40 villagers nearby.
     The disarming words that ethnic Albanian and Serb leaders utter in
public are meant for Kosovo's international tutors in democracy rather
than their respective constituents, whose visions of the future remain
diametrically opposed.
     Ethnic Albanians jubilantly trooped to the polls on October 28,
seeing them as a launching pad to inevitable statehood, even though the
U.N. mandate stipulates only ``substantial autonomy.''
     People voted for Rugova's party not because he vowed cooperation
with minorities but because he called for ethnic Albanians to be
``masters in their own house'' as fervently as his most radical
nationalist rivals did, diplomats say.

Serbs Live As If On Another Planet

Seventy-five thousand minority Serbs boycotted the vote out of protest
at their isolation in NATO-shielded ghettos, but also because they
believe any legitimate election must reaffirm Kosovo as part of Serbia,
Yugoslavia's main republic.
     They count on new democratic Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica
(news - web sites) to reassert Belgrade's presence by demanding to
include Kosovo in Serbia's December 23 elections.
     What Kosovo's U.N. administrator Bernard Kouchner decides to do
will be the province's most burning question in coming weeks. If he
agrees, however, ethnic Albanians will certainly boycott the vote, and
may try to thwart it with violence.
     For them, Kosovo is a new state in all but name.
     In most of Kosovo, red-and-black Albanian flags wave, the Serb
parts of bilingual road signs have been erased, the German mark is legal
tender, and cars sport Kosovo number plates.
     Ethnic Albanian areas boom with small trade and post-war
residential construction. No week goes by without a new petrol station
opening for business on traffic-clogged roads.
     On the highway west of Pristina, ethnic Albanians are unveiling a
smart Italianate hotel named the Aviano, in honor of the air base in
northeast Italy from which NATO launched the air strikes that drove the
Serbian forces out.
     In enclaves behind NATO sandbags, Serbs fly the tricolor Yugoslav
flag, use Yugoslavia's dinar currency, read Belgrade newspapers, and
drive cars with faded, battered Yugoslav plates. Hardly anyone works.
Brooding and decay pervade the air.
     The Serbs seethe with resentment at their loss of supremacy and the
international authorities' alleged pro-Albanian bias.
     ``We struggle to survive while Albanians are a huge mafia. There
are two nations here with nothing in common, only confrontation. We want
only our own country and own president,'' said Slavisa Nikolic, a Serb
cigarette vendor.

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