Kosovo Buffer Is Danger Zone for Serbs
latimes.com
Yugoslavia: Villagers are vulnerable to attacks by ethnic Albanians, despite NATO's
tougher measures.
By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer
MATAROVA, Yugoslavia--This is one place where Serbs have to be very careful
not to wind up on the wrong side of the road.
About 200 Serbs live in this village in the buffer zone where southern Serbia comes
face to face with the separatist province of Kosovo, and their rutted dirt road has
suddenly become a dangerous borderline.
By the stroke of a map maker's pencil, several of the Serbs' houses are in Kosovo,
under U.N. authority. But the farmers' fields are across the road in Serbia proper,
where Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic holds sway.
The split is more than just a strange quirk. It means that the Serbian villagers of
Matarova, like thousands more living in the 482-square-mile buffer zone, are on the
front line of a low-intensity border conflict that got worse when notorious Serbian
troops withdrew from the zone and NATO-led peacekeepers came to Kosovo.
The buffer zone was created to prevent attacks by Serbian forces on peacekeepers
and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, but now Serbs complain that it has opened the door to
ethnic Albanian attacks on them in the border area.
Last month, in the middle of the afternoon, arsonists set two of the Serbs' houses on
fire in Matarova. Villager Milos Kujovic, 44, blamed ethnic Albanians who, he said,
frequently sneak past Scottish peacekeeping troops at a Kosovo checkpoint about a
mile away.
The peacekeepers sent a firetruck, which put out the flames, but the ambulance that
came with it was unnecessary, Kujovic said. The torched houses had been empty since
July 1999, when a sniper killed Kujovic's son-in-law on his doorstep.
Dejan Djordjevic, 25, was killed in front of his family's house by a rifle shot that
came from the ethnic Albanian village of Dubnica, on the Kosovo side of the road. The
dead man's family and neighbors all fled within the week, Kujovic said.
He and other Serbs interviewed in the buffer zone say tougher measures by foreign
peacekeepers have improved security in recent weeks. But they say that they still hear
gunfire in the night and that attacks are continuing.
"We are the next ones," Kujovic said. "Our houses are the first ones to be exposed
now. From here, there's 207 meters [about 228 yards] to the borderline."
From the dirt road that cuts through Borovac, a nearby Serbian village, Olivera
Pavlovic, 33, said she frequently sees men in black looking through binoculars from the
Kosovo Albanian villages of Mirovac and Livadica, about 300 yards away.
Three mortar bombs fell near the Serbs' homes in Borovac about two months ago,
and peacekeepers set up a ballistic tracking system to deter any more attacks, Pavlovic
said.
But she still doesn't feel safe, and she won't till any of her land that is exposed to the
Kosovo side for fear of being shot. In early July, four bullets were fired at the village in
a border fight that started at 8:30 p.m. and went through the night, she said.
Land mines make the winding dirt tracks that twist along the border even more
hazardous. Several Serbian police officers have been killed in land-mine explosions in
the buffer zone, and two Serbian farmers from Kujovic's village almost died the same
way.
Their tractor tire just missed a mine laid in the dirt track, but the wheel of their trailer
triggered it. The explosion blew the trailer to pieces, and the remains sit on display in
Matarova, a constant warning of what might lie in wait.
"We don't know if there are any more of those mines," said Miloje Perovic, 69, a
Serbian farmer in the buffer zone. "We don't dare to venture on those roads anymore."
In one of the latest reported attacks in the buffer zone, a candidate in a coalition with
Serbia's ruling Socialist Party was abducted and shot dead by five ethnic Albanians on
Aug. 28, the party said in a statement.
The candidate, Milivoje Kankaras, and his wife were kidnapped from their home in
Serbia, near the Kosovo border, and forced onto a tractor. As they approached the
village of Velja Glava, the abductors threw the couple off the tractor and opened fire,
killing Kankaras and seriously wounding his wife, the party statement said.
These attacks are occurring about 60 miles northwest of Serbia's southeastern
Presevo region, where a low-scale conflict between Serbian police and ethnic Albanian
guerrillas has received the most attention.
The guerrillas, many of whom belonged to the now-disbanded Kosovo Liberation
Army, call themselves the Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac Liberation Army after the
three main towns in the area of Serbia that they want to unite with Kosovo, which is
technically part of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic.
In March, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright sent her then-spokesman, James
P. Rubin, to Kosovo to try to persuade Kosovo's newest guerrilla army, which then had
an estimated force of about 150 fighters, to lay down its arms.
Rubin came away with an agreement from the ethnic Albanian rebels to disarm, but
clashes with Serbian police units have continued.
The guerrillas insist that they've been forced to fight against Serbian repression of the
fewer than 70,000 ethnic Albanians still living in southern Serbia proper. Serbs call the
attacks "terrorism."
At first, NATO-led forces monitored the clashes from across the border in Kosovo
while the rebels and their supporters crossed freely into the buffer zone in the Presevo
Valley through U.S.-controlled checkpoints.
In recent weeks, peacekeepers in Kosovo have increased measures to stop
cross-border infiltrators. On Aug. 20, they arrested four suspected members of the new
rebel army after stopping a black jeep linked to the disappearance of two Kosovo
Serbs.
Meanwhile, the foreign troops are still struggling to stop ethnic Albanian attacks on
Serbs and other minorities in Kosovo itself. Peacekeepers in central Kosovo were
ordered to mount more mobile patrols Aug. 28, hours after an elderly Serb was shot
dead in the northern Kosovo village of Crkvena Vodica.
In the same village, nine Serbian children playing basketball 10 days earlier were
injured when an attacker threw two grenades onto the court as he drove past. The
Serbian enclave is one of several guarded by heavily armed peacekeeping troops.
The new security measures came 14 months after North Atlantic Treaty
Organization troops entered Kosovo following a 78-day bombing campaign to force
the retreat of Serbian police and Yugoslav troops from Kosovo, where they fought a
brutal yearlong civil war with separatist rebels in which ethnic Albanian civilians were
the main targets.
Under the peace agreement that ended the NATO bombing last year, Yugoslav
troops aren't allowed within three miles of the Kosovo border and only lightly armed
police can enter this buffer zone.
The accord, called the Military Technical Agreement, bans all personnel and
organizations with a military capability from the buffer zone, including "special riot and
anti-terrorist police."
Yugoslav troops and police, numbering in the hundreds, are supposed to be allowed
back intoKosovo to guard the border and cultural sites and help clear land mines,
according to a separate clause of the agreement and U.N. Security Council Resolution
1244. But that part of the peace deal hasn't been implemented.
Perovic, the farmer, would like someone to clear unexploded NATO cluster bombs
from his fields so that he can go back to raising crops. But Perovic, who heads the
village of Merdare next to the Kosovo border, said he has been told that Yugoslav
troops aren't allowed to come in to the buffer zone and clear the bombs.
Bozina Tosovic, 30, and his 11-month-old baby, Bojana, died in Merdare when a
NATO cluster bomb opened over the village and released dozens of lethal "bomblets"
on April 11, 1999, Perovic said last month.
A round canister about the size of a large cookie jar, with a white domed top, is still
lodged in a bush behind Perovic's house and leaves no doubt where the cluster bomb
came from: "Department of the Navy, Naval Air Systems Command," the black type
reads. "Fuze proximity, dispenser FMU-140A/B."
The cluster bombs, which look like soda cans with silver rods pointing out the top,
lie scattered in Perovic's fields, which are thick with tall weeds.
During the NATO bombing, "the army picked up the ones that were not activated,
but there are still six poking out of the ground in my field," he said before conducting a
tour to point out the unexploded ordnance. "The whole container [of bomblets] fell on
my yard. One of my cows was killed." |
