Vengeful Serbs create fiery chaos
By Boris Johnson
Troops face Serb snipers
'I WILL kill you," said the man with the waving fists, spitting in my face. "You
reporters," he screamed, and my Serbian companion, Mirko, started to pull at
my sleeve and say that things were dangerous.
"Why are you just interested in this?" said the Serb, and he waved behind him,
where a building next to a mosque was blazing merrily. Higher and higher
leapt the flames, and there was a great crash as the ceiling timbers started to
fall in and the householders next door set up a wail and came as close as the
heat would allow to throw ineffectual buckets of water.
You had only to look at the Serb army men lolling outside their little command
post - right opposite the honey-stoned mosque - to know who had done it;
but I asked them, for form's sake. "It was caused by fire," said one wit, a
skinny man of about 5ft with a downy lip.
"It was an electrical fault," hooted the other, a pasty-faced youth, and then the
angry Serb passer-by was at it again, jabbing and threatening to hit me. Why
was the media only interested in this kind of thing and never in the suffering of
Serbs? Why hadn't we been there at Suva Reka to see the expulsions?
He was drunk, like the Serb militiaman the Paras gunned down last night, and
as the shooting intensified around the town, Pristina was in a state of
Beirut-style chaos. In one street you could see the Serb army, the VJ, still
sitting brooding on the doorsteps or standing by their green personnel carriers
parked against the kerb.
In the next were the Irish Guards, trundling slowly in their Warriors. Just up
the road the KLA, the Albanian separatists, had placed their flag on the roof
of a schoolhouse and established a kind of headquarters. Perhaps to show
how they meant to go on, they had shot three Serb policemen and a civilian.
And still, in spite of the presence of KFOR, the purple-pyjama'd Serb
policemen were riding around town and loosing off shots at the sky. As one
looks at the British Army struggling to impose its will, one has a sense that
Belfast has come to the Balkans, except that this time hardly any of our troops
can speak the languages.
Already the rumours were flying that the Paras had gunned down a man in
cold blood (though it seems pretty clear he fired in a threatening way). You
could see how the event will feed the rage of the departing Serbs. On the
road from Prizren they were massing again last night: the jogging, puttering
convoys of nut-brown farmers, their wives and children. They had been
moving since the previous day and they were so exhausted that they could
barely muster a word, except to curse Western journalists.
The Serbs say the KLA have surrounded the Orthodox Archbishop of
Prizren and that the German Bundeswehr in charge of the area has done
nothing to protect them. The truth is: they are right. By not disarming the
KLA, by allowing the Albanian separatists to tag along behind, Nato has been
effectively aiding and abetting the next great round of ethnic cleansing. All we
can say to console ourselves as we watch the continuing misery, is that we
somehow have to redress the wrong done to 800,000 Albanian refugees.
Standing under a tree in his Kufi hat was an elderly Albanian looking at the
Household Cavalry, as they set up camp on a roundabout just outside town.
He said: "Thank you, thank you. The Serbs slaughtered my neighbours, a
husband and wife; I wiped the blood off the eight-year-old all night."
In the villages around town, the story was the same. Children were still lining
the streets and cheering anyone who looked vaguely foreign. We came to one
village, near the airport, where Albanian houses had been smashed beyond
repair by Serb police while their occupants hid in the woods.
Only one event has given hope to the Serbs and dismayed the Albanians: that
is the neat piece of chess the Russians have played at the airport. There we
found what has every appearance of the Checkpoint Charlie of the New
World Order. On one side was Major Edward Melotte, of the Irish Guards,
on the other side the Russians.
One of them stood there saying "Niet", a kind of human pit-bull with high
Slavic cheekbones and the very palest blue eyes, and knuckles that were so
massive and swollen he must have been a boxing champion.
No one could pass their blockade of squat APCs. The road was too
dangerous, they said; it was mined, they said; and then, grinning their
steel-toothed grins, they waved past some Yugoslav armour and Serb
civilians.
As the firing popped on into the dusk, it was clear that the battle for control of
Pristina had barely begun.
telegraph.co.uk
Now they would stop asking why there is West Bank shooting :)
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