From today's Wall Street Journal...Living in the Balkans...good story. Of course the ever present anti Serb spin is always there..and I added my comments in caps for the hell of it.
Isn't it funny how the US Press hammered the riots in Athens and we now see the same in Seattle, with the beautiful addition of massive arrests, curfews, and rubber bullets?
December 2, 1999
Reporter's Notebook: Search for Mercy
Ends in Tears on Quiet Kosovo Street
By DANIEL PEARL
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
KOSOVO POLJE, Yugoslavia -- President Clinton came to Kosovo last
week pleading for a little ethnic reconciliation. This reminded me of my first
trip here, in June, when I searched in vain for a story about ethnic
Albanians and Serbs moving beyond their hatred.
"Reconciliation? I don't think anybody's working on that yet," one relief
worker told me. I was undeterred. Albanians should be angry with police
officers, soldiers, or local militias who shot civilians and burned houses
during the war that ended in June. But ordinary people? I didn't even
understand how people could tell the ethnic groups apart on the street.
"Albanian or Serb?" I quizzed my ethnic-Albanian translator, pointing to a
pedestrian as we drove through Kosovo Polje, an ethnically mixed town
near the provincial capital of Pristina.
"Serb."
"How can you tell?"
"The way he walks."
In my search for a pocket of ethnic harmony, I tried the new soccer team
(no Serbs), a once-mixed jazz band (no gigs), even a mental hospital.
There, ethnic-Albanian nurses told me the Serb staff had fled, told the
patients to leave, too, and taken the telephones. Hearing that Albanian and
Serbs were working together to revive train service, I ventured into the
main train station. Serb guards told us to "get lost" after my translator told
them his name (names being the other way Albanian and Serbs tell each
other apart).
On a Quiet Street
Only one encounter seemed to offer any hope for Serbs and Albanians
living together. It took place on a quiet residential street here. And last
week, on a return trip to Kosovo, I decided to see if the story had a happy
ending.
In the third house on the right lived Rade Volic, a 70-year-old ex-railroad
worker. Mr. Volic is a Serb, but the kind who avoids the word "Shqiptar,"
a slur against ethnic Albanians. His wife Jelka, who is 64, served me the
same dark oriental coffee Albanians serve.
Next door lived Hamit Fazliu, 68 years old, a retired mill worker and
ethnic Albanian. He and Mr. Volic, neighbors for 30 years, worked to stay
friends, even as neighborhood Serbs were meeting in the late 1980s to
discuss harassment by the ethnic-Albanian majority, even as Albanians
were losing their jobs [ALBANIANS WERE BOYCOTTING ALL YUGOSLAV FUNCTIONS, THEY WERE NOT PARTICIPATING IN ANY FUNCTION THAT WOULD INDICATE THEY WERE PART OF YUGOSLAVIA...THE ONES NOT AGREEING TO THIS "POLICY" WERE INTIMIDATED BY KLA THUGS] and seeing their children thrown out of schools
during the 1990s [SAME HERE, THEY TOOK THEIR KIDS OUT AND SENT THEM TO ILLEGALLY SET UP ALBANIAN ONLY SCHOOLS....STUPID MOVE OF COURSE, THE SERB KIDS LEARNED MUCH MORE<G>], even as an Albanian guerrilla war for independence [OF COURSE THEY NEVER SAY THAT THIS GUERILLA WAR WAS A BRUTAL TERRORIST CAMPAIGN TARGETING SERB POLICE, SERB CIVILIANS AND ALBANIAN CIVILIANS NOT OBLIGING....AND OF COURSE DON'T FORGET THE PURELY CRIMINAL MOTIVES TOO]and
a Serbian ethnic-cleansing campaign [OH, YES HERE WE GO AGAIN WITH THE CLICHE ETHNIC CLEANSING TERM AGAIN...THE SERB AUTHORITIES HAD TO TAKE STRONG STEPS TO ERADICATE THE TERRORISTS, THEY MOSTLY TARGETED KLA BANDITS] began.
On March 27, soon after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing
began, Serb vigilantes shot up Mr. Fazliu's house while he cowered on the
living room couch. Mr. Volic says he persuaded the vandals not to burn
the house. Mr. Fazliu spent the night at Mr. Volic's house, then left
Kosovo. In June, Mr. Fazliu's nephew, Bafti Fazliu, showed me the gutted
home: glass shards everywhere, the kitchen stripped bare.
'Rade Is a Good Man'
In their own tidy home, the Volices showed me a letter their neighbor had
written while taking shelter with them. "What will happen, nobody knows,
but let this be proof that Rade is a good man, and his wife, and I'm very
thankful," it read. Still, the Volices weren't sure they would stay. All
around, neighbors were pooling their money to rent trucks to move to
Serbia proper.
That was four months ago. KFOR, the NATO-led military force, is more
organized now in its efforts to protect Serb villages, but there are few
mixed neighborhoods left. My Pristina-based translator said he hadn't
spoken the Serbian language in three months.
I visited Mr. Fazliu first. He now had furniture, a television, new cabinets.
He said he had made the rounds of neighbors at first, telling how Mr. Volic
had helped him. But lately, he was asking Mr. Volic not to speak with him
on the street.
"Some of my relatives don't understand," he said, especially the ones who
had immediate family members killed. He said he was trying to help the
Volices in quieter ways, buying them bread so they didn't have to go out,
helping them find a buyer for their house.
Next door, the Volices greeted me warmly, and asked if I could help them
determine if the German-mark notes they were about to receive for their
house were real. They had gone with one of the many Albanians who
knocked on their door asking to buy the place. KFOR was "very nice,"
but they were tired of rocks being thrown through the window, and they
were moving in four days' time to live near their daughter and son in
Belgrade.
It was a tearful moment. The Volices had built the house thinking their
children would live there. Over coffee and Serbian grape liquor, Mrs.
Volic talked about how happy she used to feel returning home from Serbia
proper and seeing the white felt hats ethnic Albanians wore. Now, "there
are extremists on both sides, and good people suffer," she said. I wished
them luck and said good-bye.
My driver was across the street. "I was worried, I thought maybe those
Serbs killed you," he said. And then: "The people who bought this place
are crazy. They could have it for free. The Serbs are going to have to leave
anyhow."
"Thank you, Agim," I said as we rolled toward Pristina. "Thank you for
reminding me that I'm in the Balkans."
Write to Daniel Pearl at danny.pearl@wsj.com
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