Atrocity at Bistrica beach

A gunman's brutal attack on a group of Serbian children swimming in a Kosovan river has plunged the troubled region into further crisis, writes Ian Traynor


IAN TRAYNOR
Zagreb dispatch
Friday August 15, 2003
The Guardian

With the mercury touching 40C (104F) in the blistering Balkan heatwave, the children of Gorazdevac merrily pursued their favourite summer pasttime - plunging in and out of a popular swimming stretch of the river Bistrica in western Kosovo.

Gorazdevac is a Serbian village among an overwhelming Albanian majority in the United Nations-run province. The splashing children, too, were Serbian, several dozen of them.

On Wednesday afternoon a man with a Kalashnikov machinegun suddenly started spraying the water with bullets. Pantelija Dakic, 11, and Ivan Jovovic, 20, were killed. Another four children were seriously wounded. The rest fled in panic.

"About 50 of us were taking a swim when we heard one, two, three machine gun bursts. I saw children falling around me, and then felt strong pain in my arm and knee," one of the wounded told the Belgrade newspaper, Vecernje Novosti.

The murderous attack is extreme, even by the vicious standards that still prevail in Kosovo four years after a war that ended with Nato forces driving brutal Serbian occupying forces out of the province and left the Albanians under an international protectorate.

The murders also come at an extremely delicate time in the protracted wrangling over what will become of Kosovo, with the Albanians insisting on full independence, the Serbs demanding that Kosovo enjoy a form of home rule within Serbia, and the international community playing for time.

Murders and armed attacks are a weekly occurrence in the streets and villages of Kosovo, with the minority Serbs still clinging to an existence in the province particularly under threat from roaming bands of Albanian thugs.

A few days before the beach killings, an Albanian gunman shot a Serb man in the mouth while he was fishing. An Indian UN policeman was killed by an Albanian sniper in a road ambush 10 days ago, the first UN policeman to be murdered since the war ended in 1999.

And just beyond Kosovo's border in the Presevo area of Serbia proper, where Albanian militants are on the prowl, a series of incidents in recent weeks points to trouble ahead.

The Bistrica beach atrocity is assumed to have been the work of an Albanian gunman although the perpetrator is still at large. The attack on the children was exceptionally brutal. Predictably and understandably, Serbia is in uproar over the crime.

The Serbian government declared today a day of mourning for the victims. An emergency session of the country's supreme defence council was hurriedly convened to debate the crisis.

"We are not here to announce war or military messages," said Svetozar Marovic, the head of state of the new loose union of Serbia-Montenegro.

Angry Serbs blocked roads in Kosovo and in southern Serbia. The Belgrade government demanded that the UN security council meet to discuss the matter.

"Kosovo is descending into a catastrophe," said Nebojsa Covic, the Serbian deputy prime minister responsible for Kosovo, who said the murders constituted "a continuation of ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo".

The Serbian foreign ministry declared the murders were part of a planned and coordinated campaign of terror aimed at Kosovo's destabilisation.

UN and Nato officials in Kosovo deplored the murders as an act of barbarism. Kosovo Albanian leaders also condemned the killings, but perhaps a bit more hesitantly than they might have.

"We are shocked that someone in Kosovo could do such evil," Ramush Tahiri, a senior Kosovo Albanian official, told a Belgrade television station. "Dark forces who bear ill intent towards Kosovo are probably behind it."

It remains to be seen what impact the murders will have on the wider effort at conciliation and resolving the curious status of Kosovo, currently a diplomatic and political limbo.

Earlier this week the Serbian prime minister, Zoran Zivkovic, laid out Belgrade's claims with a declaration on Kosovo that is to be adopted by the Serbian parliament after the summer recess. It is a wish list instantly scorned by the Kosovo Albanian leadership, with fat chance of becoming reality.

Serbia's sovereignty and territorial inviolability extends to Kosovo, the declaration asserted, and promised that once human and ethnic minority rights are secured for the Serbs in Kosovo, the province will also be afforded substantial autonomy.

This is essentially a return to the status quo ante of the 1980s before the indicted war criminal, Slobodan Milosevic, abolished Kosovo's autonomy and established a police state there. It is utterly unacceptable to the Albanians who have since been through a war to secure independence along with the other peoples of former Yugoslavia.

Besides, the Zivkovic demand presupposes that the loose union of Serbia and Montenegro, established earlier this year, will survive while most analysts view those chances as remote.

Mr Zivkovic's gambit, following the assassination in March of his predecessor, Zoran Djindjic, is also aimed at building electoral support among Serbian nationalists, a move which will inevitably produce a parallel hardening of nationalist positions on the Albanian side.

On the fringes of the European Union summit in Greece in June, it was announced that the Serbs and Kosovo Albanians were about to embark on their first negotiations since the end of the war. The talks, initially to deal with low-level and administrative matters, were to open last month. They did not. The talks are now expected to begin within a couple of months.

The murders, the thuggery, and the political posturing highlight the problems enveloping these negotiations and the challenges facing the former Finnish prime minister, Harri Holkeri, who has just been appointed the new UN chief in Kosovo after months of backroom sniping and manoeuvring between the Americans and the Europeans.

Mr Holkeri has not even taken up his new post yet. Wednesday was the first day of his first reconnaissance visit to Kosovo, the day of the Bistrica beach atrocity.