FROM THE MEDIA

Mon., March 29, 2004 Nisan 7, 5764

The chasers have become the chased

By Yossi Melman

Last Thursday, Dr. Krinka Vidakovic-Petrov was sitting in her office at the Embassy of Serbia-Montenegro in Tel Aviv, trying to explain what has been happening in Kosovo in the past few weeks. "There is ethnic cleansing of the Serbs," she said. "Their Albanian neighbors are threatening them, harming them and using methods of terror and intimidation against them, and the world remains apathetic."

But even she was also aware of the ironic aspect of that day's events. A few hours earlier, the Zeleznik Belgrade basketball team announced that it was afraid to come to Israel for the second leg of the ULEB Cup semi-final against Hapoel Jerusalem.

After making a few inquiries, Vidakovic-Petrov picked up her phone and spoke with one of the team executives. She tried to persuade him that in spite of security tensions in Israel following the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the team should come for the game. It is unclear just how much the conversation played a part, but this weekend Zeleznik announced that it would be suiting up tomorrow for the game in Jerusalem.

The brief phone call that interrupted a much longer interview drove home the difficulty of classifying national conflicts, finding parallels between them and defining terror and terrorists. A terrorist who threatens one man is not necessarily a threat to his neighbor. When the situation in Kosovo is examined, it is hard to ignore the parallels between the conflict there and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both instances concern a national conflict that has religious elements. Both are disputes over a common piece of land and have a long history of violence, repression and dispossession, and an exaggerated sense of self-righteousness.

And there are other analogies: here and there, international mediators intrude, and here and there the communities live with the sense that the world is hostile to them, and apathetic to their plight. Both here and there, every little incident is liable to set off a large conflagration, as happened two weeks ago in Kosovo.

There the recent flare-up began with the drowning of three Muslim children in the Ibar River on March 17. A rumor quickly spread that the children had fled from Serbians with dogs. No inquiry committee was able to find any evidence of the claim. But the rumor generated an immense outburst of rage, be it spontaneous or organized. In a single day, the day after the children drowned, 20 Serbian churches and the homes of about 400 Serbian families were destroyed. In the riots, at least 35 Serbs and several soldiers in the KFOR international peacekeeping force were killed, and several hundred people were injured. The riots broke out close to the fifth anniversary of the peace settlement in Kosovo.

"The incidents were neither spontaneous nor coincidental," says Vidakovic-Petrov. "It is part of a systematic crusade by the Albanian majority against the Serb minority in the province." She asserts that this crusade has been underway for many months. "Four Serb children drowned last summer in the Ibar - the same river that is now in the headlines. But no one reported it. One of the aims of this organized crusade is to put an end to the attempts at dialogue between my government and the leaders of the Albanians in Kosovo."

Although the population of the province is predominantly Muslim-Albanian, to Serbs, Kosovo merits the same sort of status that Jerusalem has for Israelis - what Benjamin Netanyahu described as "the bedrock of our existence." In the federated state of Yugoslavia, it was an autonomous province within the Serbian Republic. Yugoslavia's communist leaders tried to settle as many non-Muslims in Kosovo (especially Serbs) as possible, in order to blur the province's Muslim identity. But they failed at the task.

The venerated leader of Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito, paid a visit to Kosovo in the 1970s, and instead of the enthusiastic welcome he was expecting, he was met with hostility and demonstrations. Slobodan Milosevic, the last leader of Yugoslavia before its breakup, chose Kosovo as a venue for the Serbian nationalist speech that served as a prophecy of sorts of the future Balkan wars. The event, on June 28, 1989, was held to mark the 600th year since the Battle of Kosovo, in which the Serbs stopped Ottoman forces, stemming their advance for several decades.

Not long after Milosevic's speech, Slovenia and Macedonia seceded from the Yugoslav federation, practically without bloodshed. Once Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina also withdrew, in a violent war, Yugoslavia continued to exist in name only, aside from the republic of Serbia-Montenegro and the province of Kosovo. Milosevic dispatched his soldiers and policemen to Kosovo in order to put down - brutally - the uprising of the Albanians. In 1999, NATO responded with aerial attacks on Belgrade that went on for two and a half months, practically day and night. The attacks caused the deaths of 2,500 Serbs and great destruction of property, and forced Milosevic to remove his security forces from Kosovo.

Liberators

The Kosovo multinational force (KFOR) entered the province in March 1999, with the objective of enforcing law and order. The force operates under the aegis of the United Nations authority that was established in the province. The KFOR troops were received as liberators by the two million Albanian Muslims. One-quarter million Serbs fled and became refugees. Only 100,000 Serbs remained in Kosovo. The province has its own parliament, and a government that is headed by Ibrahim Rogova, who is considered a relatively moderate leader. But the minimum demand of all of the Muslim political forces in the country, moderates and extremists alike, is that Kosovo will become an independent state. There are also those who demand full unification between Kosovo and Albania, in the hope of fulfilling the dream of a Greater Albania.

Over the years, the nationalist aspirations of Kosovo's Muslims have strengthened. Whether locally initiated or as part of the systematic activities of nationalist organizations, violence has increased. Churches have been burned down. The Serbs have been forced to leave their homes in cities, as they were subject to constant incitement and vulnerable to attacks, and they are now concentrated in enclaves.

"We call them ghettoes," says Vidakovic-Petrov, flashing an ironic smile. "The soldiers of the multinational force are protecting the ghettoes, and until recently they escorted children to schools and patients to hospitals. A few months ago, the UN authority decided that the situation in Kosovo had calmed down and that there was no longer any need for this sort of protection. This is obviously not true, and as we've seen in the past few weeks, the situation has grown even worse."

Vidakovic-Petrov came to Israel in early 2002, after Milosevic was thrown out of power in a quiet popular revolution in October 2000. Her parents were diplomats, and she spent her childhood in Cuba during the first years after Fidel Castro's revolution. She studied comparative literature in university and wrote a doctoral thesis on the history of the Judeo-Spanish community in Yugoslavia. After earning her Ph.D, she taught at Belgrade's Institute for Literature and Arts. Her house in the city was damaged in the NATO bombings. Since her arrival here, Vidakovic-Petrov has tried to bring to the attention of the Israeli public the complex situation in the Republic of Serbia-Montenegro, and especially in Kosovo.

The most recent riots are undermining what's left of her optimism. "Five years ago, when the current settlement was achieved, the international community committed to contributing funding for rebuilding the homes of the quarter-million refugees that fled Kosovo. But very few of these promises have been kept, and the money is not coming. If the international community doesn't come to its senses, not only will this prevent the return of the Serb refugees that according to the agreement would return to their homes, it would also cause the exodus of the 100,000 Serbs still remaining in the province. That would complete the ethnic cleansing."

This is one of the ironic aspects in the gloomy history of the Balkan wars. Early on, the international community accused Milosevic and his henchmen of war crimes, including ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo. Now there is a risk that the Serbs in Kosovo might find themselves facing a similar danger.

After the latest spate of riots, KFOR announced the reinforcement of its forces by an additional 2,000 troops, to maintain order and calm tensions. Javier Solana, the EU's top foreign policy official, visited Kosovo last week and was astounded at the extent of the destruction and the atmosphere of hatred.

Solana knows that the EU has to find a settlement for Kosovo. The international community refuses to allow the province to gain independent statehood, for fear that this might lead to a wave of irredentist demands by Albanian minority groups in Macedonia and of Macedonians in Belgrade and maybe by Hungarians in Romania. The problem is that diplomats in Europe do not have a real solution to the entanglement.

"My government's preferred solution," said Vidakovic-Petrov, "is to decentralize the Albanian rule in Kosovo and grant autonomous authorities to the Serb minority. In my opinion, this is the only way to protect the lives of the Serbs and to guarantee then any sort of security."