Or so the current rumor goes. True or not, it captures the tension, fear and animosity between Albanians and Serbs that make Kosovo such a volatile place these days. Squeezed between Albania, Serbia and the breakaway republic of Macedonia, Kosovo “is a powder keg,” warns a Western diplomat in Belgrade. “Either side could trigger the explosion, and the violence could quickly spread across the borders.” Serb extremists in the province, which is 90 percent ethnic Albanian and largely Muslim, have already begun an “ethnic cleansing” campaign that resembles the early stages of Bosnian conflict. Since 1990, more than 100,000 people-including lawyers, doctors, politicians and teachers-have lost their jobs for refusing to sign loyalty oaths, says the Albanian Human Rights Council. Police search house to house for weapons, randomly arresting and detaining Albanians. They are no match for the informal alliance between police and the thousands of Yugoslav Army troops who are ready to move at the first sign of insurrection. “It would be a slaughter,” says the Belgrade-based diplomat.
The roots of enmity extend to the 14th century. Kosovo, once the spiritual heartland of the Serbian kingdom, was overrun in 1389 by Turkish forces, who laid the foundations for 500 years of Ottoman rule over Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over the centuries, Albanians poured in and Serbs fled north. Under the Communist regime, Albanians were granted a high degree of autonomy, and 400,000 Serbs fled the region. Autonomy was repealed abruptly in 1990, when Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic declared a state of emergency, ostensibly to protect the Serbian minority. That kicked off the systematic purging of Albanians from the police force, courts, media, schools, hospitals and the university. Forty percent ofthe population is now unemployed.
The result is apartheid, Balkan style–two parallel and embittered societies. Albanian children attend underground schools run by teachers who have been fired. Albanian doctors, purged from state-run hospitals and replaced with Serbian physicians, have built a network of low-cost private clinics. But there are problems: clinics aren’t equipped to handle complications, and Serbian doctors, many of them interns hastily imported from Belgrade, are often unqualified. Dr. Fehmi Ahmeti, the obstetrician who delivered Qefsere Uka’s baby, says he knows of three cases of Albanian babies whose jaws were broken during improper breech deliveries at Pristina’s university hospital.
To protest the crackdown, Albanians boycotted official elections last May and elected a shadow government led by Ibrahim Rugova. A 47-year-old former literary critic, Rugova insists that his goal is independence for Kosovo, not unification with Albania, as many Serbs fear. “We are aware that international borders can’t be changed,” he says. “That’s why we are asking the international community to recognize our independence-the same as other former Yugoslav republics.” But unlike Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, which have all gone to war with Belgrade to gain independence, Albanians in Kosovo have neither police nor territorial defense forces. “We have no chance to be prepared for war,” says Rugova.
Local Serbs hope to keep it that way. “We want to change the ethnic and economic balance of Kosovo,” says Ilic Jovic, vice president of the Serbian Radical Party, an ultranationalist group that won 40 percent of the Pristina vote in recent elections. “The first thing we have to do is return the property that was confiscated by the Communists to the Serbs.” The radical plan is to encourage Serbs who left the region in recent decades to return-and to expel great numbers of Albanians. The justification? “Serbs fought here to save Europe from Islam,” insists Dusan Simic, president of the Pristina city council. “And we are still fighting to keep Islam from spreading into the heart of Europe.”
The more pressing challenge is to keep the conflict in Kosovo from spreading beyond its borders. War in Pristina would at the very least let loose a flood of refugees to neighboring Albania. That could provoke a response from Turkey, which signed an economic and military treaty with Albania in June. “If anything happens in Kosovo,” Turkish Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel assured Albania’s President Sali Berisha, “we will stand with you.” Ethnic Albanians in Macedonia, a large and restive minority, might also jump into the fray-which would certainly force Greece to get involved. This week U.N., European and former Yugoslav leaders convene in London to consider the sorry fate of Bosnia. They might also give some thought to the doomsday scenario in Kosovo.
