April 25, 1999
IN BELGRADE
Serbs Want Some Albanians in Kosovo, Officials Say
Related Articles
The Overview: As Leaders Meet, NATO Air Campaign Enters 2d Month
Issue in Depth: Conflict in Kosovo
Forum
Join a Discussion on The Conflict in Kosovo
By STEVEN ERLANGER
ELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Serb authorities in Kosovo say they are
trying to remake the demographic balance of the province and
sharply reduce Albanian power there, according to a senior European
diplomat who was recently in the province.
Officials in Kosovo, where all governmental power has been
wielded by Serbs since President Slobodan Milosevic stripped the
province of broad autonomy in 1989, say they hope to have about
600,000 Albanians living there when the war is over, the diplomat
said. That would be two-thirds fewer than was previously estimated
living in Kosovo.
But these Serb officials also seem to understand that they must
do more "to help their image," the diplomat added, "now that
they feel they have a roughly tolerable level of Albanians" and
have swept the armed Albanian rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army
from most of their strongholds.
This kind of brutal population shift has been a feature of
politics in the Balkans for much of the last century. Yugoslavia's
earlier wars this decade saw the Serbs purge eastern Bosnia of
Muslims and Croatia drive out most of its Serbs.
The diplomat said that Kosovo's Serb authorities are encouraging
thousands of hungry Albanians -- who are coming down from the
forbidding mountains to which they had fled -- to return home to
their empty villages.
Many of those Albanians are men of military age, the diplomat
said. Western officials have noted the small numbers of such men
among the refugees pushed out of Kosovo, raising questions about
how many of them remain alive.
The diplomat, along with international aid workers, saw about
20,000 Albanians -- many of them men -- moving along the roads near
Podujevo, near the provincial border with Serbia. The Albanians,
speaking to him in a driving rain, said they had spent several
weeks in the far reaches of Kosovo's mountains, still snow-covered,
as Serb forces tried to clear armed rebels from Kosovo Liberation
Army strongholds around Lapastica, in the hills west of Podujevo.
These Albanians showed signs of long exposure to hunger and
cold, with extremely chapped lips and flaking skin. They said that
they had had little food, and that they no longer felt that the
rebel army could protect them, the diplomat said.
"They said right now they just want security and peace," he
said. When asked about food and medicine, they said their families
needed both.
Some of his observations matched those of foreign correspondents
who were taken on a guided tour of Kosovo by the Yugoslav Army last
week. Other aspects of the diplomat's account could not be
independently confirmed because foreign correspondents are barred
from traveling freely to Kosovo.
Zoran Andjelkovic, the Serb chief of the Executive Council of
Kosovo, the local head of administration for the province, has gone
to speak to the refugees and urge them to return home, promising
them safety, the diplomat said.
In general, the Serbs are presenting the situation in Kosovo as
peaceful and claiming that their offensive there is now over. They
say they are busy trying to negotiate a settlement for political
autonomy for Kosovo and safety for returning refugees.
In recent days, Serb state television has also shown columns of
Albanians inside Kosovo said to be returning home. Nearly every
televised interview is with a young Albanian man of military age,
as if to undermine Western allegations of mass killings and up to
40 mass graves.
Near Decani, between Pec and Djakovica, an area that the
security forces are trying to sweep of armed rebels, the Serbs
"are trying to get people to return to their homes after the
sweep," the diplomat said.
"The atmosphere is entirely sinister and eerie," the diplomat
said. "Serb authorities try to present the situation as relatively
normal, but one is struck by the presence everywhere of large,
tough guys in uniform."
Each day, the security forces wear different-colored ribbons
tied to different parts of their uniforms, to try to discover armed
rebels disguising themselves in Serb uniforms.
There are long lines for food in the cities, with Serbs
complaining of the time wasted getting essentials, but there is no
food rationing, the diplomat said.
"The general impression is of driving through emptiness, with
packs of dogs, animals untended, fallow fields and the growing
season lost," he said. "With most food reserved for the military,
there is the potential for a real humanitarian crisis."
The Kosovo capital, Pristina, is peculiarly empty, given its
size, and the Albanian part of the town has been evacuated and
looted, he said. But electricity still functions there.
According to figures from the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees, about 600,000 ethnic Albanians have left or been expelled
from Kosovo since NATO air attacks began March 24 and the Serbs
began their swift sweep through Kosovo. Before spring 1998, there
were an estimated 1.8 million Albanians in the province and just
under 200,000 Serbs, but these figures are suspect, since the last
census was in 1991.
In conversations now, Serb authorities indicate a kind of
"revanchism," the diplomat said, "a sense of old accounts being
settled."
Serb officials regularly claim that as many as 300,000 Albanians
moved in from Albania to Kosovo in the last decade, but were never
Yugoslav citizens.
Since the 1980s, the Serbs have argued that the Albanians put
pressure on Kosovo Serbs to sell their land and leave the province.
The Serb litany about Albanians goes roughly: "They pushed us
out, they overpopulated, they took advantage of autonomy in Tito's
time and they made us sell our land," the diplomat said. "Now,
the Serbs feel they have a chance to rectify mistake after
mistake."
In general, he said, Serb officials say that "500,000 or
600,000 Albanians are no problem for us." They are conscious that
an Albanian-free Kosovo is both absurd and impossible, he said, but
also believe that a sizable number of Albanians in the province
will help protect the Serbs from a NATO ground attack.
The Serb position is that any Albanian with documents, who can
prove that he or she is a citizen of Kosovo, can return, the
diplomat said. He noted, however, that Serb officials carefully
destroyed the documents of many refugees as they left Kosovo.
Asked about a demographic remaking of Kosovo, Goran Matic, a
Serb cabinet minister, denied it. "We would like all the Albanians
to come back," he said, "all those who can prove that they were
citizens of Yugoslavia."
Matic, who belongs to the Yugoslav United Left party of Mirjana
Markovic, Milosevic's wife, is a former information minister who is
increasingly taking on a spokesman's role in Belgrade.
"We want a Kosovo where Albanians won't be forced to leave and
Serbs won't be forced to leave," he said. "There is enough room
for all."
