May 10, 1999
THE SERBS
Torn by War, a Town Works to Recover
Related Articles
More Anti-U.S. Protests in Beijing as Officials Study Bombing Error
Issue in Depth: Conflict in Kosovo
Forum
Join a Discussion on The Conflict in Kosovo
By STEVEN ERLANGER
ODUJEVO, YUGOSLAVIA -- Three months ago, Milos Savic was
frantic. He had been stopped at a checkpoint by the Kosovo
Liberation Army close to this northern Kosovo city and dragged out
of his car at gunpoint. The fear ravaged him, he said, and he lost
nearly 40 pounds.
When he met a foreign journalist then, Savic said he was afraid
that the last Serbs would be pushed out of Podujevo, a 95 percent
Albanian city about five miles from the border with Serbia proper.
Today, in his cafe across from the Podujevo municipal building,
Savic says he's feeling better, even as NATO airplanes circle and
bomb in the hills to the west. The rebel checkpoints that began
less then a mile from the city center are gone now, pushed back by
the Serbian offensive.
The regional headquarters of the armed rebels in the hills
around Lapastica, where a commander called Remi used to hold court
for foreign journalists, is also gone, leaving only small groups of
Albanian guerrillas fighting partisan actions in the hills farther
north and west, around Bajgora.
Many of Podujevo's ethnic Albanians are gone, too, and Savic,
when asked, expresses some hopes that more of them will return.
Wearing his wartime civil defense jacket and civil defense cap --
blue with earflaps -- Savic, a simple and essentially decent man,
says he is trying to help remaining Albanians, especially the
elderly, to buy bread and provisions.
But Savic also remembers "the first night that NATO bombed,
when the Albanians were in the streets cheering and shooting guns
into the air to celebrate," he said. "The Serbs didn't call in
NATO, but the Albanians did, and now NATO kills them as well as
us," he said. "We didn't need NATO, and look at what they're
doing to all of us."
He described how a friend and neighbor, Dragan Bubalo, was
killed in a NATO cluster bomb attack on a village called Merdare
near here, blown off the road in his Ford Sierra. This reporter had
visited the scene a few hours after the attack and remembered the
car and its bloodied interior.
"I had to go to the hospital to identify him," Savic said. "I
washed his body and shaved his face and I buried him." Bubalo was
single, and Savic visits the dead man's mother, Mica, nearly every
day. "Her husband is dead and she has no more sons," he said.
"She's crying and yelling every day."
Of course the Serbs would defend Kosovo, which belongs to them,
he said with bravado. "It is our house, and the Albanians were
welcome to live there, too. But it is not their house, and we are
not going to give it away."
The resentment of Podujevo's Serbs toward the Albanians was
mounting three months ago, and it burst forth in a week of violence
after the bombing began on March 24 and ethnic Albanian guerrillas
attacked policemen in the town, killing 10 people, said the town's
mayor, Milovan Tomcic. There were "heavy battles" between the
Kosovo Liberation Army and security forces along the main roads and
in the hills to the west along a 20-mile front toward Kosovska
Mitrovica, he said.
The police and the army brought the situation under control, he
said, but not before Podujevo was practically emptied.
"There was shooting in the town and a lot of panic," Tomcic
said. "Serbs and Albanians fled. There were less than 100 people
in the whole town -- just some officials and old people who couldn't
run away."
There is evidence of that anger in the town, with many Albanian
shops and houses burned and looted. Spray painted on some of the
shops are slogans, like "Serbia -- we aren't leaving," and "You
asked for it."
But between 55 and 60 percent of the 70,000 ethnic Albanians of
the municipality have returned, Tomcic said, including villagers
who had fled to the higher mountains while Serbian authorities
"cleaned the villages of the terrorists," he said.
Part of his task now, he said is to get flour, oil, bread and
potable water to the villagers.
Tomcic, an economist who became mayor in September 1996, is an
angry man, but keeps a flat, even tone with a NATO-country
journalist. He is convinced that Yugoslavia is being bombed
unjustly by a Western world that is siding with the Kosovo
Liberation Army, which he said had killed 1,000 Serbian policemen
and civilians in 1998, and had laid plans that he said were found
recently in its conquered headquarters to take control of Kosovo
and kill Serbian men "from the ages of 3 to 70."
Asked if a journalist could see such documents, he said it was
impossible, that these were military documents.
The West seemed to think the rebel group was not an army "but
some kind of humanitarian organization," Tomcic said sardonically.
"But it was a military force, and it is now destroyed and
disbanded, except for some small groups of three to five people who
appear somewhere to hit our forces. But their area for maneuver is
smaller and smaller."
Tomcic is especially angry at the destruction NATO bombing has
caused to bridges, highways and water, electrical and
communications systems, as well as to warehouses for food and fuel
needed for transportation and agriculture. "The damages are
enormous, unbelievable," he said. "There are no phone lines.
There is no media. There is no way to address the people. We can't
get food to them or water or diesel for farming. And just now the
most important thing is to save the people, to give them enough
food and medical protection, to avoid an epidemic."
The municipality is preparing vaccinations against dysentery,
hepatitis and typhus fever, he said. "Summer is coming, and there
is not enough clean water."
At the same time, he and other officials insisted, the Yugoslav
Army is well dug in and is suffering comparatively little damage.
"Fixed targets like barracks and warehouses have been hit,"
Tomcic said. "And they have hit decoy tanks and artillery pieces.
But the main damage is to ordinary people."
Tomcic believes that what has been broken here can be mended, so
long as the bombing stops and the rebels remain suppressed. "Even
if all the powers of the world attack us, the Albanians have to
realize that the problems of Kosovo must be solved with the
Serbs," he said. "The Serbs and the Albanians here have to decide
how to live together -- day by day, point by point. I think it was a
terrible mistake that the Albanians listened to some in the West,
and a year ago, with their help, tried to solve the problems here
with weapons."
In his cafe, Savic, wears his civil defense uniform to wait on
tables while he chats with his newly confident customers, all
Serbs. "This is a tragedy for all the people," he said, as the
planes flew overhead.
"It's always like this in a war. There's killing and bombing
and terrible things, and in the end, someone has to make a peace
between us."
