Bombings inflame ethnic tensions ahead of Kosovo's likely independence

Associated Press, Thursday, September 21, 2006 7:34 AM

 

GNJILANE, Serbia-At a dusty market in the center of this eastern Kosovo town, Serbs and Albanians haggle good-naturedly over the prices of their onions and tomatoes.

 

It's one of the few places in the province where people on both sides of the ethnic divide live together and get along, and that makes the yellow police tape and bomb crater a few blocks away seem even more ominous.

 

As Kosovo enters the final phase of U.N.-brokered talks that many believe will give it independence from Serbia, recurrent explosions are rattling nerves and raising troubling questions about what lies in store for a region trying to put atrocities and animosities behind it.

 

"I am afraid," said Aziz Kryeziu, a 46-year-old ethnic Albanian who lives in normally tranquil Gnjilane. "Afraid for all the innocent people who might get hurt."

 

Over the past week, there have been four bombings, the worst of which injured four Serbs in a western town. Authorities think some of the blasts may have been a settling of scores between rival politicians or mobsters. But parliament speaker Kole Berisha insists the violence is a deliberate attempt to destabilize Kosovo at a delicate stage in its drive for statehood.

 

"The closer we come to a decision, the risks and threats are higher for sure," Prime Minister Agim Ceku conceded this week in an interview with The Associated Press.

 

On Friday, chief U.N. envoy Martti Ahtisaari will brief the Security Council on the lack of progress in U.N.-brokered talks that began in February to determine the province's future status.

 

U.N. officials say the talks have done all they can to ensure the beleaguered Serb minority will be protected and have a greater voice in an independent Kosovo. Sometime this autumn, Ahtisaari will give the council his idea of what a future Kosovo should look like, and a U.N. resolution paving the way for independence is expected by the end of the year.

 

"This is a sensitive process with a lot at stake for a lot of people," Steven Schook, Kosovo's deputy U.N. administrator, told the AP. "But I believe we must have a change in status and a new status as soon as possible. We anticipate and hope it will be soon, this year."

 

Ethnic Albanians, Muslims who make up 90 percent of Kosovo's 2 million people, have sought independence for decades. In the late 1990s, their quest to break free prompted the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to launch a brutal crackdown that killed 10,000 people and made refugees of thousands more.

 

Orthodox Serbs are willing to grant Kosovo broad autonomy, but see it as the heart of their ancient homeland and want it to remain a part of Serbian territory. Their leaders worry about the safety of Kosovo's 100,000 Serbs, many of whom don't dare leave their small, scattered enclaves. After the 1998-99 war, 200,000 Serbs fled fearing reprisal attacks, and relatively few have returned.

 

Serb unease is evident even in Gnjilane, considered a model for the kind of peaceful, multiethnic republic Ceku hopes to govern.

 

Jadranka, a Serb woman so fearful she refused to give her last name, said she pretends not to hear when Albanians occasionally taunt her with shouts of "What are you doing here?" or "Go to Serbia!"

 

"It's a very scary situation for us," she said. "It's not a life when you're afraid to go out."

 

With 16,000 NATO-led peacekeepers still patrolling the province, armed conflict is highly unlikely. But the chances of more violence like the March 2004 riots that killed 19 people and displaced thousands "are unfortunately rather high," warns Alex Anderson, Kosovo project director for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention center.

 

Although Ceku insists Belgrade will never invade, a Serbia still sullen over Montenegro's independence earlier this year has made thinly veiled threats that it might not let Kosovo go.

 

This past weekend, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica insisted publicly that Kosovo must remain a "historic and integral" part of Serbia, and ultranationlist firebrand Tomislav Nikolic urged the army to go on standby. A rare military parade drove home their point.

 

"There's a sense of pressures building up behind the dam. A lot of violence could be unleashed once the status issue is resolved," Anderson said. "At best, we're going to have a very grumpy Serbia refusing to recognize Kosovo. To Serbs, the idea of Albanians running anything is absurd and grotesque."

 

Ceku said he's confident that independence will bring foreign investors and international loans. But even he concedes the cash-strapped government, burdened by 35 percent joblessness, will be hard-pressed to deliver on expectations of quick prosperity.

 

"If the state is unable to respond in time, it may find that the agenda is increasingly set by its angry young men," the Berlin-based European Stability Initiative think tank cautioned this week in a new report.

 

Although NATO's peacekeeping force will stay on for at least a few years, it will likely shrink as troops redeploy to Afghanistan or other hotspots.

 

That worries Bejtullah Rahimi, a 23-year-old criminology student. Like many ethnic Albanians, he lives in fear that Serbia will someday use force to reclaim Kosovo. He hopes peacekeepers, especially Americans, "will stay here as long as I live."

 

But if things go badly, Serbs have the most to lose.

 

Aca Nedecjkovic, 36, sells apples at curbside in the Serb enclave of Gracanica just outside Pristina, the provincial capital where he had a stand at the main marketplace before the war. With so much bad blood between Serbs and Albanians, he doubts they can ever live together peacefully.

 

"Whenever I travel anywhere, I always have to watch my back," he said. "I just want to have a better life."