| |
|
Serb leader resolute on status of
Kosovo |
By Nicholas Wood
International Herald Tribune
Tuesday, February 15,
2005
| VELIKA HOCA, Kosovo In the first visit
to take a Serbian leader through Kosovo since the end of the 1999
war, President Boris Tadic repeatedly asserted his country's claim
to the disputed province on Monday, giving its majority Albanians
little overt sign of the kind of reconciliation that would be needed
for a lasting solution here.
"Independence for Kosovo is
unacceptable for me. I will never endorse it," Tadic repeated before
Serb crowds in village after village during what his advisers billed
as a two-day fact-finding tour.
It deliberately included no
meetings with leaders of the majority Albanian
community.
Tadic's vows never to cede Kosovo, the heartland
of Serbia's medieval empire, were standard Serbian political fare
and were tempered with what appeared to be attempts to reach out to
the Albanians by urging everyone in Kosovo "to end the long history
of hate and destruction in the Balkans."
Tadic is visiting
months before possible talks on the future status of the province,
which is administered by the United Nations.
Most of
Kosovo's ethnic Albanians want self-rule and have bitter memories of
the decade during which Serb security forces dominated the province
during the rule of Slobodan Milosevic, who is facing a war crimes
trial in The Hague.
While still formally a part of Serbia,
Kosovo has been run by a UN mission for the last five years. Serb
police and Yugoslav troops were forced to quit the region in June
1999, after NATO bombed Serbia when Milosevic refused to meet
alliance demands to withdraw his security forces and stop them from
committing atrocities. The UN estimates that up to 10,000 Albanians
were killed in the conflict.
Since 1999, the Serbs have been
the target of Albanian community anger.
Despite a
peacekeeping force that numbered 44,000 at its peak and now is close
to 18,000, less than half of the original 230,000 Serb population
remains in Kosovo.
Many live in remote areas and are unable
to travel freely for fear of attack. Last March, 19 people were
killed as tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians rioted for three
days, attacking Serbs and other minorities.
Tadic's tour
took in some of the most isolated and impoverished
communities.
In each village, he handed over a Serbian flag
and implored his audience to stay put.
"I hope that
institutions or our state will be here more concretely," he told a
small crowd in Orahovac, a town in western Kosovo.
In the
nearby village of Velika Hoca, where 600 Serbs live surrounded by
barbed wire and 24-hour armed protection, he said in a packed movie
hall, "I've never been anywhere and seen people the way they are in
Velika Hoca. I thank you for staying in this area in such difficult
conditions."
The crowds responded with rapturous applause.
For many, this was the first visit by a senior Serbian politician in
a region where many Serbs feel forgotten by the government in
Belgrade.
For all the Serbian nationalist rhetoric that
helped propel him to power in the late 1980s, Milosevic paid only
one high-profile visit in his 13-year rule.
"Other
politicians should come more frequently to see what is going on, and
not just before elections as some of them do," said Trifun Stosic,
54, a cook in Belo Polje, where ethnic Albanians set 24 homes ablaze
last March.
Albanians, many of whom lined the roads as the
president's convoy drove by, shouted abuse and threw stones and
snowballs as lines of policemen held them back.
Kosovo's
Albanian media uniformly condemned the president.
"Visit of a
criminal," read the headline in Epoka e Re, a nationalist
Albanian-language daily. A senior adviser to Kosovo's president,
Ibrahim Rugova, expressed disappointment that the Serbian leader had
not used the visit to seek some common ground before talks
start.
"He did not use this opportunity to work on
reconciliation," said Alush Gashi, a member of Kosovo's regional
assembly. "He did not ask for forgiveness for all the crimes that
the Serbs have done in this country."
See more of the world that matters - click here for
home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.
< < Back to Start of
Article
|
| |
