Serbs Rule in Kosovo's Vacant Villages By Michael Dobbs Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, April 17, 1999; Page A1 BREZOVICA, Yugoslavia, April 16 – A tank is camouflaged inside a haystack, its gun turret hidden by pieces of straw. At checkpoints, Yugoslav soldiers and policemen carrying automatic rifles lounge in groups no larger than a dozen, stopping vehicles at random. Heavily armed soldiers cruise along the road in unmarked civilian cars. Serb-led Yugoslavia is fighting and – so far at least – winning a low-tech war here in Kosovo despite a three-week-old NATO air campaign designed to create secure conditions for the province's ethnic Albanian majority. Those Albanians who have not yet fled or been expelled from Kosovo are cowed and fearful. The Serb forces are well hidden and dispersed – in forests, inside undistinguished buildings, scattered among the civilian population – and are not an easy target for NATO warplanes. A 24-hour tour of southern Kosovo suggests that Serbian forces are the masters of the situation on the ground even though NATO has overwhelming superiority in the air. From this perspective at least, the chances of NATO persuading the Serbs to withdraw from Kosovo through air power alone seem remote. The Yugoslav army arranged for a busload of journalists to visit a six-mile stretch of road where dozens of ethnic Albanian civilians were killed Wednesday in what Yugoslav authorities said were NATO airstrikes. U.S. officials have since acknowledged that NATO jets bombed along the road at roughly the time the civilians were killed. Reaching the site required a 200-mile round trip through the Serb-controlled province, the most extensive firsthand glimpse of conditions inside Kosovo by independent observers since the beginning of NATO bombing and an all-out Yugoslav military offensive. Impressions gathered during the trip coincide for the most part with reports that have seeped out of the province since the withdrawal of international observers and aid workers in late March. Kosovo today is a land that has been emptied of many of its ethnic Albanian inhabitants. Farm animals have been left to roam across fields and roads because their owners have disappeared. Many Albanian villages along the main highways appear uninhabited after shelling by Serbian forces, but the destruction is far from universal. The town of Prizren, for example, is largely intact, even though the normally teeming streets are lifeless and all but deserted. Serbs encountered along the way seemed relaxed and self-confident despite daily NATO bombing, flashing the three-finger Serbian victory sign and boasting of Serbian superiority over the West. Ethnic Albanians, by contrast, were clearly frightened of saying anything that would offend Serbian security troops and restricted conversations to half a dozen quickly murmured phrases. "What can I say? It's bad here," said an elderly Albanian man, encountered in the grounds of Prizren hospital as he carried a child in his arms. "Half my neighbors have fled. We try to live as best we can." Declining to give his name, the man added that conditions were better in Prizren than in Pec, where many Albanian homes are reported to have been destroyed. Farther east, at a checkpoint outside the town of Urosevac, near where Yugoslav soldiers could be seen digging trenches, Serbian farmers said they were ready for anything that NATO could throw at them. "They don't have a chance against the Serbian soldier," said one man. "They can fly around as much as they want above, but just let them come here. It will be different then. The borders are mined and we will fight." The apparent NATO bombing of civilians along the Prizren-Djakovica road illustrates the difficulties confronting NATO in distinguishing between Serbian security forces and civilians from a height of 15,000 feet. While the Serbian security apparatus is omnipresent, it does not present an easy target. The Serbs appear to have achieved their principal strategic goals in the early days of the war, when heavy cloud cover over Kosovo gave them a virtual free hand. Troops cleared out areas near the borders with Albania and Macedonia as well as villages along the main roads, shelling ethnic Albanian-owned houses to prevent them from becoming a haven for the Kosovo Liberation Army, the separatist rebel movement that advocates independence for the province. Although there is some evidence of recent shelling along the Prizren-Djakovica road by Serbian forces, the Serbs no longer depend on heavy armor to retain control. Albanians who remain in Kosovo appear sufficiently terrified to respond to the instructions of a few armed men and seem to be herded about from one checkpoint to another with relatively little military supervision. Survivors of the column of displaced people attacked on Wednesday spoke of receiving "orders" to move from Dobros to Djakovica to Prizren, with little understanding of the reason for their odyssey. NATO spokesmen have claimed that the air war has "degraded" the capacity of the Serbian army in Kosovo to repress the civilian population by cutting its lines of communication, hitting its fuel supply, and disrupting its command and control. Seen from the ground, there is little evidence that any of this is having a serious impact. Gas shortages may be hurting civilians, but Serbian soldiers and paramilitaries appear to still be able to roam freely. Bridges may be down, but there is usually a detour. This is an army that does not seem to require a sophisticated command and control system. A few walkie-talkies appear quite sufficient. It is almost as if NATO and the Serbs are fighting two different wars: one an extremely high-tech war from the air, using laser-guided missiles and multimillion-dollar aircraft; the other a relatively low-tech war on the ground, using the weapons of terror against an ethnic group that have long proved effective in the Balkans. The escorted trip for journalists began with a long detour to avoid a bridge, bombed a week ago, leading into Kosovo north of Podujevo on the Nis-Pristina road. Instead, the group was taken via the bombed-out railway line at Grdelica, where at least 27 bodies have been recovered from the rubble after a NATO warplane hit a passenger train by mistake. Although the main road and rail bridges are impassable, cars and trucks can still cross the South Morava river by a smaller bridge. At the Kosovo border, just past the town of Bujanovac, 20 or so Serbian police and soldiers were milling around with Kalashnikov rifles. The journalists' military escort, Col. Slobodan Stojanovic, delivered a little lecture about the possible hazards ahead. "We are entering a dangerous zone. We may be targeted from the air. We should also not exclude the possibility of a terrorist incident," he said, using the official term for activity by the Kosovo Liberation Army. Even before the war, Kosovo was a mixture of the 20th century and the Middle Ages. Every other Kosovo house boasts a satellite dish, most of them still intact. But farming methods are primitive. Peasants could be seen plowing the land by hand or with a horse-drawn plow. Right now, the countryside is abloom with flowering cherry and apricot trees, set against the backdrop of the snow-covered mountains that rise up along the Macedonian and Albanian borders. At the predominantly Serbian village of Crepanj, a few miles east of Gnjilane, local Serbs said that there had been only two ethnic Albanian families in the town, and they fled to Macedonia. One of the Albanians operated a bar, which is now a smoking ruin. The other lived in a larger house at the edge of the town, which also has been destroyed. At the entrance to Gnjilane, the group passed a bombed-out military base on the left side of the road. The charred remains of a few armored personnel carriers were visible. On the other side of the road was a bus depot, which had also been hit, presumably in the same NATO raid. Half the buses were destroyed. A building that belonged to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which withdrew its monitors from Kosovo shortly before the start of the bombing, appeared to have been used for target practice by Serbian paramilitaries. A few miles beyond Gnjilane, a group of 100 or so men, women and children stood forlornly by the side of the road, as if waiting for orders. What they were doing there was a mystery. Later in the trip, two crowded buses passed, guarded by soldiers, heading toward Prizren. While there was little sign of overt military activity along the roads, many of the civilian cars on the highway were full of uniformed soldiers. At the town of Urosevac, the bus halted at another checkpoint. Serbian policemen swaggered about, patting each other on the back, as workers hauled crates of soda and food out of a nearby store and loaded them onto a truck. People seemed to be helping themselves to whatever they wished. According to a Serbian neighbor, the store belonged to a "very rich Albanian" who fled to Macedonia with his two sons. The store is now decorated with the four back-to-back S's that form the nationalist Serbian slogan, "Samo Sloga Srbina Spasava," or "Only Unity Will Save the Serb." Despite the evidence of looting, most Albanian homes in Urosevac have not been destroyed. A middle-aged Serbian woman talked about her departed ethnic Albanian neighbors as "friends" who asked her to keep an eye on their home for them. After an hour's wait at Urosevac, the group was told that the bus could not proceed to Prizren by the most direct northern route. "Terrorist" activity had been reported along the road. Instead the group followed a winding road close to the Macedonian border, over a 5,000-foot mountain pass. Albanian villages along the border had been shelled and appeared largely abandoned, part of a pattern of clearing strategic tracts of land that might be used by the Kosovo Liberation Army. In the Serb-inhabited village of Strpce, locals seem unfazed by the arrival of what seems like half the international media. As they swigged down beers in a bar at lunchtime, they boasted of the glories of medieval Serbia and how it was a center of civilization while America was "just a jungle." "Did you know that a Serb, Mikhailo Pupin, invented the telephone?" asked one of the drinkers. "Alexander Bell stole the idea from him. The airplane, by the way, was invented by Nikola Tesla." At Prizren, the journalists were taken to the hospital to see the disfigured bodies of six victims of "NATO air attacks" and a dozen survivors, most of whom seemed too dazed to talk. Other survivors were still on the Prizren-Djakovica road. They talked about a plane bombing them. When one of the men gave a version of events that was at odds with the official account, Serbian police lead him away to a little hut out of sight of the journalists. At the end of the day it was too late to return to Belgrade, as originally planned. Instead, the group was taken for the night to a former ski resort at Brezovica, high in the mountains above Prizren. Before the start of the NATO bombing campaign, it was home to OSCE monitors. Now it is closed and abandoned, a monument to more peaceful times. © Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
