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Date sent: Tue, 18 May 1999 11:39:32 -0700
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From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: A PUZZLE IN ONE YUGOSLAV VILLAGE
The International Herald Tribune Paris, Tuesday, May 18, 1999
A PUZZLE IN ONE YUGOSLAV VILLAGE
''As an Albanian, I am convinced that the Serbian
government and security forces are not committing any kind
of genocide'' — spokesman for Kosovo Democratic Initiative,
ethnic Albanian political party opposed to KLA
By Paul Watson Los Angeles Times Service
SVETLJE, Yugoslavia - Something strange is going on in
this Kosovo Albanian village in what was once a hard-line
guerrilla stronghold, where NATO accuses the Serbs of
committing genocide.
About 15,000 displaced ethnic Albanians live in and around
Svetlje, in northern Kosovo, and hundreds of young men are
everywhere, strolling along the dirt roads or lying on the
grass on a spring day.
The presence of so many fighting-age men in a region where
the Kosovo Liberation Army fought some of its fiercest
battles against Serbian forces poses a challenge to the
black-and-white versions of what is happening here.
By their own accounts, the men are not living in a
concentration camp, nor being forced to labor for the police
or army, nor serving as human shields for Serbs.
Instead, they are waiting with their families for permission to
follow thousands who have risked going back home to
nearby villages because they do not want to give up and
leave Kosovo.
''We wanted to stay here where we were born,'' Skender
Velia, 39, said through a translator. ''Those who wanted to
go through Macedonia and on to Europe have already left.
We did not want to follow.''
Mr. Velia, his wife, Hajiri, their three children and his
mother, Farita, 56, were among as many as 100,000 Kosovo
Albanians who fled the nearby northern city of Podujevo in
the early days of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's air
war, which began March 24.
Some said the Serbs had driven them from their homes,
while others said they had simply been scared and left on
their own. They all moved from one village to another,
trying to escape fighting between Kosovo Liberation Army
guerrillas and Serbian security forces.
A foreign journalist spent two hours in Svetlje during the
weekend, his second visit in less than a week, without a
police or military escort or a Serbian official to monitor what
was seen or said.
Just as NATO accuses Yugoslav forces of using ethnic
Albanian refugees as human shields, the Serbs say Kosovo
Liberation Army fighters hide among ethnic Albanian
civilians to carry out ''terrorist attacks.''
Mr. Velia and other ethnic Albanians interviewed in Svetlje
said they had not had any problems with the Serbian police
since being allowed to come back.
''For the month that we've been here, the police have come
only to sell cigarettes, but there hasn't been any harassment,''
Mr. Velia said.
Kosovo Albanians continue to flee Yugoslavia, often with
detailed accounts of atrocities by Serbian security forces or
paramilitaries. Yet thousands of other ethnic Albanians are
coming out of hiding in forests and in the mountains, hungry
and frightened, and either going back home or waiting for
police permission to do so.
While the Serbian police seize the identity documents of
Kosovo Albanians crossing the border into Albania or
Macedonia, government officials in Pristina, Kosovo's
provincial capital, issue new identity cards to ethnic
Albanians still here.
The Kosovo Democratic Initiative, an ethnic Albanian
political party opposed to the Kosovo Liberation Army's
fight for independence, is distributing aid, offering
membership cards and gathering names of Serbs accused of
committing atrocities.
''As an Albanian, I am convinced that the Serbian
government and security forces are not committing any kind
of genocide,'' Fatmir Seholi, the party's spokesman, said
Sunday.
''But in a war, even innocent people die. In every war, there
are those who want to profit. Here there is a minority of
people who wanted to steal, but that's not genocide. These
are only crimes.''
His father, Malic Seholi, was killed Jan. 9, 1997, apparently
for being too cooperative with Serbian authorities. The
Kosovo Liberation Army claimed responsibility for the
slaying, Mr. Seholi said.
Asked whether he thought NATO's bombing was helping or
hurting, Mr. Velia shifted at the wooden desk where he was
sitting in one of the school's classrooms.
''My blood is the same as yours,'' he said. ''I just want the
situation stabilized. People are not very interested in what is
going on with big political discussions here and there. They
are just interested in going home.''
Despite the mass exodus, several hundred thousand Kosovo
Albanians remain in the province, many of them still hiding
without proper food, medicine or shelter.
After waves of looting, arson, killings and other attacks
turned many of Kosovo's cities into virtual ghost towns, the
government took steps to restore order, and ethnic Albanians
began to move back, often under police protection.
Of an estimated 100,000 people living in Pristina, roughly
80,000 are ethnic Albanians, and a quarter of those are
displaced people from the Podujevo area living with relatives
or friends or in abandoned homes, Mr. Seholi said.
In Svetlje, the biggest problem is getting enough to eat. None
of the foreign relief agencies delivering food to refugees
outside Kosovo has been able to come to feed those ethnic
Albanians left behind.
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