Hungry Get Easily Deceived

Some twenty houses are put up for sale in the village of Milosevo, that is situated on the tenth kilometer of the road from Pristina to Kosovska Mitrovica. ``I am selling the house because the state is much too slow in solving the Kosovo problem,'' says the sign in front of the house of Vukasin Dutina. He says ``he's fed up.'' Thirty years ago Dutina and his neighbors were deprived of their land. All trace of plots was lost after socialist collectivizations of the land, frequent sales or renting it to other parties to till it.

The plot that was ``returned'' to Nikola Grbic is registered in the cadastre and in the local public records office under two different names. He knows that the plot beside his house that the state yielded to the agricultural producer ``Kosovoeksport'' thirty years ago is now tilled by Ismail Jakupi. Jakupi said that he would yield the land to Grbic but only when the state returned his land to him, with which Grbic agrees. Meantime, he is expecting the state to do its job or else he'll leave.

``The land that had been taken away was often handed to the Albanians,'' Milan Hrkalovic says. Besides the problems with commassation, Hrkalovic has four daughters all of whom are jobless. ``If I had the son I would give him the job to work on the land,'' he adds. Hrkalovic is a worker and is on forced vacation now. He says he had gone together with a group of his colleagues to the Serbian Parliament to complain about the scams in his company. Former leader of the SPS branch in Kosovo and MP Zivorad Igic sent them to the cafeteria in the Parliament building where one can get good food at a good price. As the hungry get easily deceived, they went to the cafeteria and ran into the security officers in the parliament. ``They threw us out and we were happy when we found the door,'' Hrkalovic said. That was his first experience with the state. Milan Hrkalovic is not considering complaining again. However, Nikola Grbic is considering approaching Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic under whose picture in his family's living room he tells his tale. ``If Slobo doesn't help, I don't know who will.'' ``If Slobo doesn't help,'' the Grbic family will soon leave Kosovo. They arrived in the village in 1922 from Lika (now the UNPA zones in Croatia).

Vukasin Dutina is ``80 per cent'' resolved to leave. He thinks there is no future there and ``the problems are not being solved properly.'' His younger son got his first job when he was 29. His older son Slobodan works as a car mechanic in the coalmine ``Obilic'' for a miserable wage which stops him from having a family. Many people have already left and he doesn't know why he is still there. Those who left told him that they would have returned if the situation was ``the way it should be.'' But, it isn't. Vukasin complains that he couldn't afford to build the house from the honest work, while others received flats when they did not want to bother to whitewash their old places. He says he ``had hoped,'' and stayed even in 1981 when the people were leaving in masses, remained all these years and added that he will have to leave in 1994. There are no hopes any more. With its promises the state has tied the fulfillment of these hopes to itself. Hoping that the state will not let him down, the younger son of Vukasin Dutina has waited until he turned 29 to get the first job, during which time the Albanians went abroad and opened private businesses. The Serbs from Milosevo are now complaining about Kosovo's (Serbia's) corrupt bureaucracy.

The Albanian demographic growth and the growth of the capital discourages the Serbs, just as the scheming of their fellow Serbs does. Milos Djordjevic, the president of the Pristina municipal board of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), complains about a low intellectual potential of the Kosovo Serbs. ``How important are we here when there is not a single Serb whose name would means something either in culture, science or art. They are relevant only in the power structure, exclusively at a local level,'' Djordjevic said.

The state remains silent. There is only the President's sentence, uttered at the meeting with Mr. Hogg, that ``it is not a problem to grant a wide autonomy to the Albanians.'' However, it is now debated whether this was uttered at all. The only difference is that the economy in Kosovo is slowly waking up.

The state appointed Vekoslav Sosevic Minister for Kosovo, i.e. officially Minister without portfolio. He is reputed in Kosovo to have revived the factory ``Balkan'' from Suva Reka thus proving his managerial skills. Hotel ``Grand'' in Pristina is returning its old shine in order to receive a number of economic and financial experts. Judging by this, Sosevic is turning into the manager of Kosovo. But, the problem of Kosovo is not that of management as the Minister for Kosovo knows much too well himself.