United Differences

This is a story from Kosovo, typical of one of the few segments where Serbs and ethnic Albanians come into contact. The typical overall story in Serbia's southern province is no contact between Serbs and Albanians.

When you take the road from Horgos towards Dragas, via Krusevac, Kosovo starts from the village of Merdare on a good road boxed in by the walls that typically surround Albanian houses and the ever-present garbage everywhere.

Milos Nesovic, assistant Kosovo regional head said it was the biggest Serbian region with the largest population and greatest number of problems. He wasn't aware that he had said exactly the same thing that Milos Simovic the deposed regional chief told VREME a year ago. Quite possibly the current officials and the deposed Simovic reached the same conclusions independently. Simovic was apt to speak of high politics in Serb-Albanian relations, Serbian state relations towards the self-proclaimed Kosovo republic and the clan divisions among Serbs in Kosovo which he couldn't avoid. Those divisions cost him his post. Now the head of the region is Aleksa Jokic from Valjevo and his assistant is from Kraljevo.

Nesovic adheres strictly to his state operative's mission; he's more apt to talk about water supply facilities and road network.

Following euphoric slogan-shouting times, Kosovo is now very tense and nothing can be achieved without it becoming a campaign. The latest campaign is the construction of housing for repopulation. Serbian and Yugoslav refugee commissioners are inaugurating things across the province, the press is creating the right mood, explosive statements are being made about the 1,564 apartments (a total of 88,773 square meters) and 711 sites for houses which will cost over 91 million dinars. Serbia often returns to Kosovo with old programs which never succeeded before: the return of people who left Kosovo and a renewal of the economy.

As for the first issue, Serbs say they have no motive to return to Kosovo if they don't have housing. 30% of the new housing is earmarked for people who left Kosovo.

The Kosovo economic chamber's annual report said the international blockade and unfavorable trends proved stronger than the Avramovic program and the province saw "unfavorable economic trends". In March 1994, compared to March 1993, industrial production was lower by 5%. The report said favorable results were achieved in agriculture despite problems. Coal production dropped by 20% and electricity production by 12%. The Trepca mining complex recorded an ore production drop of 25.7%, fine silver 69% and gold 73.9%. Metallurgy recorded a drop of 46% but retail sales recorded a rise of 15%. Wholesale turnover rose by 55.9%.

Veljko Vujovic, assistant provincial agriculture secretary told us about the favorable trend in agriculture. Kosovo has a total of 405,000 hectares of arable land, 90% of it owned privately mainly by Albanians.

This autumn 90,000 hectares were sowed and another 175,000 hectares are waiting for spring. Vujovic said they faced a catastrophe in buying up the harvest last year because of low prices. "The Albanians wouldn't have sold the harvest to the state" even if things were different, he said. On average, 3.3 tons of wheat were harvested per hectare, paradoxically the corn harvest was smaller. Vujovic said the reason was that farmers haven't used the Ibar-Lepenac irrigation system in three years even though it can water 21,000 hectares. Land prices have jumped. A hectare of land near the irrigation system costs 400,000 DEM and around Pec or Prizren double that.

There are cow, sheep, pig and chicken farms in Kosovo. The farms are state owned with up to 50% of their facilities in use. When trends are unfavorable the state helps out. The state bought 120 cows for a farm in Kosovo Polje which, along with Serbs in nearby villages, should provide some 30,000 liters of milk a day. The local milk plant, which has a capacity of 100,000 liters a day, is at a standstill. Federal deputy premier Sainovic visited it and promised money so it can start work on March 1.

Trepca has also been reinforced by federal minister Tomica Raicevic. There, everything hinges on the mining-chemical-metallurgy complex (RHMK), a system which, depending on prices on the London commodities exchange, earns between 100-150 million dollars a year. Whenever something was done in Trepca, one of the world's largest producers of zinc, lead, silver and gold, the press had front page articles. Trepca isn't doing anything much these days except for the car battery plant. We tried but failed to meet the newly appointed director general Novica Bjelic.

While we waited for him in the newly redecorated outer office, a secretary told us he was the seventh director in nine years. A guard told us they look on him like on Avramovic: "he's our only hope, he got Fagar up and running."

We talked to a miner who hid behind his initials (R.R.). He works on the 11th level below ground. He said there were just 60 men per shift in the pits; 22 miners and the rest are maintenance crews. There are 750 employees listed, 150 of them in the pits. R.R. said his level now looks more like a cave. He added that Albanian houses were sprouting up on Trepca land.

Up to the great Albanian strike in Trepca in 1989, the Stari Trg mine had 3,070 employees; there were around 300 miners and 700 support workers. They dug out 600-650 tons of ore a day. R.R. said normal production could be achieved with 100 miners but said a lot of equipment would also be needed. He's bitter about the fact that he has to bring a knife and fork from home so he can eat in the canteen and adds that many miners haven't been issued overalls, boots, gloves or even soap for a year. He said they had talked about leaving Stari Trg but instead they went on strike in January for seven days when the management decided to send them on compulsory leave. They succeeded. They demanded a new director and got one. They demanded better pay and better food. R.R. said there was some strange criteria for salaries (according to the number of household members and depending on whether other family members were employed) as if the mine was a social institution. His last salary was 180 dinars. His wife, a cleaner in a government institution, earned 270. They live in a part of town which was once full of life, now they don't want their three children to end up there. The restaurants have been closed, there's no high school, no local doctor, no phones, no cinema. The only program they can see on TV is state TV channel one which shows Belgrade shops full of oil, detergent, sugar and milk.

Hajro Kofrc and Ferad Redzepagic, retired miners, confirm his bleak tale. They said the only people left there are people with no other place to go.

The local population have something specific, something that sets them apart from the rest of Kosovo. No one here complained about a Serb or Albanian as such. Locals say the mines rallied members of 23 nationalities over time. Although the Albanians boycotted the elections here as well, the local Serbs said they had no problems with each other: "We're all poor and have nothing to argue about".

Dr. Zeinel Kelmendi, teacher at the parallel Albanian university school of medicine informed us about health conditions. He spoke of ousted Albanian doctors, selective vaccination, epidemics, visits by armed Serbian doctors, sales of medication from humanitarian aid supplies. He said cures were the biggest problem. Complicated cases were sent to Albanian, he said, but their passports were taken away when they returned and now they have to send their patients to Belgrade. He didn't dispute the fact that 50% of the doctors in the legal institutions in the province are Albanians, that there were contacts with the state which expressed readiness to employ Albanian experts. "But not under their conditions," Kelmendi said. Albanian conditions are the restoration of conditions dating back to 1989, at least in health care institutions.

Pristina hospital center director Stevan Baljosevic feels the accusations by Albanian political leaders are construed propaganda since 80% of the 2,200 beds in his center are occupied by Albanians. Baljosevic, a prominent infectologist, said a mistrust of Albanians in Serbian institutions was construed in the early 1990s but they returned to state health care institutions when they were offered private practices as an alternative.

Kosovo's health care institutions have a 50-50 ratio of Serb and Albanian employees but the number of Albanian doctors is lower than Serb doctors. "they ignored their work and thought the system would collapse without them," Baljosevic said.

We checked on the nationalities of patients at a health care center in Pristina. The duty nurse said the ratio was 80% Albanians to 20% Serbs. The center gets about 300 patients a day with at least 10 of them without any health insurance. They are charged two dinars for a checkup by a general practitioner, 2.5 dinars for a specialist.

S.M., an Albanian specialist, has only one complaint; someone suggested that doctors should write some Latin terms in Cyrillic which Serbian doctors also objected to. However, he said he needs a certain instrument right now and if he asks for it, the request could be interpreted as obstruction.

Baljosevic showed us a textbook that he and his Albanian colleague Muharem Kurtalovci wrote. It includes pieces written by both Serb and Albanian doctors and was printed in both languages. When it went into print the Albanian doctors decided they didn't want their names signed. The whole project fell through and both Serb and Albanian students were left without a textbook on infectology. "I really don't know how that happened. We spent several years on the project," Kutolovci told us from his office near Baljosevic's.

Unfortunately, we also got an opportunity to see the emergency health service in action. It's much better than it seems from Belgrade. They tell you to wait till the doctors return from house calls but if things are bad there are medical technicians on duty. The doctor who arrived was Nebojsa Raic from Serbia proper who came to Kosovo looking for professional affirmation and an apartment. He didn't get the apartment so he lives in a student hostel. He works nights and studies for his specialization during the day.

Education secretary Marinko Bozovic is also in charge of culture and science. He said all culture institutions are functioning except for the museum of the revolution. There are Albanian drama troupes in Pristina, Djakovica, Mitrovica and Gnjilane, he said but they have management boards which read every play. Globally, Bozovic said the "interest is spreading Serb culture and national minority monuments. The Serb identity has to be preserved primarily through cultural institutions but we won't exclude Turkish or Albanian culture if they deserve it."

Serbian and Albanian culture meet in the national theater in Pristine. The Serbian (13 actors) and Albanian (25 actors) drama groups have survived with an ever-present mild tension.

"Relations aren't all that good, but compared to where we are they're excellent," theater chief Radosav Stojanovic said. Judging by what Afem Kasapoli told us, the Albanians have no understanding for Stojanovic's reasoning that the theater is a state institution and that it can't show plays which mock the state. The latest dispute is over a play that they rehearsed for months but it never saw the light of day. "Pure censorship," Kasapoli described it. He criticized the manager for not being a man of the theater, without the flexibility that his predecessors had. Stojanovic is criticized by state authorities for being too tolerant, for allowing several students of the parallel Albanian university to work in his theater.

We believed a story that a (nationally) mixed crowd gathers every night in the Papilon cafe in an overwhelmingly Albanian suburb of Pristina. An Albanian journalist took us there and we mingled among the young people who immediately noticed strangers. The people there drew our attention because they spoke Serbian to our Albanian friend and were older than we expected. Amid the tense mood, without any ill intentions or anything but surprise, we decided not to talk to the cafe owner.

Our guide took us to an Albanian restaurant where he told us he'd recently seen a young Serb couple walk into the Ame pizza parlor. Nothing happened until they ordered in Serbian. Then, he said, an ominous silence fell on the place. Both the newcomers and the regulars felt the mood of the stupid situation but couldn't do anything to overcome the feeling. The people who live here know that there are a few exclusive restaurants where members of the opposed nationality often go.

Papilon is obviously not a place where the crowd is mixed. Near it is Vozd, a bar with poker machines owned by a Serb and an Albanian. They have both Serb and Albanian girls working there, their regulars are both Serbs and Albanians. The communication this Serb and Albanian achieved when they went into business together was raised to new levels because they now attend business seminars together and owe money to the same bank.

In journalism, things are exactly what you expect: the Albanian language Bujku (circulation 10,000) costs a dinar and is the informal organ of the Kosovo Democratic Alliance (DSK). The Serbian language Jedinstvo (circulation 3,000) costs just 0.2 dinars.

Pristina TV's information programs are customary. In the eight hours of programming, Albanians can hear only news translated from Serbian. While we were there the station held its 20th anniversary celebration, attended by Serbian state TV boss Milorad Vucelic and republican information minister Ratomir Vico. Speeches were held translated into six languages, the national anthem was intoned and finally Vucelic got up to speak. "The Serbian language program will continue to be developed and promoted," he said solemnly. He added: "We can see the huge effort by Serbia in respect for national equality in this province of ours in such an important field as information. The RTS, as the state TV, will continue performing its function with maximum respect for professional criteria, truth and objectivity." He also promised Albanians more programming if they end their boycott of the state and its TV.

Then the folk singers took the stage. The Albanians were represented in so much as one of the folklore dancers wore a white Albanian cap.

Next issue: Who holds private capital, whose are the schools, who defends Albanians in court.

ANTRFILE

Janjevo is 30 kilometers from Pristina. This is an enclave in Kosovo populated by Croats. It has 700 houses lining the streets uphill towards a catholic church. The locals were always craftsmen; now they make plastic toys. Since 1991, the population has diminished because of the war in Croatia and overall tension in Kosovo, Janjevo's population is now a third of what it once was. Entire families migrated to Zagreb, the coast, Serbia. There are empty houses which locals said weren't sold because there's no one to buy them. There are several restaurants in the center of Janjevo, shops, Albanian traders.

Pensioner Ivan Gucic, a former officer who also worked in Trepca spoke to us with an interruption from a policeman ("What station are you from, how long are you staying?") about the reasons for the exodus. He told us about the water supply system that hasn't worked in three years, vineyards where neighbors let their cattle graze, a visit by Seselj, great fear and uncertainty. He told us that the only people left in Janjevo are the elderly who would be starving if it weren't for Caritas and the church.

Craftsman Roko Polic told us everything is all right. He claimed to get along fine with the Serbs and added that the locals never made problems. When the war in Croatia broke out they had their hunting rifles and other firearms taken away but they all turned out for the last elections.

The Serbs have a different view of the exodus. They said everyone who left joined the Croatian national guard and they wondered why so many new homes were being built when there were empty houses in Janjevo.