The Battle of Ponosevac

The village of Ponosevac is situated about ten kilometers from the town of Djakovica, along the road to the Morina crossing. There is a police station in the village. The latest conflict between Serbian police and the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) broke out in the village, near the police station. It is hard to say who came out victories, but the battle itself reflects the sad position of Serbian police in Kosovo.

It all started around 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, May 3, when a Ponosevac police unit detained an ethnic Albanian for questioning. The unit was fired at from a house in Ponosevac and two policemen were wounded. The police station was attacked minutes later. Police asked for back-up immediately so that they could defend their outpost and get the wounded out. Back-up, however, arrived for the assailants too, so the fighting continued throughout the night and the next day. A reporter of the Reuters news agency saw a police van get blown to pieces by a stinger missile, as well as fragments of a goat killed in the blast. The police told him terrorists armed to the teeth were all around the village. "This is a war dawn and they could have blown you away instead of this truck", a Serb police trooper told Reuters's reporter.

Wednesday was mainly calm in Ponosevac, except that Yugoslav army border guards were under fire at one point. The army says it returned fire, adding that no one was hurt.
It is hard to determine the total number of casualties. Police reported five wounded, one of whom is in critical condition, while losses on the ethnic Albanian side are a complete mystery. Newspapers close to the Belgrade regime said on Monday there were "many dead and wounded terrorists", but came out with no figures. On Tuesday, most of them wrote that the terrorists have come up with a living wall made of civilians. The reports could mean that the police are preparing an alibi for would-be casualties among civilians. Although no bodies or names of the missing have come up so far, it is more than likely that there are casualties. The police said on Tuesday that it fully controlled Ponosevac and that it surrounded a group of 200 UCK fighters. The next day, the police said they had "taken the terrorist group apart" and that its fighters have taken refuge in nearby villages. The army, however, said the same day that its border guards were under fire.

Headlines such as "Terror is out" and "Terrorists surrounded", brought by the dailies Vecernje Novosti and Politika Ekspres, sound good. However, the battle of Ponosevac can hardly be described as successful for the police. It was more of a disaster, actually. VREME’s reporter who visited Ponosevac a few days before the conflict broke out witnessed how fragile police control in the village was. Ponosevac and the nearby villages are populated almost entirely by ethnic Albanians, and all of them are very hostile towards local police.  Uniformed UCK members with their weapons were seen less than a mile from the police station in broad daylight. Not even the vicinity of army bases nor police reinforcements from Djakovica could discourage them.

Even before and especially after the incident, the police could patrol the village during the day only in armored vehicles. This implies that the UCK has the upper hand, for the very reason that it's fighting on its own turf.

The Ponosevac conflict was a carbon copy of all previous clashes between the police and the UCK. Many of those to come will probably be the same. The UCK sets up a base in a village and then send its patrols to direct traffic, first at night and then during the day too. The police gather in outposts and sets up checkpoints. Fighting starts when one of the two sides violates an undeclared truce, as the police try to arrest somebody and the UCK attacks a police station. Fighting goes on for a few hours or a few days, after which both sides withdraw to their initial positions. The police go back to their outposts while the UCK takes shelter in the woods and villages. According to latest reports from Ponosevac, food is being brought to police stations in armored vehicles storming through the village at full speed. All this implies that it is not the UCK but the police who are surrounded and fighting for their lives.

There are no winners yet in the battle of Ponosevac. Worse still, the present situation will only bring fresh clashes. Especially worrying is the possibility of clashes spilling over into towns, as it would bring the death toll to unimaginable figures. A police patrol was attacked in the town of Kosovska Mitrovica in broad daylight. The assailants used Chinese-made kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades, killing one policeman and wounding two. One of the assailants was killed himself, while the other was wounded.
The situation in Pristina itself doesn't give much room for hope. There is shooting every night in the nearby settlement of Vranjevac, populated by the poorest ethnic Albanians. No one knows who is shooting and why because the locals won't talk and police are kind of reluctant to ask too many questions. Every Kosovo village could turn into Ponosevac and every town has a settlement like Vranjevac. The last moment to prevent a full-scale conflict with a firm political initiative may be history.