Tight control

Fierce clashes between the UCK and Serbian police occurred on Friday morning in the villages of Balince and Iglarevo. Several ethnic Albanians were killed and a few police troops wounded in the fighting. Metohija can no longer be reached safely from Kosovo since the incident, because the UCK has established its presence in Drenica and Decani and cut off the Pristina-Pec road by dragging the police off it.

The Komoran checkpoint is 25 kilometers away from Pristina, on a crossroads to Komoran, Glogovac and Pec. It was the headquarters for police troops engaged in Kijevo and nearby villages. Although the troops had a large bunker and armored vehicles, they were more relaxed than their colleagues elsewhere in Kosovo because they were in an airport area protected by a massive armed force.

However, the picture in Komoran changed completely on Friday evening. The police huddled up in bunkers, trenches and half-finished houses and left an armored vehicle in the middle of the crossroads. Shells were all over the place for at least 100 yard along the road, meaning that a clash had just occurred. A very nervous policeman waved a STOP sign at us and told us to return to Pristina immediately. The road was closed. Many reporters tried to reach Klina via Komoran over the next two days, but all in vain. The police always told them they couldn't go any further for "security reasons". Meanwhile police reports on clashes in Lapusnik, Iglarevo and Balince kept coming in. Several people were wounded, including a soldier who tried to set off to Pristina from Pec in his own passenger vehicle. Ethnic Albanian sources, on the other hand, reported scores of dead, wounded and captured inhabitants. On Monday, May 11, a TV cameraman, a photographer and three reporters formed a team. We decided to try once again, hoping that it would be "third times lucky". The policeman hardly bothered to check our identification documents and told us we would probably get shot if we carried on. His colleague kept staring at our bulletproof land rovers and gave the impression of a man who knew what he was talking about when he said: "Come on guys, they are quicker than rabbits. Even we are not safe, they are just a mile down the road".

We saw obvious signs of fighting in Lapusnik, less than two kilometers away from Komoran. Walls and fences were riddled with bullet holes. It was even more obvious in the village of Iglarevo that fierce clashes had taken place. A house along the road was burnt to the ground, and the rest were riddled with bullet holes. Police in Kijevo told us we were traveling at our own risk. In this village, we found two bewildered reporters who told us that they had been stopped and questioned by uniformed UCK members only three kilometers down the road. "They had bears and they were very tense. They told us not to drive back to Pristina by any means", they said.

After a very brief debate, we decided to leave one of our land rovers that had broken down at a police checkpoint and to return to the checkpoint in Klina. However, a uniformed official who had just made it to the village from Pec told us to stay put. All roads were impassable. The police told us we stood no chance of getting through alive.
Police patrols were running up and down the village. We heard no shooting, but we were told that it was "show time". A policeman told us the UCK were about to employ their favorite hit-and-run tactics. "First they hit, then they run up into the hills and then roll down again when we are gone", he said. When we finally got clearance to go back to Pristina, police looked at us pitifully and wished us good luck. We stormed back to Kijevo in no time.

The policeman there told us to drive on as fast as we could. He looked very worried when we told him we had to drive slowly because our vehicle was falling apart. We could drive at a maximum speed of 40 km per hour. The next forty minutes were very tense. We saw armed Albanians running across the road in Balinci and Iglarevo. Three men sat with a huge machine gun in a trench along the road. UCK fighters watched us drive by in Lapusnik, they were in a backyard of a house. Fifteen minutes after we drove through the village, a foreign reporter and his photographer were fired at. Neither of them was wounded. On Monday afternoon, the Pristina-Pec road was officially closed to all traffic.