How We're Aiding
the Ethnic Cleansers
by Stephen Glover
London Daily Mail
2/26/00

Little seems to have changed in Kosovo since I was here seven months ago. Some bombed out houses have been rebuilt, mostly by private hands. No one has managed to get the traffic lights or street lamps or telephones or electricity to work properly. The roads are even more pitted with pot holes, and at the roundabout on the southern edge of Pristina, the capital, the same Albanian entrepreneurs are selling petrol out of plastic cans.

More restaurants have sprung up to service the burgeoning number of United Nations personnel. These curiously detached people drive round in their huge white jeeps without seeming to contribute very much. Apologists say that things are going on behind the scenes – 300 local police trained, new judges inducted – and this must be true. But the UN administration is fast turning into a joke, and may soon be a scandal.

Beneath the surface, one thing has changed, one development has almost reached its logical conclusion. There are hardly any Serbs left in Kosovo. They have either departed or been driven into a handful of enclaves. Of these by far the most important is Mitrovica, in the north of the province. It is here, nearly a year after Nato began its bombing of Serbia, that a final, inevitable act is about to be played.

The bridge at Mitrovica is wide and functional, just an ordinary bridge. Who would have guessed, when it was built 30 or 40 years ago, that it would come to mean so much? Who could have thought that, thousands of miles away from this obscure place, people would watch pictures of this bridge on their televisions and read about it in their newspapers?

Today French troops stand at the northern end, Canadian at the southern. The British soldiers have left now. On Monday they found themselves defending the bridge against an angry Albanian mob trying the get to the Serb enclave in the north. For a moment it seemed the mob might succeed. Disaster was much closer than most reporting has suggested.

It happened like this. Two weeks ago British troops were sent up to Mitrovica, which is in the French zone. When it was agreed that the Albanians could march to the bridge, more British troops were sent up from Pristina. The reasoning was that French troops should be kept away from the Albanians. The Albanians regard the French as pro-Serb, and Albanian extremists have shot and wounded two French soldiers in recent weeks.

On Monday morning unnumbered tens of thousands of Albanians set out from Pristina to march the 25 miles to the bridge at Mitrovica. By all accounts they were a spirited but well-ordered bunch. About 220 soldiers of the Royal Green Jackets stood ready to meet them, having taken up a position some 150 yards from the southern end of the bridge. They didn’t have shields or weapons of any kind because they didn’t expect much trouble.

By noon several thousand local Albanians had already assembled. Around 2.30 pm, between 2,000 and 3,000 marchers arrived, but they were not the lot from Pristina. These were the boys from Drenica, and among them were the faces of several well-known extremists of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

The Drenica mob pushed and shoved the British soldiers. The odd missile was thrown. Such was the weight of the crowd that the unarmed and unprotected Green Jackets were unable to hold their line. They broke, ran back to the bridge, and re-formed. At that moment a detachment of about 80 French gendarmes and some Danish riot police swooped in from the northern, Serb end of the bridge, where they had been waiting out of view. Both the French and Danes began to let off teargas over the heads of the British at the advancing mob.

No one knows whether the Albanians would have surged across the bridge to the Serb side if they had got through. Some say they intended only to taunt the French, and perhaps kill one of their soldiers. At all events, the much-maligned French gendarmes did a useful job. A few of their teargas canisters went off near the Green Jackets causing problems, but that may have been inevitable. Without the French our soldiers might have been in greater trouble. However, the British believe the French were too free with their teargas.

Nearly a year has passed since Nato began to bomb Serbia. The politicians have moved on to other things. They don’t have a long-term plan for Kosovo, but in Mitrovica even their short-term plans are coming apart. Something really awful may be about to happen that will further discredit Nato policy in Kosovo and jolt politicians in London and Washington who have forgotten about this place.

Meanwhile the French and British commands – one might say the French and the rest of Nato – are at daggers drawn. The French have kept the Serbs and Albanians apart in Mitrovica. The British approach is to integrate the two communities. The trouble is that since the end of the war integration normally leads to the ethnic cleansing of Serbs.

Of the British soldiers on the ground it is impossible to speak too highly.

They are calm and approachable whereas the French seem jumpy and reserved. The Royal Green Jackets are as impressive as the Irish Guards and the soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment whom I met last August. Going with the Green Jackets on a foot patrol in Pristina is an object lesson. Unlike the French and some other Nato soldiers, they don’t strut about. They move quietly, and are evidently liked by the Albanians.

One of their jobs is to protect the diminished number of Serbs. Last August I was taken to visit Professor Vladetta Vukovic, an elderly poet and expert in romance literature, who had been shot at by Albanian thugs after his front door was smashed in. I look now for him but can find no trace. Probably he has gone to Serbia, as he said he might, another casualty of this war, forgotten and unmourned.

It’s better now, British officers tell me. There is increasingly little anti-Serb violence in their sector, or in most of Kosovo. There are fewer Serbs being protected by our soldiers. One reason for this is that there are so very few Serbs left to attack. In Pristina there are only an estimated 800 Serbs out of a population of 40,000 at the end of the war. As many as 200,000 Serbs have left Kosovo, along with other persecuted minorities such as gypsies and Bosniacs.

Four Green Jackets take me to a ‘static location’ – a house permanently occupied by British soldiers – in a street in northern Pristina whose population was once half Serb but now has only a few. These people live as best they can under the permanent protection of our soldiers. They are prisoners in their own homes and can’t go out unless escorted.

In one ramshackle house we meet an elderly Serbian man called Paule, whose parents and grandparents were born in Kosovo. Four months ago his aunt was shot by three gunmen outside his house while she was talking to an Albanian. The Albanian was shot too – his crime, conversing with a Serb. Paule’s family have left for Serbia and, old though he is, he will soon follow. As one British soldier says, ‘What kind of life is this?’

Next door we find Yelena, a Serbian former nurse who is also protected around the clock by the Green Jackets. Since she was shot at in the street just before Christmas, she has not dared go out unescorted. She would like to sell her house but no Albanian – there aren’t any Serbs in this market – will offer her a realistic price for it. She is 31 but looks 50.

Of the Royal Green Jackets’ good humoured affection, and the Serbs’ gratitude, there can be no doubt. I don’t suppose you would find French troops doing this sort of thing. But wonderful though our soldiers are, there is no disputing that British, and Nato, policy towards the Serbian minority since the war ended last June has been disastrous. By contrast, there is something to be said for the French approach.

Despite assurances, despite the high-flown rhetoric about a multi-national Kosovo, Nato has disgracefully failed the Serbs. Nearly 100 Serbian churches have been destroyed. Thousands of their homes have been burnt or stolen. These are called ‘revenge attacks’ but the victims are rarely among those who took part in the brutal killing of Albanians. One smug western diplomat tells me that all Serbs were ‘complicit’ – but how can that be said of the people I visited, or a Serbian female interpreter and her young son whose lives have been threatened by Albanians?

No, this has been a dreadful betrayal as well as a denial of the Serbs’ human rights. The object of Albanian nationalists has been to drive out all Serbs and non-Albanians, and for the most part they have succeeded. There is this one glaring exception: Mitrovica, controlled by the French. There are perhaps 16,000 Serbs here, of whom 6,000 or 7,000 have been displaced from other parts of Kosovo. Yesterday around 3,000 Serbs demonstrated in northern Mitrovica.

Doubtless there are rights and wrongs on each side. The Albanians want to return to their homes on the northern side of the bridge but the Serbs say they unable to set foot on the southern side, where some of them have homes, without risking life and limb. The trouble blew up in early February when Albanian terrorists threw a grenade at a bus and killed two Serbs. Serbian para-militaries then killed 6 Albanians. About 1000 Albanians who had managed to move back to the north of Mitrovica then decamped to the south.

French policy has been to keep Albanians and Serbs apart. According to the British, this has led to the present crisis and the certain prospect of more confrontations – possibly bloody ones – on the bridge. In a sense they are right. The logic of everything that has happened over the past year in Kosovo – the logic of Nato’s war – is that the Albanians drive out the Serbs. The French are probably attempting the impossible in trying to resist this logic.

One senior British officer tells me that he would like the British to be given northern Mitrovica ‘to sort things out’. Sorting things out means allowing the Albanians to move back to their homes north of the river. It seems fair enough, but once they were back, the extremists would follow. The Serbs would probably be ethnically cleansed as they have been elsewhere in Kosovo. There wouldn’t be many left in Mitrovica, and those that were would have to be protected like the poor wretches I spoke to in Pristina.

The British won’t be allowed to take over in Mitrovica in a formal sense since the French could not accept the political humiliation. There has been talk of sending some American marines to help out, and 700 more front line troops are on their way from France. The French commander is said to be ‘dazed’, as well he might be. His policy will be to swamp Mitrovica will soldiers. He will be under pressure from Nato – and this means political pressure as much as military – to allow the Albanians back into the northern part of the city.

The same senior British officer already quoted says, ‘If the French don’t change, and they won’t, there will be a catastrophe within the next ten days or two weeks. A French soldier will be killed.’ He fears that Albanian guerrillas may cross the river and harry the French in the north. If that happened, French troops might be forced to back down. Without there being an official announcement they could find themselves deferring more and more to other Nato forces.

The truth is that the die is cast, only the French troops in Mitrovica seem not to know it. By fighting the war Nato allied itself indivisbly and inextricably with the Albanians, including, or perhaps especially, the extremists. These people want Mitrovica, and the gold and zinc mines that lie beyond it. American sources within Nato are up to their old trick of demonising Serbs – accusing those in Mitrovica of receiving guns from Belgrade, as though they might be expected to defend themselves with pea-shooters.

Our politicians have no plans for Kosovo and are being swept along by events. The United Nations is hopelessly unfit to run this or any other country. Our estimable soldiers are left picking up the pieces. The Albanian nationalists are getting what they want. Thus the disastrous train of events set off when Nato dropped its first bomb on March 24 last year continues to unravel.