For the Stjepanovic family of five, home is a small, stinking room in a Nissen hut by the Danube, north of Belgrade. Sixteen families share three showers in a muddy washroom. The food is disgusting and there is no work.
The father is ill. The three children are aggressive, one of them unable to talk after the Nato bombings. Mother Dijana (30) tries to hold the family together, but her nerves are wrecked. ”I’m not ashamed to say that I often think of strapping the three children to my waist, going up on to the Pancevo bridge, and jumping into the river,” she says.
The Stjepanovics are Serbs from Kosovo, expelled from their two-bedroom flat in Pristina by ethnic Albanian gunmen when Nato drove the Serbian military out of Kosovo in June 1999. Ever since, theirs has been the wretched lot of the Serbian refugee in Serbia, victims of the serial disasters visited on their country by Slobodan Milosevic, the president and war-crimes suspect who cheated justice by dying in custody at the tribunal in The Hague last year.
Dijana knows she is not going home. ”I’d rather go back to my flat than have a palace in Belgrade. But who’s going to guarantee our safety? My flat’s been taken by Albanians. Our houses are burnt. I don’t even follow the news from Kosovo these days. It’s the same old story, the same record playing over and over again.”
Eight years after Dijana snatched her daughter from a Pristina hospital bed and left Kosovo, the southern Balkan province is again the front line in a showdown between Serbs and ethnic Albanians and in a wider dispute between Russia and the West. European, American and Russian mediators are to tell Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary General, on Monday that they have failed to forge a deal between Serbian leaders and Kosovan Albanians over the fate of the province.
Two years of talks have not budged Serbia from its refusal to countenance the ethnic Albanians leaders’ key demand: Kosovan statehood. The scene is set for more Balkan bloodletting, say gloom-mongers. Who will blink first?
Consequences
Serbia’s nationalist Prime Minister, Vojislav Kostunica, warns of the gravest consequences if the Americans and Europeans back Kosovan independence, strip Serbia of 15% of its sovereign territory and redraw Balkan borders in the weeks and months to come.
Is he bluffing? ”The level of reaction here will be relatively low,” predicts Dragan Bujosevic, a Belgrade commentator and TV chat-show host. ”Nobody wants Kosovo independent, of course. But it’s clear they can’t do much about it.”
Djordje Vukadinovic, a nationalist democrat close to Kostunica, sees thing more apocalyptically. ”Serbia is Pompeii and Vesuvius is about to erupt. Several times, Serbia has avoided the worst scenario. I fear that this time we won’t be so lucky. Kostunica is genuine and serious. He means what he says.”
The dire prognoses range from a new war, mooted by a Kostunica adviser last week, to paramilitary violence by freelance thugs, to unrest on the streets of Belgrade and a government collapse. The political vacuum would then be filled by the extreme nationalists of the Serbian Radical party, whose leader is on trial for war crimes in The Hague.
The government says it has prepared an ”action plan” to retaliate against Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence, expected within weeks. But insiders say the action plan is more rhetoric than reality. There are no signs of mobilisation. Western diplomats in Belgrade hope that Serbian fury over Kosovo’s secession will be limited to a temporary recall of ambassadors from countries that recognise the infant state.
Kostunica appears more obsessed with winning the propaganda war than the real contest. The billboards of Belgrade are smothered with great Western statesmen. Washington, Lincoln and JFK, Churchill, De Gaulle and Willy Brandt all peer out from the posters alongside ringing declarations on duty, patriotism and liberty. The message of the government ads is simple: ”Kosovo is Serbia.”
But it will take more than billboards to keep Kosovo Serbian. After 15 years of wars, sanctions, isolation, revolution and assassinations, Serbia is utterly exhausted. ”Nobody here could face another war. It’s the very worst thing,” says a Belgrade army reservist who fought in Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s. ”We’ve only got one life; let’s get on with it.”
Cost of living
Opinion polls show Serbs much more concerned with the cost of living than with the fate of Kosovo. The biggest outrage in Belgrade last week was the news that Pampers disposable nappies are three times more expensive than in Germany. A mini-consumer and property boom is under way, fuelled by easy but expensive credit. Serbs are more worried about debt repayments.
But alongside the tiredness, there is a searing sense of injustice. Serbs appear mired in self-pity and resentment over the raw deal they think they are getting.
”We’ve been living with the politics of defeat since 1991,” says Cedomir Antic, a liberal historian from Belgrade’s Balkan Studies Institute. ”First it was Croatia, then Bosnia, then the loss of Montenegro and now Kosovo. The dismemberment of Serbia has not stopped yet. These are all bad factors for a democracy. I’m not sure democracy will prevail here.”
The parallels frequently raised in Belgrade are with Europe at the end of World War I, with the humiliations heaped on Germany, Austria or Hungary paving the way for fascism, social collapse, and a bigger war. By insisting on detaching Kosovo from Serbia, the West is either seeing the disintegration of old Yugoslavia through to its belated but inevitable conclusion, or inflicting one humiliation too many on Serbia.
Milica Minovic is convinced it is the latter. The 18-year-old school pupil is too young to remember well the signature Serbian atrocities of the 1990s at Vukovar, Srebrenica or Sarajevo. Like most Serbs, she is in denial about the horrors of the 1990s perpetrated in their name, but lucid on the endless wrongs done to Serbia.
She sports a badge boasting: ”I don’t want Europe.” She belongs to the Serbian People’s Movement, one of several new nationalist youth groups formed to campaign to keep Kosovo.
Europe is a bastion of paedophiles, homosexuals and devil-worshippers, she says. ”We want to be a healthy nation.” She is campaigning for Serbian women to have more children, not least because the Albanians of Kosovo are the youngest and fastest-growing people in Europe. ”We Serbs are slowly vanishing. It’s very sad to hear about my people being slaughtered in Kosovo, girls raped, old people beaten. I don’t hate Albanians, but I don’t want my people to suffer.”
But like the Stjepanovic family in the Nissen hut, suffer they inevitably will, abandoned by their own government and persecuted by the rulers-to-be of Kosovo.
Wild card
Kostunica, a strong prime minister despite a weak mandate, is the wild card in what happens next over Kosovo. He has turned his term into a single-issue premiership, securing a new constitution to declare Kosovo forever Serbia’s, and threatening to break with the United States and Europe over the territory, pulling his country into Russia’s orbit. He could resign, he could fight or, most likely, he could opt for a lengthy stand-off, seeking to frustrate and obstruct Kosovo’s sovereign development and turning it into one of the world’s multiplying frozen conflicts.
Unlike Kostunica, the late Milosevic knew Serbia had lost Kosovo when Nato drove him out in 1999. Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Russian envoy who negotiated the terms of Serbia’s surrender in 1999, said Milosevic understood what that surrender meant. After Milosevic died last year, Chernomyrdin revealed a long, private conversation from 1999. The Serbian leader predicted that all Serbs would leave the province and Kosovo would get its own Albanian ”parliament, leadership and political system”.
”Milosevic saw the future of Kosovo exactly and clearly,” said Chernomyrdin. ”Time has shown he was right.”
Dijana Stjepanovic agrees. ”Kosovo was lost the day we left. It’s been independent ever since. The politicians are just telling stories.” She points to her two-year-old son. ”Even he knows that. Kosovo is lost.” — Guardian Unlimited Â