© 1999 Global Beat Syndicate. All Rights Reserved.

Letter from Pristina

By Dukagjin GORANI
March 24, 1999
 
PRISTINA, Kosovo -- Everything here is shutting down. Except for the security forces, no one is on the streets. Shops have closed and only a few cars are on the roads.
 
The people are afraid. Families are trying to come together and decide where they will stay once the air attacks begin. There are reports of heavy shelling on the outskirts of the city, and people are moving towards the center of the city, believing they may be safer there.
 
There is barely any information about what's going on. A few journalist who tried to enter the Drenica region, a stronghold of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), were turned back and may have come under fire. No one is really sure what is
happening there or in other small cities in Kosovo, such as Glogovac and Produjevo, where there have been offensives by the Yugoslav authorities.
 
Tuesday was the last day of publication for Koha Ditore, an Albanian-language newspaper here, as well as my own newspaper, the English-language KD Times. Koha Ditore had been fined for publishing a public statement by KLA leader Hashim Thaci and ordered to shut down by Yugoslav authorities. Last week, three other Albanian-language papers were also fined and closed. A few days ago, I was beaten by police outside my newspaper's offices.
 
But frankly, in the present situation, newspapers are a luxury. The time for such communications is finished. There is no Albanian-language electronic media in Kosovo. Any kind of news that you can get is like a breath of fresh air.
 
Now there are different priorities: How to protect yourself; how to find shelter in the coming days. For the present, we are thinking of fundamental survival, of running for our lives.
 
Those of us living in Kosovo, and particularly here in Pristina, are completely unprotected from the Serbian police, military and -- worst of all -- the paramilitaries. Armed Serbian civilians may also soon mount their own attacks on Albanian civilians.
 
For now, people feel safer in Pristina than in the countryside but we worry about a direct attack on the city. The fear is that once the air strikes begin, "the massacre" many of us have feared will finally come.
 
The KLA is no match for the Yugoslav Army and security forces, which have up to 40,000 troops on the ground in Kosovo now. The KLA's forces are now hiding in the mountains and other inaccessible locations.
 
But the Yugoslav army is not after the KLA. They are out to destroy the villages and conduct ethnic cleansing in the region. The army, of course, will target villages that have been KLA strongholds. But what they are really trying to do is
create another Republka Srpska, the ethnic Serbia enclaves carved out of Bosnia during the war there, in Kosovo.
 
Recent moves suggest they intend to "cleanse the north and northeast, possibly parts of the east and some portions of the center of Kosovo. While these regions contain many valuable mines and some key Orthodox religious sites, the main aim is
probably simply to "cleanse them of their current ethnic Albanian population and then use this "new reality" on the ground as a bargaining chip. In effect, the Serbs are using the Bosnian model, only in much smaller areas with a much higher
population density and without any real military opposition.
 
Pristina itself could suffer the save fate as Sarajevo, divided into two or three ethnic zones. While there is not a large Serbian minority population in the city, already barricades are cutting off certain areas of the city. These barricades are manned by around 50 armed men each.
 
Air strikes will weaken the Serbian defenses, but Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic will never agree to the peace deal. And once the air strikes begin, Serb reprisals on the urban areas is inevitable. Air strikes are needed, but without a strong involvement of ground troops, the situation here will only deteriorate. A NATO deployment of ground troops is the only way to prevent a vast humanitarian crisis.
 
Meantime, we just run for our lives.
 
Dukagjin Gorani is editor of KD Times, the English-language edition of Koha Ditore, in Pristina and a reporter for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting's Balkan Crisis Report in London.

 

Click here for more analyses of the Balkan Conflicts from the Global Beat

 

© 1999 Global Beat Syndicate. All Rights Reserved. The Global Beat Syndicate, a service of New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, provides editors with commentary and perspective articles on critical global issues from contributors around the world. For more information, check out http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/.

Home | About | Archives | Advisors | Staff