May 8, 1999
THE MINISTER
Milosevic Aide on Kosovo Urges Albanians to Return
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Issue in Depth: Conflict in Kosovo
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
RISTINA, Serbia -- Last
September, Zoran Andjelkovic, the
Serbian minister for youth and sport,
was assigned the unenviable task of
trying to run Kosovo as it slid faster
and faster toward civil war.
A bluff and friendly man, Andjelkovic says he's doing his best to
hold Kosovo together and to promote
reconciliation among all the Serbian
province's ethnic groups. In a long
interview today in the undamaged
part of Pristina's government building, which was hit by NATO missiles
a month ago, Andjelkovic described his efforts to get aid to those
who need it and to encourage ethnic
Albanian refugees to return home.
He is president of the Temporary
Executive Council of the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija (the province's full name). Andjelkovic knows that any political
settlement will mean his replacement once new elections can be held.
And he may be gone much sooner, as
the Yugoslav Government, working
on an internal solution to Kosovo,
tries to cobble together a new temporary government with a moderate
Albanian as its head.
While real power is out of his
hands, Andjelkovic, who belongs
to President Slobodan Milosevic's
party, is working hard to trying to
put the best face on the situation in
Kosovo. He is working hard to find
gasoline for farmers' tractors, and to
find flour for the bakeries and transport to get the loaves to people. Each
day now, 100,000 loaves are being
sold in Pristina, he said, evidence
that people are returning.
"I'm proud that we have managed
to stabilize the situation and put the
police back in control," he said. It
was NATO's bombing campaign,
which began March 24, and the simultaneous effort of Kosovo Liberation Army secessionists to begin an
uprising, he insisted, that set Kosovo's population to flight.
The first 10 days or so of chaos
included fierce clashes among angry
civilians, Andjelkovic said, much
as he had warned Western officials
would happen if the bombing began.
But he also has his own special
take on events. The chaos was further manipulated by "multiethnic
criminal gangs" dressed in stolen or
purchased army and police uniforms, Andjelkovic said. And it
was these gangs of Serbs, Turks and
Albanians, he insisted, not regular
Yugoslav Army forces or Serbian
paramilitaries, who went door to
door threatening Albanians and ordering them to leave, in order to rob
their apartments.
In essence, he said, there was no
organized "ethnic cleansing" -- just
organized crime.
"I'm not claiming there were no
threats from Serbs," he said, when
pressed. "But no one left Kosovo
before March 24, when the bombing
started, and I insist on that."
Asked about the evidence of thousands of burned houses and shops of
Albanians all over Kosovo, Andjelkovic said: "When the houses are
empty it is an opportunity for the
multiethnic criminal gangs. They
rob the houses and burn them. But
I'm very proud we could stop it here
and get the situation under control."
More than 380 people in Kosovo
have been arrested for such crimes,
he said, and are being punished with
sentences ranging from 5 to 20 years
by military courts. When told those
figures were two weeks old, he said
there would be new ones soon.
Anyway, he insisted, the houses
could all be rebuilt and refurnished
"for the price of rebuilding only
three of the bridges" that NATO has
destroyed, let alone all the factories,
oil refineries and warehouses.
Asked about recent Albanian accounts of uniformed men ordering
people out of the Suncani Breg district of Pristina, Andjelkovic
said that Yugoslav Army uniforms
could be bought for up to $300. Banging his finger on the table, he said,
"I'm absolutely convinced that official army and police forces did not do
something like this."
Other senior Yugoslav and Serbian
officials privately acknowledge the
accuracy of some refugee accounts
of Serbian paramilitaries' forcing
them to leave Kosovo, following the
pattern in Bosnia in the early 1990's.
But they also insist that the army
and the police have moved to rein in
the paramilitaries and did not participate in any organized "ethnic
cleansing." Their version is that
these forces merely pursued a strategy, as the United States did in Vietnam, of clearing villages of insurgents and their civilian supporters
before allowing residents to return.
As for the Albanians, Andjelkovic said sadly, about 30 percent
have left the province. That is roughly in line with estimates from the
United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees, which says that at
least 700,000 have left Kosovo, out of
a prewar total of some 1.8 million.
"But I'm convinced people will
come back," he said. "On the first
day that the bombing stops and a
political climate of trust is restored,
they will come back."
In his fashion, Andjelkovic is
trying to restore that trust. A number of Albanian Kosovars serve on
the temporary executive council, although, he said, "I can agree that not
enough representatives of the Albanians were willing to participate before the war."
He bemoans the Albanian political
strategy of nonparticipation in Serb-run elections and institutions, including the police, over the past decade.
This was the Gandhi-like policy promoted for years by the nonviolent
Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova,
who encouraged Albanians to create
parallel structures. But Rugova
lost influence to the insurgents of the
Kosovo Liberation Army.
With the rebels badly hurt, Belgrade has turned to the enigmatic
Rugova to try to create an internal solution that could spell the end
to Andjelkovic's difficult tenure.
Asked if patriotic Serbs would later be ashamed by events in Kosovo,
Andjelkovic bristled.
"Serbs should be proud of their
attitude and behavior toward Albanians before March 24," he said.
And what about after March 24?
"It doesn't mean they should be
ashamed of events after March 24,
either," he said. "Serbs and Albanians shared the same situation under
the bombs."
