Attacks on kids don't shock Kosovo now

By Andrew Gray

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (Reuters); When attackers with grenades wounded 10 Serb children at a village basketball court last week, neither Kosovo's United Nations (UN) mission nor leaders of the ethnic Albanian majority even bothered to issue a condemnation.

Violence against minority groups is so commonplace it appears to be regarded as normal, often met with a resigned shrug of the shoulders from United Nations police officers and members of the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force.

The international mission to Kosovo is now well into its second year. But incidents such as Friday night's drive-by attack on the children in the village of Crkvene Vodice make it hard for both foreign and local observers to see many signs of progress.

Adding to the troubling picture is a daily diet of violent crime within the ethnic Albanian community, including a recent increase in attacks with a possible political background as municipal elections scheduled for Oct. 28 draw nearer.

The attacks and acts of intimidation against Serbs and other minorities have been going on since the day in June last year when the UN and KFOR entered the Yugoslav province to bring it under de facto international rule.

As a result of the terror ethnic Albanians had just suffered at the hands of Serbs, there was a certain understanding among international officials -- although they condemned it -- of the desire for revenge in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Some officials now admit that the international presence was too indulgent and lacked focus in the early days, setting the tone for a climate of impunity.

"With hindsight, it had to be more vigorous and credible all round," said Dennis McNamara, who headed the UN refugee agency's operations in Kosovo until last month.

"And by all round I mean by all of the UN actors, the military actors, the supporting governments and the Albanian leadership," McNamara said at a farewell news briefing.

Even die-hard humanitarians now believe a period of martial law at the start might have helped, instead of a decision to move straight to trying to create a normal Western society.

The worrying fact for officials is that the situation doesn't seem to be getting better, particularly for minorities. Those minorities include ethnic Albanians in the few areas left in Kosovo where Serbs have not fled and still predominate.

The Nobel Prize-winning medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres pulled its staff out of three minority enclaves earlier this month, accusing KFOR and UN police of failing to adopt a proactive security policy to protect people.

"There has been a passive acceptance of acts of violence against minorities," the agency's international president James Orbinski said on a visit to Kosovo last week. "Ethnic minorities are increasingly fearful for their security."

For some officials and observers, the crux of the problem is this: the same no-casualty logic which dominated the NATO air campaign now shapes KFOR's and the UN's work on the ground. Kosovo is a place worth fighting for, but not dying for.

It would take a brave politician to suggest KFOR should take more risks. But, argue Serb leaders and others, the current attitude won't get you very far against ruthless extremists.

"The Western governments want to forget about Kosovo and to avoid direct confrontation with terrorism, knowing full well that Western democracy still has no answer to terrorism in its own countries, let alone in the brutal Balkans," said Father Sava Janjic, spokesman for Kosovo's Serbian National Council.

"Does this mean that the Serbs, Rumanies, Bosniaks and moderate Albanians are to be sacrificed to the insatiable terror of the credo of a Greater Albania?" he asked at the weekend.

The father's reference to moderate Albanians is significant. A year ago, prominent liberal ethnic Albanian politician and newspaper publisher Veton Surroi warned that once Albanians had finished attacking minorities, they would start on each other.

"Those who think these actions will end once the last Serbs have left Kosovo will be wrong. It will be the Albanians' turn once more, only this time at the hands of other Albanians," he wrote in a commentary for his newspaper in August 1999.

Today Surroi's words seem horribly prophetic, although the troublemakers have not even waited for all the Serbs to leave.

In the past few weeks, one local leader of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) has been murdered and two more have been shot and wounded. An office of the ethnic Albanian party in the town of Malisevo was destroyed by an explosion on Friday night.

The LDK, led by Ibrahim Rugova, is the favorite to win the October elections. Although Kosovo's politics are still in a state of flux, most international officials see the party as more moderate and Western-friendly than its main rivals.

A bomb on Friday which ripped through a building in the heart of the capital Pristina has added to the tension. The building housed ethnic Turkish political parties, a Muslim Slav party, smaller Albanian parties and Yugoslav authorities.

The true target is anyone's guess but a political motive of some sort seems highly probable and officials seem resigned to more of the same in the coming months.

"We are convinced, unfortunately, that all the extremists -- from Belgrade to some extremists here in Kosovo -- will make the utmost effort...to spoil the election system," warned Bernard Kouchner, the head of the UN mission in Kosovo.