Kosovo European-quality renovation

The compactness of the Serb settlement does not guarantee security. On June 6, a grenade exploded in the center of the Serbian village of Gracanica, injuring five Serbs. A few hours later, Serbs gathered for a demonstration attacked British KFOR fighters and burned two Albanian-owned trucks and a car. (Photo: AP )

Whenever there is a war in the former Yugoslavia, the time it takes to get from point A to point B increases. So the journey from Zagreb to Belgrade - through Hungary - took 13 instead of six hours. And now: the bus that took four hours from Belgrade to the capital of Kosovo, Pristina, is no longer there. You have to drive more than six hours from Belgrade to the city of Kosovo Mitrovica, the Serbian part, where the bus stops on the street next to the market - the bus station remains on the other side of the river, in the Albanian part. Then you need to cross the bridge, walk a couple of kilometers to the bus station and from there drive another hour to Pristina.

Along the road along which Serbian units left Kosovo a year ago, pieces of houses still stick out. There are tents in some courtyards: the Albanian owners, who most likely spent the winter in the city in an apartment abandoned by the fleeing Serbs, began reconstruction in the summer. A larger-scale reconstruction is also being carried out, but the restoration of the infrastructure here, unlike Serbia, is still far away: the iron hand of Milosevic does not reach here, and there is incomparably more destruction. Even in Pristina, which suffered relatively little, the electricity goes out every now and then in the evening: all the shops and stalls have candles or gas lamps at hand. The post office only started working on May 31, after more than a year of interruption. Telephones in houses practically do not work: a NATO bomb dropped on the post office building also destroyed the local telephone exchange. Telephones worked disgustingly even before the war, so shortly before the bombing began, when mobile communications appeared in Kosovo, all of Pristina acquired cell phones. But when thousands of “international workers” arrived here with telephones, the network was so overloaded that it practically stopped working. Recently, the interim administration held a tender for the introduction of a second mobile network in Kosovo. The company from Monaco won, so now many mobile subscribers in Kosovo virtually live in Monaco, and a call from a mobile to Pristina or vice versa is technically considered international.

Where Pristina residents actually live a year after the deployment of UN troops here, they themselves do not understand very well. The city has changed beyond recognition. As hundreds of thousands of refugees began returning to Kosovo, people whose homes had been destroyed - mostly by Serbs, sometimes by bombs - came to a relatively intact Pristina. The Europeanized capital of Kosovo was overrun by villagers who, out of habit, poured slop out the window, oblivious to the fact that they now live on the fourth floor, with a crowded sidewalk below them. The sidewalks are crowded, and Pristina's population has more than doubled, reaching approximately half a million people. There is chaos on the roads: an incredible number of cars, almost all without license plates, rush around without observing any rules, traffic lights rarely work, and the only opportunity to cross the street is when a large jeep of some international organization turns around and blocks traffic.

A year ago, international troops - KFOR - entered Kosovo under the auspices of the UN, and a police force was formed from parts of different countries, which had to restore order and restore the economy. “There are no maps, no signs either,” recalls one of the Russian policemen who arrived here back in August. “They call us somewhere: we rush, we go up on foot to the 13th floor - the elevator does not work - no, it turns out, not here. The Irishman , my partner, is ready to run to the 13th floor in a neighboring building. I say: “You go take a look, and I’ll wait downstairs.”

Topographical confusion, of course, is not the main thing. The laws that existed in Kosovo before the entry of NATO troops, established by the Milosevic regime in 1989, discriminated against the Albanian majority of the region. For ten years, Albanians lived in a so-called “parallel society” - an example of the largest and longest civil disobedience in history. At this time, official power in Kosovo was completely in the hands of the Serbs; attempts by the Serbian police to subjugate the Albanian majority became increasingly harsh, and in 1998 resulted in war. When the war ended, the Albanians had to learn to live by the laws again - but by what laws? It took several months of consultations between the OSCE, the UN and local public figures to decide: according to those that existed before 1989, that is, according to the laws of socialist Yugoslavia.

These laws, of course, are poorly adapted to the conditions of the free market, which has begun to rapidly develop according to its own laws. Albanians, who were practically prohibited from doing business in the 90s, began to appropriate shops abandoned by the Serbs. How would the market, which in the past was state-owned, now belongs to itself, be reanimated? Recently, the UN police tried to find out who it belongs to, but found out only that every month someone collects a “tax” from the sellers - for a total of about 20 thousand German marks, but they could not trace the fate of this money.

Criminal groups in Kosovo are engaged not only in racketeering, but also in prostitution - several brothels were recently discovered where citizens of Romania and Moldova worked - as well as smuggling cigarettes, gasoline, drugs and weapons. Kosovo borders Albania, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia and is surrounded on all sides by mountains. The UN is unable to patrol the mountains. Judging by the number of old Mercedes in the region - all of Albania drives these, and it is well known that most are stolen in European countries - smuggling is coming to Kosovo in a wide flow. Almost every day the UN reports on the detention of trucks with fake “humanitarian” documents at the border.

However, what, if not smuggling, could be expected in the absence of any legal mechanisms for the import of goods and money? It was only in the spring that the UN managed to create a system for registering cars, but so far an insignificant number of cars have been registered. And only at the end of May the official opening of the Banking and Payments Department took place.

The fate of a banker
In a large, dusty office on the fourth floor of the Banking and Payments Department sits its head, Airi Begu, a man of about fifty with a quiet voice and sad eyes. “A year ago we started from less than scratch,” he says. “Everything was broken, bombed or broken. There was no money in the banking system - Serbia took everything. And in the building itself there were no telephones, no computers, and even the walls were already They haven’t painted it for 10 years.” Until 1990, Begu worked in the same building: he was the head of the Kosovo bank, which he himself opened in accordance with the Yugoslav constitution of 1974, which allowed the region to establish its own bank. In the 90s, left without work, he wrote eight books and several poetic plays.

Isn't banking boring now? “What are you talking about, this work brings me great satisfaction.” A new bank is starting to make small loans to Kosovar entrepreneurs, among whom Airi Begu's son may soon be among them. Twenty-two-year-old Uranik studied in America, but last year, without receiving his diploma, he decided to return. He works in one of the international organizations, but in the near future he plans to start his own business.

In general, an exemplary Pristina family: educated, patriotic, people who have not fought, and are now ready to work for the good of the new Kosovo. The Begu family may serve as a symbol of today's Kosovo for another reason: Airi's wife and Uranik's mother, Flora Brojina, a famous poet and public figure, is in a Serbian prison. She was sentenced to 12 years for "terrorism". The crime: Flora Brojina founded the Albanian Women's League, a non-partisan political organization that was considered terrorist by a Serbian court; in 1998, she created a center to help women and children who had lost their husbands and fathers in the war - this is regarded as "aid to the Kosovo Liberation Army."

According to official data, there are 2,050 Kosovo Albanians in custody in Serbia, accused or already convicted of terrorism in connection with the war in Kosovo. 144 people - the latest batch of convicts - were sentenced to long terms at the end of May, in a massive show that hardly even resembles a trial. According to the Serbian Helsinki Committee, about 1,000 more people were released over the past year, usually for bribes. About 5 thousand more people are wanted by relatives in Kosovo. Probably all of them died - several dozen mass graves remain unopened in the region - but the relatives of each missing person naturally suspect that he is being held in Serbia.

“In almost every family there is someone missing or arrested by the Serbs,” Uranic Begu reminds me. Besides his mother, he himself has five cousins ​​in prison: they were among those 144. “Until everyone returns, there will be no tolerance and peace in Kosovo,” he declares.

Serbs, or What's left of them
In the center of Pristina there is an institution called the Center for Peace and Tolerance. This is an organization founded before the war by Serbs and Albanians, seemingly with the best intentions. Now they have to be guarded by KFOR soldiers and the UN police: a high fence, beyond which the center’s employees only go out when accompanied by armed police. The director of the center, a very young lawyer named Sasha Ilic, hands me a hefty photo album dedicated to the crimes of Albanians against Serbs since the entry of international forces: murders, kidnappings, beatings, destruction of houses, monasteries and churches. Albanian human rights activists appealed to exactly the same photo albums before the war.

Today there are very few Serbs left in Pristina (before the war there were more than 40 thousand). Constant shelling of apartments and daily reports of killings of Serbs forced almost everyone to leave either to Serbia or to the suburbs of Pristina - places where Serbs live densely. Twice a week, a bus guarded by KFOR takes them to Serbia for shopping.

Before the war, Serbs made up approximately 10 percent of the population of Kosovo and a significant part of the population of the largest cities - Peji (Pec) and Mitrovica. The Serbian armed forces burned Peiu as they left: according to KFOR, about 80 percent of the living quarters there were destroyed. And Mitrovica became the center of a new Kosovo confrontation, a divided city, where about 10 thousand Serbs live on the northern side of the river (before the war there were 43 thousand), on the southern side - about 50 thousand Albanians (before the war there were about 250 thousand, but many houses in The southern part of the city was destroyed, while the northern part was almost undamaged). The bridge is guarded by French KFOR fighters, and on the northern side by the illegal Serbian association "Bridge Group". KFOR admits that there are illegal armed groups on the Albanian side as well. Every few months the conflict escalates and gunfire breaks out.

Belgrade human rights activists believe that Milosevic is deliberately fueling the conflict in Mitrovica by tying the Serbs there to Belgrade, for example, with pensions - higher than anywhere else in Serbia. This is not just the revenge of the loser: it is to the north of Mitrovica that the main wealth of Kosovo is concentrated - 42 deposits of a wide variety of metals and minerals, as well as an aluminum smelter. Although for the last ten years the plant and mines have been staffed almost exclusively by Serbs, the Albanians consider them one of their own. KFOR, of course, cannot offer any solution to this conflict.

Helpless forces
To the extent possible, international organizations involved in the governance of Kosovo are trying to resolve the long-standing ethnic conflict. But the only Serb who was part of the interim administrative council created by the head of the UN mission in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, recently announced her resignation. The new local police forces being created by the UN and OSCE have mandatory quotas for Serbs and other ethnic minorities, as well as women. Plus international armed forces and international police, which in theory are obliged to protect everyone. True, the prejudices of the fighters themselves often get in the way.

“I sympathize with the Serbs that we had to take under our protection,” says KFOR public affairs officer US Major Scott Slaten. “But you have to remember that 80 to 90 percent of the people who now live in Kosovo could not be here." He tells me about the brutal eviction of Albanians from Peyia. I heard these terrible stories from the victims themselves a year ago, when they fled to Montenegro. But the American officer seemed to have forgotten that the Serbs now in Kosovo are mostly elderly people, poor people, and not at all the young, healthy men who dealt with the Albanians a year ago.

The attitude of the Americans towards the Kosovo problem is the result of a one-sided educational program received immediately before arriving in Kosovo. The prejudices of their Russian colleagues have deeper roots. I had to communicate mainly with Russian police officers, who, unlike the military, do not live on the base, but in cities and villages and work side by side with police officers from other countries. These 120 people are the police elite, mainly teachers at the academies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. For most, this is already the third, or even fifth mission in the Balkans: they served in peacekeeping forces in Bosnia, Croatia, and Macedonia. Many of them speak Serbian and came to Kosovo with fully formed, usually anti-Albanian, views. One lieutenant colonel even brought his Serbian wife from Croatia, who had been declared a war criminal in her homeland.

The international officers should be replaced by local police officers in about three years. Several hundred people have already completed nine-week courses organized by the OSCE. True, all UN police officers dealing with the Kosovo Security Service - the so-called new police - are very pessimistic about its prospects. First of all, nine weeks is a ridiculously short training period. Secondly, the police are paid a ridiculous salary, by Kosovo standards: 300 marks per month. “If he has a wife and children, then he can subsist on this money for one week,” says Lieutenant Colonel Vyacheslav Vorobyov, who heads the rear service of the new police. “We are creating a potentially corrupt police force. Moreover, considering the way of thinking of the previous (Serbian. - “Results ") to the police, who openly took bribes. The people who came here brought the concept of that police: “I have power because I have a gun.”