In the foggy gloom of a Kosovar fall, the main square of this small market town bustles with an endless stream of cars, horse-drawn carts and the jeeps and trucks of NATO peacekeepers.
Tomatoes, cabbages, potatoes, onions and apples spill from brimming boxes in the open-air fruit and vegetable market. Everything from rosy sides of beef to shiny stacks of CDs appears behind new glass windows in refurbished shops that were little more than charred and gaping cavities at the war’s end in June.
On the surface, life in Decani appears to be returning to what it was before yearlong fighting between Serbian forces and Kosovar Albanian rebels ravaged it. But beneath the fresh paint and plaster, life isn’t anything like it once was–and it probably never will be again–for anyone in Kosovo.
Just months ago, members of the ethnic Albanian majority here, people like Raza and Bajram Isniqui, cowered inside their homes, hiding from NATO bombs and the murderous wrath of Serb paramilitaries sensing imminent defeat.
Fearful, for weeks at a time, of leaving their house, the Isniquis survived by their wits and the kindness of brave Serb friends, such as their longtime neighbors, Dragica and Miomir Bakic.
Even when Serb paramilitaries commandeered part of the Isniquis’ spacious stone house on High School Street, the Bakics still delivered food and medicine to the family. And, in June, when infuriated ethnic Albanian refugees returned and sought revenge on every Serb in sight, the Isniquis sheltered the Bakics in their own home.
But that was during the war, when acts of kindness and compassion were aberrations in a Balkan enclave ruled by atrocity and terror. Things have changed.
Bajram Isniqui, 72, a former professor of Albanian, strolls freely through the streets of Decani to the market as he chats with friends in reopened cafes.
His wife, Raza, 55, a former ambulance company worker, has lost the worried look that haunted her brown eyes in June. Their grandchildren are back in school. And rumor has it that their pensions, long suspended by a hostile Serb government, will be reinstated in the new year. But their friends, the Bakics, are gone. Just as bombs and guns won the war, hatred is winning the peace.
Driven from Kosovo by fears of Albanian vengeance, the Bakics are refugees in the neighboring Yugoslav republic of Montenegro. Shuttling between the houses of friends, they are homeless and impoverished. They are not alone.
Indeed, all 600 of Decani’s Serbian residents are gone, aside from a handful of Orthodox monks guarded by NATO peacekeeping troops in the 14th Century monastery above the town. They are unlikely to return anytime soon, if ever, despite the assertions of United Nations and NATO officials to the contrary. The Serbs are scared; they don’t want to die.
A subtle but deadly drumbeat of revenge throbs in the blood-soaked soil of Kosovo. And all the troops and tanks of the NATO peacekeeping force called KFOR will be hard pressed to silence it.
Subjugated and oppressed since 1989 by a Serbian minority that took their jobs, segregated their schools and suspended their civil rights, Kosovar Albanians have embarked on a vicious campaign to eradicate every trace of Serbia from their small province.
They have stripped Serbian names from roads and cities. Towns now boast Albanian designations; Decani is called Decan. Albanian radicals have destroyed houses where Serbs once lived, and if Serbs still occupied them, so much the better. They destroyed them with the Serbs inside.
In early July, just days after they fled, the Bakics’ small house at the foot of Monastery Street was looted and burned to the ground. Only its twin chimneys still stand like stone bookends above a jumble of charred ceiling beams and ashes.
Not all Albanians approve of the carnage. The Isniquis were in the Kosovo capital of Pristina the night the Bakic house burned down. “When we came back, most of the Serb houses were destroyed,” says Raza, quietly, pouring demitasses of thick Turkish coffee. “No one sees who is burning the houses. They won’t tell.”
Her stern-faced, silver-haired husband, Bajram, nodded in agreement, disgust in his pale green eyes. “They’ve burned down some good people’s houses and left the houses of others who were bad.”
According to Bajram, the current frenzy of Albanian revenge allows no room for discrimination between the innocent and the guilty. “It’s just like when a flood comes. It takes whatever it can find,” he said.
In a shattered countryside desperately short of adequate shelter for the coming winter, even homeless Albanians squatting in former Serb houses are being evicted so their extremist brethren can burn and raze the structures.
“It’s true,” said Bajram. “People were settled in houses, and other Albanians came and took them out and destroyed the houses because they don’t want any trace of Serbs. Most of the Serbs who committed the crimes won’t be back. Why burn the houses?”
In most cases, Serb houses not only are burned but pointedly obliterated. Aside from seething hatred, there is a purpose, however irrational, behind this time-consuming madness, Bajram said.
“It’s an Albanian proverb that if your house is burned, for any reason, and the chimney still stands, it means that you will be back in that house. People believe if your chimney is destroyed, you shouldn’t rebuild there.”
Asked, then, the significance of the two chimneys still standing at the Bakic house, Bajram gave a wry smile and said, “We say they will come back.”
But, he said, it won’t be soon. “They can’t come back now. Many people are very hurt,” he said, referring to the rage of Kosovo Albanians who returned to find their homes destroyed, livestock gone and family members dead or missing.
The U.S. and its NATO partners insist that their occupation of Kosovo is temporary. But the current enmity between ethnic Albanians and Serbs appears to be anything but fleeting. Few here can envision life in the foreseeable future without the buffer of peacekeepers.
“If not for KFOR here, which is a guarantee that the Serbs will not come back, the Albanians couldn’t do the things they are doing because the Yugoslav Army would be here,” said Abbot Theodosy, head of the Serb monastery here, who cannot venture beyond his gates without military protection.
On a daily basis, Serb homes are destroyed and more bodies of the murdered, Albanian and Serb, continue to be discovered. Ethnic Albanian radicals have called for a ban on Albanian purchases of Serb property because they don’t want the Serbs to have the money. They also are known to intimidate ethnic Albanian moderates.
“There are extremists on both sides,” said Bajram. “We have two kinds of extremists here: one that doesn’t want to hear that a Serb ever lived here and another that says that despite all the bombing the international community still hasn’t settled us as we should be. The international community left things unfinished.”
By that, he said, he means ethnic Albanians, himself included, who resent that Serbian enclaves, protected by KFOR troops, stubbornly remain, particularly around the town of Mitrovica and elsewhere in northeastern Kosovo near the Serbian border.
When it was suggested that the remaining Serbs are relatively few and the amount of land they occupy relatively little, he looked exasperated. “It’s a little for you, but it’s too much for us,” he said.
He considers these Serb holdouts extremists of two kinds. “The first type is the same as ours: any trace of Albanians must be erased. The others simply would do anything to keep the land.”
Historically, Kosovo sacred to Serbs, who dubbed it their “Jerusalem” and treasure its many medieval Orthodox monasteries. Every year on June 28, Serbs commemorate the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje, in which the Ottoman Turks defeated them and took Kosovo.
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic evoked the battle in 1989 as a nationalist rallying point to reclaim Kosovo from the ethnic Albanians for the Serbs.
Until then, Serbs and ethnic Albanians had lived relatively peacefully together. But tensions between them never were far from the surface and the war unleashed them, said Bajram. The war did strange things to the best of people.
Bajram’s best Serbian friend, he said, was a man named Lubo Duriskovic. For 35 years, the two families constantly spent time together.
When the Isniquis were away, the Duriskovics would babysit the Isniqui children. “He called my wife his `sister,’ ” Bajram said.
But when the Serbs began their ethnic cleansing, Lubo Duriskovic delivered a surprising message to the Isniquis.
“He said, `You asked for this because the Albanians wanted to be a republic. You were not satisfied with what you had. You raised your heads. So, you deserved this,’ “said Bajram.
Unlike the Bakics, he said, his good friend Duriskovic never offered to help the Isniquis during the war. He even refused to come to Bajram’s aid one day when he was being harassed by Serbs on a bus. “I would never have believed it,” said Bajram, shaking his head.
The rambling three-story house, built 32 years ago by the senior Isniquis, incredibly survived the war intact.
Electric lights once again glow in rooms panelled in fragrant pine and carpeted with vibrantly colored Turkish rugs.
Two of the Isniqui sons, engineers in Germany, send money home. Their youngest son, Ilir, 31, has taken a job with the charity Save The Children, which has rented a ground floor space in the family home.
Ilir, his wife, Shprasa, and their children Ilyet, 6, and Fatbardha, 5, live with Raza and Bajram.
Currently, Raza’s stepmother, three sisters and a brother also are staying with the Isniquis until their own war-wrecked houses are repaired.
Standing by a freshly cut pile of winter firewood, Bajram said he feels guilty about his family’s relatively good fortune. “We really feel sorry and uncomfortable. People look at us in a strange way because we have a big house, untouched, and we are getting rent money from Save the Children.”
Days later, a letter comes from the refugee Bakic family. Resigned to remaining in Montenegro, they asked the Isniquis to help them sell their devastated property on Monastery Street.
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Next: The Bakics, homeless and destitute, have no regrets that they tried to help their ethnic Albanian friends.
