Ferocity of Clashes Stuns All

As the KFOR APC drove quickly through the centre of Pristina on the night of March 17, pushing along a rubbish container placed in the middle of the street to obstruct its progress, an angry protester shouted, “Stop if you dare.”

But the APC moved on regardless, as did other vehicles of the Kosovo Police Service passing by the crowd.

The smell of petrol and singed metal came from four UN cars, burning near the building of the National Library. The flames eventually caused several explosions, which echoed around Pristina at around midnight.

While the police had sealed off UN headquarters in the city, they more or less abandoned the rest of Pristina to mobs of angry young men who were hanging around looking for trouble.

This sight and smell of anarchy in the capital was illustrative of what was going on in the whole of Kosovo. The violence that was unleashed had a cathartic, bacchanalian feel about it, the extent of which nobody would have predicted even a day before. It spread like a contagious epidemic of madness to almost every town.

The pure irrationality of it all, overcoming all logic and reason, created the feeling that Kosovo was descending - if only for a day - into civil war.

“NATO’s largest deployment in the world,” as Colonel Horst Piper of KFOR put it. Now 17,000 strong, the alliance forces were busy protecting themselves, as well as the embattled Serbian enclaves in central and southern Kosovo.

The same NATO troops who were welcomed with flowers five years ago have been reeling from the attacks of angry Albanian men who ignored calls from local leaders to go home.

The sudden arrival of spring and the first good weather had allowed several different strands of tension in Kosovo to coalesce to explosive effect, among them a growing sense of humiliation at the hands of both the Serbs and the internationals.

Demonstrations the previous day in Pristina, Prizren and other locations included many people aggrieved at the internationals’ treatment of the former Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, fighters and the imprisonment of former commanders of the rebel force. That had already produced such newspaper headlines in Epoka e Re as, “UNMIK watch yourself, there’s gunpowder for you too.”

On March 17, the Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK, demonstrated in Pristina after a grenade attack on the house of Kosovo’s president and LDK leader Ibrahim Rugova. Trade union protests about privatisation we re planned for later this week.

A highly emotive media report about the drowning of three children in the divided town of Mitrovica, allegedly caused by Serbs, provided the spark that ignited this latest upsurge in violence.

The initial trouble started on March 16 in Caglavica, five kilometres south of Pristina, where Serb villagers blockaded the highway from the Kosovo capital to Skopje in protest against a drive-by shooting of a local Serb, attacking Albanian-owned and KFOR vehicles and hurting several Albanians.

As news of ethnic violence in Mitrovica spread, by early afternoon on March 17 Albanians were pouring out of Pristina to attack the Caglavica Serbs as UN police struggled to contain the situation and KFOR remained in the background. A UN police officer at the scene said, “What can KFOR do? Only shoot people!”

An anti-UN mood rapidly built up in Pristina itself and the surrounding area. Driving in what looked like a UN car towards Caglavica we passed a group of children, one of whom shouted in English, ‘Fuck you” .

By late afternoon on March 17, UN police were struggling to contain the Albanian crowds trying to break into Caglavica. As nearby houses burned, police doused the mob with a water cannon and launched stun grenades. KFOR shot dead an Albanian who tried to ram his truck into their lines.

A crowd of up to 5000 students - many from the countryside and more militant than their city-born counterparts - descended on the UN headquarters, chanting “KLA, KLA”, before marching toward Caglavica.

As night fell, they torched police cars and a UN bus on the highway . A kilometre short of Caglavica, the police, exhausted from battling for 12 hours in riot gear, withdrew and called for backup.

But help was not forthcoming. With police stretched to the limit all over Kosovo there were no men to spare . As they and accompanying KFOR withdrew towards a Swedish army base , more explosions and gunfire could be heard in Caglavica.

American KFOR reinforcements then arrived from the south, but the violence in Caglavia continued unabated until late in the evening, when a Swedish APC was set on fire.

While chaos enveloped Caglavica, there was total confusion on the road north of Pristina towards Serbia, with protesters blocking the traffic in and around Podujevo, close to the Kosovo-Serbia border.

The violence, which had earlier seemed like random protests organised by Albanians angered over the death by drowning of three boys in the Ibar river in Mitrovica, looked like orchestrated attacks by extremist groups by evening.

Derek Chappell, UN spokesperson, told IWPR on March 18 that the synchronised nature of the attacks against Kosovo Serb houses and churches, as well as against KFOR soldiers and local police in almost every single town, suggested the attacks had been planned.

“We don’t know who is doing this and what organisations, but we know that subversive extremists groups from both sides could benefit from this situation and we fear that since there is a clear target in each town one of these groups is orchestrating them,” Chappell said.

On the morning of March 18 in Obilic, a town 10 km north-west of Pristina, it was clear that the target of these groups of thuggish and threatening-looking men were local Serbs.

Several Serbian houses were on fire, with crowds of people looting and ransacking them. The local Serbs had been moved to the police station under the protection of 40 KFOR soldiers and UN police officers.

The international security presence here was insufficient to protect the Serbian homes. The local police made two arrests and saved one Serb who was trapped in his burning house.

Ismet Hashani, the Albanian mayor of Obilic, said he was helpless to stop the looting. “I went to talk to the crowd and tell them to refrain from violence and go back to their homes but they just swore at me,” he said.

Kosovo’s Albanian leadership has largely shrunk from tackling the challenge. President Rugova and assembly chairman Nexhat Daci delivered calls for calm to little avail.

A far more vigorous reaction came from Xhavit Haliti, one of the KLA’s founders and a member of the Democratic Party of Kosova, PDK, who praised the good that the UN has done and accused Kosovo’s politicians of taking cheap shots with their ritual anti-UN declarations.

An anti-UN backlash has long been feared in Kosovo. But most expected the real trouble to come later this year, or in 2005, if the status of the territory was not settled in way that satisfied the Albanian majority. Its frenzied arrival over the last couple of days came as a shock and almost everyone has been taken by surprise by its ferocity.

Jeta Xharra is IWPR project manager in Pristina and Alex Anderson works for an international NGO in Kosovo.