The New York Times

Thursday, July 8, 1999

Milosevic's Governor in Kosovo Gets NATO Protection

By CARLOTTA GALL

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- It is one of the ironies of peace enforcement here that NATO soldiers, called in Friday night to protect Serbian representatives of the Yugoslav government, shot dead two young heroes of the Kosovo Albanian rebel movement.

The young men were out in the street celebrating. Inside the building was Zoran Andjelkovic, one of the organizers of the ethnic discrimination and suppression of Albanians in Kosovo during the last decade and a proven and loyal ally of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Amazingly, Andjelkovic is still in town. He still calls himself the prime minister of Kosovo, and he continues to live and work in the Executive Council Building at the top of Pristina's main street.

"I don't have a secretary," he complained loudly as he hunted for a letter in an office adjoining his during a recent interview. "I don't have a driver."

Most of his staff members have left the province. Yet Andjelkovic, a short man dressed casually in a nylon bomber jacket, says he intends to stay.

"My personal plan is not to leave before the situation is stabilized," he said. "If I leave, all the non-Albanian population will leave."

So far NATO, the United Nations and the returning Albanians appear to be tolerating his slow departure. British paratroops guard the entrance of the building. They are there to stop the removal of documents, but they have ended up protecting one of the most despised men in the province.

Officials at the U.N. mission still have dealings with him. He is useful for information about how to run the utilities and other services, they say. One official called dealing with his administration a necessary evil.

Andjelkovic has kept busy trying to encourage the Serbian population in Kosovo to stay. He may have other reasons for staying, foreign officials here say, like making sure that the Yugoslav government maintains a voice in affairs in Kosovo, and sending information back to the capital.

His office was reported to have been shredding documents and transporting large amounts of paper back to Belgrade -- for safekeeping, Andjelkovic said. Those reports sent the United Nations into action, and it requested NATO soldiers to guard his office.

Andjelkovic, who was appointed the top government official in Kosovo last October, was present throughout the apparent Serbian campaign of killings and expulsions of Kosovo Albanians of the last few months.

He plays down his role, contending that he has had little influence on decision-making and no part in military or police operations. "This institution never had objective power," he said. "Orders always came direct from the ministries in Belgrade, and we were just coordinating things."

During the NATO bombing campaign, the government in Belgrade declared a state of war, giving extensive powers to the military over the civilian authorities.

Yet as a member of the Serbian Socialist Party, Milosevic's party, Andjelkovic would have retained considerable power. In Serbia the Socialists, the successor of the Communists, tend to dictate policy. Andjelkovic did carry out Belgrade's directives, including the order to expel foreign journalists from Kosovo on March 25.

His role in Kosovo goes a long way back. Albanian politicians and civil servants here name him as one of a number of vigorous Serbian activists used by Milosevic to subvert the stature and self-government of Kosovo Albanians in the late 1980s.

"Milosevic prepared a crew of people to throw Albanians out of their jobs, to grab control of institutions" for the Socialists, "and in this crew was Andjelkovic," said Belul Beqaj, a Kosovo Albanian who is a political analyst and journalist.

"Everything took a new turn with a new law on June 26, 1990," Beqaj recalled, referring to a law that brought the province more tightly under Belgrade's control. "From that day the whole legal system was broken, Parliament was suspended, the workers were thrown out and the executive government stopped. From that base Serbs could do what they wanted. Andjelkovic contributed to this."

Today Andjelkovic concedes that the policy of the Socialists has proved disastrous for Kosovo, and in particular for the Serbs living there. Yet he denies personal responsibility. "I did not choose the party," he said. "It chose me."

He contends that he tried to stop the flow of expulsions by trying to persuade fleeing Albanians to return home but that his actions had little effect.

Albanians say he did little to stop the violence or to alleviate their suffering. His office, they say, failed to provide basic protection or even supplies of bread.

Zejnullah Gruda, a Kosovo Albanian who is a law professor and vice president of the Council for Human Rights in Pristina, has no doubt that Andjelkovic bears responsibility for much of the suffering of Albanians in Kosovo.

He referred to a book by a 17th-century Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius, called "On the Law of War and Peace."

"It says responsibility lies with people who fail to prevent when it is their duty to prevent," Gruda said. "For many months he was the leader of the government. He has responsibility -- he did nothing to stop it."