The New York Times

Wednesday, February 2, 2000

Kosovo's Ex-Guerrillas Turn to Ice-Clearing Duty

By CARLOTTA GALL

PRISTINA, Kosovo, Feb. 1 -- Former fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army have turned their attention to more mundane tasks in recent weeks, performing their first public service job as the newly formed Kosovo Protection Corps.

The onetime guerrillas have turned out with pickaxes to clear the ice from Pristina streets as this impoverished province in southern Serbia battles its latest woe -- heavy snowfalls and temperatures in the low teens.

The main power plant went out of action just as the freeze arrived. Killings are still taking place at a rate of about one a day. Progress is measured in shades: there were no reported kidnappings as of two weeks ago, and no looting.

But arson and grenade attacks are still occurring, and no one dares to suggest that the vicious cycle of revenge and retaliation between Serb and Albanian is waning, if in some areas it is being contained.

In Pristina, where the children enjoy the freeze, tobogganing down steep, icy streets where few cars venture, there are more signs of what passes for normality.

The British Royal Green Jackets, responsible for security and for protecting the 1,200-member Serbian community here in the capital of the mostly Albanian-inhabited province report that only one Serb has been killed in the last three months.

Kosovo's first bank, the Micro Enterprise Bank, was opened recently. Its founding was the initiative of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and a consortium of European banks. It will provide retail banking for citizens of Kosovo and offer loans to small businesses. The United Nations administration that now governs Kosovo has organized a licensing agency and says it will close down any local banks trying to operate without a license.

Even if electricity is not always guaranteed, many local news organizations and state companies now have unlimited access to the Internet, thanks to the International Rescue Committee, an American charity.

Paul Meyer of the committee has hooked up the United Nations and major relief organizations via microwave antennas and from the proceeds is providing the local university, news organizations, hospitals and schools with free connections. Kosovo's computer owners no longer have to send e-mail via Belgrade, and the university may soon apply for an Internet domain for Kosovo, ko, a statement of sorts of sovereignty.

And Kosovo's richest son, Behgjet Pacolli, returned recently to offer the ugly city center a face lift. He is the head of the Swiss-based construction group Mabetex, which has built glitzy palaces in many cities in the former Soviet Union.

Mr. Pacolli held court in Pristina and laid out plans to rebuild a central bank building and a shopping complex, both damaged last year in the NATO bombing campaign against the forces of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.

"Pristina needs an entire new downtown," Mr. Pacolli said, offering to put his own money into the reconstruction and thus blaze the trail for investment by foreigners and by Kosovo Albanians living abroad.

In another hopeful sign, some 6,000 people have moved from tents or half-built houses into community shelters that the United Nations high commissioner for refugees has prepared around the province.

The best way to transport sacks of beans down Pristina's icy streets, one resident found, is to just slide them. Ethnic killings have not completely halted, but the principal battle being waged now is against winter.

It is only half the number expected, but Dennis McNamara, the head of the refugee agency's Kosovo operations, accentuates the positive. The fact that Albanians without homes are surviving, he said, "shows the resilience and sheer determination of those guys."

"People are hanging on in difficult circumstances," he said.

Potentially the most important development of recent weeks is on the political front. Echoing Mr. McNamara's brand of optimism, Bernard Kouchner, the United Nations special representative in Kosovo, says he is close to getting Serbian leaders to join a new political structure, the Joint Administrative Council.

Devised as the beginning of a local coalition government, it is intended to bring together Serbs, Albanians and the international officials who have been running Kosovo. It has so far proven as cumbersome as its name, but it is widely seen as the only way for the United Nations to involve local leaders in decisions and thus enlist their support and responsibility.

Three of the most important Albanian leaders are already on board. A seat for a Serb has been open since the council was formed on Dec. 15. Now, after intensive diplomacy by Dr. Kouchner and his United Nations team, Serbian community leaders, who walked out of the last council, have agreed to try to cooperate.

Last Monday, members of the Serbian National Council, led by Bishop Artemije, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo, told Dr. Kouchner that they would join, pending agreement of Serbian leaders in the northern part of the province around the town of Mitrovica.

If a Serb does take up the fourth chair on the council, other Serbs will be appointed co-heads of 2 of the 19 departments or ministries, although Dr. Kouchner warned that relations between the two groups would remain "horribly complicated."

The message that some sort of dialogue is necessary before the elections scheduled for autumn seems to be sinking in. Hashim Thaci, the former political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, sounded at his most conciliatory when asked in an interview about the Serbs' joining the council.

"Serbs are going to be engaged in departments and we are going to manage to resolve open issues," he said, "especially the division of Mitrovica and the release of missing people."

Nevertheless, the two ethnic communities seem ever more solidly divided. New clinics and schools are being organized in Serbian-populated areas, where residents are scared to attend institutions in neighborhoods dominated by Albanians.

United Nations officials are no longer talking of preserving a multiethnic society so much as encouraging tolerance and preventing further violence.

Some of the tens of thousands of Serbs who fled Kosovo after NATO troops arrived and the Serbian police pulled out are said to be returning. But the United Nations refugee agency is bracing for 100,000 to 200,000 Albanian refugees expected to be returning from Europe in the next year, an influx that will require the continuation of shelter and rebuilding programs.