Rebuilding Kosovo –

26’57”


COMMENTARY (COMM): Kosovo 2002. Gruesome memorials to a war fought in 1999 pockmark the country. Now the United Nations is introducing the idea of ‘Justice’. They’re starting with housing rights. Hassan Hamdi is a teacher. He is taking UN investigators out to his old village, Shusik, deep in Southern Kosovo.
Hassan: My village was 90% all burned.
COMM: Hassan is Albanian, a Kosovo Albanian. He is one of hundreds of thousands of Albanians whose homes were damaged or destroyed in the war three years ago when the communist Dictator Slobodan Milosovic decided to Serbianise Kosovo.
Hassan: That is my house.
COMM: The Albanians returned to Kosovo after NATO had bombed Yugoslavia into submission, then took their revenge.
Serbians were driven from their homes.
Hassan: This is my house.
COMM: Now both they and Albanians who lost houses – more than 75,000 in all - are looking to UNMIK – the United Nations Interim Administrative Mission in Kosovo - to introduce the rule of law.
Hassan: This is my house.
COMM: His house wrecked, Hassan found a 2-room apartment in the nearby town of Vitina. It’s on the top floor of a seven-story walk-up. It’s owned by a Serbian woman. Hassan lives here with his wife and three children. They neither own the place nor pay rent.
Hassan: One of these rooms is here for cooking and here for sleeping.
After the war, when I saw my house was burned, I came here. And after that came this woman, a Serb, who said this is my flat. I said I’m ever so sorry but now I don’t have a place where I put my family. Where do I go to? Where do I put my family? And for that I’m here.
COMM: So Hassan refused to move his family out. The Serbian owner complained to the Housing & Property Directorate – HPD - in nearby Guilane. UNMIK, helped by UN-Habitat, set up HPD to bring order and justice to housing problems in Kosovo. THE HEAD OF HPD ASKED US TO DISGUISE THE FACES OF HPD STAFF FOR THEIR OWN SAFETY.
Today Hassan comes to the HPD office to contest the case.
Zvezdan Milenkovic: She asserts that you occupied her apartment. This is the contract. You can see this is from Supreme Court.
Hamdi: This document is different. This document is not before the war it’s after the war. That document what she give me to see –that document she have right only to stay for 6 months. I’m sure she changed that document after the war.
Zvezdan Milenkovic: You think those documents are false? Every single document should be verified by the verification team in Pristina so they verify also these documents. But do you assert any right on this property?
Hamdi: You know that flat is not mine. I’m not there because I want it. I must be. Because my house is burnt during the war. It’s everything I lose in this house. I can’t go back in my house. If I can go back in my house I will go from this flat. I don’t care about the flat.
Zvezdan Milenkovic: Anyway don’t be afraid. Our first task is mediation. We have to find a solution.
COMM: But is Hassan telling the truth? Does he have other property? Is he in fact the owner of the burned house? The head of HPD in Guilane is cautious.
Armand Forster: This gentleman who is illegally occupied a property belonging to a Serb who fled Kosovo will have to be thoroughly investigated. We would in the first place like to know whether the burnt property belongs to him, and if it is confirmed that it belongs to him, then I will have to postpone the eviction for six more months while he’s applying for reconstruction. But if it ever happens that he owns a property somewhere else, and he is profiting from the situation to occupy somebody’s property in town, then I will have to use forceful means to evict him from the property.
COMM: Nis. A Serbian city a short drive from Kosovo. A city that has seen much fighting down the centuries. UN-Habitat has reached out to Serbian refugees now living here in an effort to help them recover their homes back in Kosovo. Maia Drakulovic is a hundred miles from her home town, Prizren in Kosovo - forced out of her home by the Albanian KLA -The Kosovo Liberation Army. She’s come to HPD to try and get her apartment back or get compensation. It’s perhaps ironic that Maia’s intervieweris also a Serbian Kosovar refugee, also from Prizren - the only member of her family to find work here. Maya tells how she lost her apartment.
Kristina (translating): Maya told me that she had an apartment until the 14th June 1999 and she bought documentation with her, connected to the apartment. The apartment was allocated to her husband but he was killed in Croatia by the terrorists and two months later her father in law was killed too. She had to leave for the safety of her children and her.
COMM: Would she go back to Kosovo?
SYNC: No.
COMM: To bring order out of chaos, UN-Habitat is rebuilding the Land Registry – the records of who owns what. It’s essential in part because when the Serbs left they took with them half the land registry – or, as it’s officially known, the Cadastre.
Bengt Andersson: The Land Register is very important for a society - whatever society we are talking about. Essential. It will be the base for investments - and for mortgages for urban planning - for spatial planning - you need it for taxation purposes to get incomes to the state or whatever.
Bengt: So we have started aerial photoing the whole of Kosovo so you can have a good look at all the buildings, all the roads, the vegetation and everything. And out of that aerial photos we have produced auto-photos, which is a kind of map.
COMM: After photographing the whole province from the air, he got his team of local engineers to re-survey the whole province. They are very precise.
Reshat Murati: Yes we know exactly where we are in the world with accuracy 4mm.
Bengt: For the Kosovo people, land is very essential. They have grown their crops on land within the family for decades so land is very important to them. In some respects more important than human beings.
COMM: In the aftermath of war UNMIK arrived in numbers in Kosovo. HPD has a mandate to enforce the housing rights of all Kosovans – underlining their fundamental human rights to secure tenure and protection from forced eviction. Today they’ll post eviction notices here, in an apartment block full of illegal occupants in the capital Pristina.
Dmitri Kaportsev: This building has been occupied mainly by Serbs, and there are also internationals living who rent from Serbs. As I told you, people have to present the documents proving that they are legally in the property. Some Serbs who are renting out apartments of their neighbours without even telling them about it, and they were collecting rent from internationals earning money on someone else’s property. At the same time, these guys in Serbia live in very poor conditions, sometimes just renting a garage or paying rent to some host family or living in a collective centre. And they don’t know that someone else is renting their apartment house.
Agent: The question is: Are we going to go up all together?
Dmitri: Whatever you planned before you came. If you wanna hit all five entrances together go ahead and do this.
COMM: From the electricity meters they know the apartments are occupied. Often people pretend not to be there. Today they’re posting 23 eviction notices.
Dmitri: The story is that the lady behind the door happens to be a police officer from Romania who is employed here with the International police force. She was occupying this property for a long time. So what we advised her to do is produce the original documentation - then we will not take it under administration, we will not evict her. They got already notice served posted on the door saying that this property is taken under administration and people have 30 days to contact HPD and produce the documents. In 30 days if nobody will answer, the door will be broken.
COMM: Kosovo is big land-locked bowl, a plain in the heart of the Balkans. It lies in a cradle of featureless hills. It looks innocent enough but is crowded with Serbian dead. When they died, they took their greatest civilisation with them to the grave. This monument to the Serbs who died at the hands of the invading Turks 600 years ago is the kind of nationalist Serbian icon that Milosovic used to drum up his hate campaign against Albanians. Inside poems extol the bravery of young men fallen in battle: this one praises seven brothers for whom a nearby village is named. It overlooks the Field of Blackbirds, the site of the battle of Kosovo now carelessly polluted by their modern descendants. To the south lies Grachanista Monastery. This building is testimony to the unique quality of the Nemayan Mediaeval Serbian Empire. For travellers like the British writer Rebecca West, Grachanista ‘refers to the reality which lies above the world of appearances - to the order which transcends the disorder of events.’ And every year, on June 28th Serbs religiously remember the day they lost the battle of Kosovo in 1389.
Beautiful frescoes cover almost every inch of the church. In a side chapel, the Old Testament prophet Elijah sits enclosed in a womb of rock. On either side, highly stylised little trees symbolise barrenness. The old man, Elijah, wrapped in a sheepskin throws his head back in an ecstasy of thought. He wants for nothing: a rook brings food. For some Serbs, this fresco crystallises the central truth of this civilisation: mysticism without suffering. But many Serbs remember their suffering. The Turks cut out the eyes of these figures. The frescoes, never restored, still bear testimony today. The majority of people in Kosovo are Albanian – not Serbian. Like the Serbs, their culture also reaches back hundreds of years. This dance is about Albanian unity. Slobodan Milosovic even banned Albanian dancing -before trying to drive them out of the country. Here, the warriors engaged in a blood feud are admonished to become blood brothers in the name of Albanian Unity. The war over, most Serbs left Pristina. There was no government, weak law enforcement, no banks and meaningless property rights. There was no basis for an economy. Organised crime took over.
Derek Chappell: It’s a cruel fact that the area that is most successful for inter-ethnic cooperation between Kosovo Albanians and Serbs is in organised crime. Organised crime has a very strong hold on most aspects of life in the Balkans. Not only is it accepted and tolerated by the people who accept it. It is also part of the government of the region.
COMM: It’s only now, after three years of occupation, that the UN forces of law and order are beginning to have an impact on Organised Crime.
Russian Cop, Roman Ulonovskiy: Yesterday on the 24th of June all local bosses, the Director of this factory and his deputies were arrested. When local police officials came to this factory, 20 tonnes of tobacco were found without any records, without any documents. COMM: This tobacco factory in Guilane was recently closed down. The top management team are alleged to have been producing counterfeit cigarettes for markets all over the Balkans.
Russian Cop, Roman Ulonovskiy: Director and Deputies gave very different information. At first they confirmed that the owner of this tobacco was one Albanian business. Later they started to confirm that it was European guy from Austria.
COMM: Tensions between Serbs and Albanians are greatest in the north of Kosovo. The river Ibor divides the town of Mitrovica. Once it was integrated. But now the Serbs live in the north, on the left here. All the Albanians are south of the River. Mrs. Hyseni is Albanian. She has an apartment in the north. She was driven out by Serbs. David Chillaron-Cortizo, the local head of HPD, is temporarily re-housing her and her family in this house in the South. It belongs to a Serb who was driven out by the Albanians. Now Mrs. Huseni and her family have refuge until she can get her apartment back. She will likely be here for years.
David Chillaron-Cortizo: So this family is now starting a new life. They are seven members, five children. One of the childs, one of the kids, was killed during the war. Her husband was beaten also during the conflict and finally he died. And that’s the place where they are going to be ‘till a solution is found to integrate again the north and the south sides of Mitrovica.
COMM: With most Serbs driven out of Kosovo and money pouring in from the European Union, from expatriate Albanians - even from organised crime - there is building everywhere. Albanians are homesteading with the abandon of cowboys in the old American West.
Dan Lewis: You don’t need to look too far to see new construction in Kosovo. The problem that we have is that we don’t have a system that facilitates the legal construction of these properties.
COMM: Illegal construction is everywhere. Albanians illegally build new tops on apartment blocks even though Kosovo is in an earthquake zone. They build illegally in the only park in town. And if there’s not enough room - why, let the building stick out a bit into the sidewalk – that’s legal. Indeed they’ve built entire neighbourhoods in Pristina illegally, with no thought for a sustainable future: the river is both a sewer and a rubbish dump.
Dan Lewis: Until an enforceable system is in place that regulates this kind of activity, this will continue.
Z. Ethem Ceku, Minister of the Environment: With the groups of experts that are being formed now, and legal experts that we have help from HABITAT programme, Kosovo within two years we think that we will have an action plan being prepared which will help in making some order in all this chaos. COMM: To bring order out of chaos, UNMIK arrived in force. For 2,000 years, outside powers have tried to repress this growling underbelly of Europe - a growling that in the past has led to world war. But now they’re imposing international values.
Dan: Without the commitment by the European community, by people outside the member states to investing in a viable long term economic stability in the Balkans and particularly in Kosovo, I think that History would tell us that we can expect more of the same.
Dmitri: We identified 23 families which got their own houses rebuilt already but they still prefer to use both accommodations. So what we’re doing today, we’re targeting 15 houses and we’re evicting people. We have other people who have no roof, have nowhere to go, and we will move these people in.
David: A rule is a rule. This is Europe. In Europe you apply the rule, that’s it. You’ve had 30 days warning…(Serbian interjection) No. It’s not my problem. It’s not a problem. We have the pictures. Your house has been revealed. Sorry you’re moving out.
Dan: In the end what will happen for Kosovo and the Balkans is they will be integrated in with the rest of Europe. But in order to do that there are certain pre-conditions that have to be put in place like they are with any new country under consideration for inclusion in the European Union. But the road to that objective is a long one, and we’re at the very beginning of that road at the moment. This is the essence of why the UN is here in Kosovo: it’s to establish Justic