REPORTER: Thom Cookes
Pristina, the capital of the United Nations-run province of Kosovo. On one side, pro-independence demonstrators, on the other, UN anti-riot police. And watching closely from the sidelines is Naim Rashiti, a local Albanian Kosovar, working as a researcher for the International Crisis Group. These are ethnic Albanians, who make up around 90% of Kosovo's population. The more radical have formed a group called 'Vetevendosje', or 'self-determination'. They've grown impatient with the UN administration and the wrangling over Kosovo's future, and are demanding full independence from Serbia now.
GLAUK KONJUFCA, PROTEST ORGANISER: We are here to say to the people of Kosovo.
According to Glauk Konjufca, one of the protest organisers, they're not looking for trouble today.
GLAUK KONJUFCA: From our side, we guarantee that the demonstrations will be peaceful, but we cannot guarantee anything about police.
The situation suddenly becomes more tense, and UN anti-riot troops from Pakistan appear in front of the marchers.
NAIM RASHITI, INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP: The protesters, they wanted to pass through the road, the normal road to go back to their HQ, and the police has blocked the road.
For a few minutes, things threatened to get ugly and the anti-riot troops prepare to fire tear gas. But the barriers are moved aside to allow the protesters through, and tensions drop. Naim tells me what probably would have happened if the police hadn't backed down.
NAIM RASHITI: Could have been very bad. Automatically the protesters would start attacking the police, throwing everything they have. Could have come even dangerous stuff from back side, not as part of protesters but throwing whatever, could have been. It was very, very close thing and the police managed to avoid it at the very last minute.
Naim had called the police commander on his mobile from the middle of the demonstration, pleading with him to move the police aside. He knew exactly how bad things could have got. The next day, in the International Crisis Group office in Pristina, Naim and Alex Anderson, the group's Kosovo project manager, are playing me footage of a similar demonstration last month.
NAIM RASHITI: Police, as you see was not advancing, moving towards the crowd to make them spread more and more. There were just staying in the same line and shooting, nothing else. Look at it now.
ALEX ANDERSON: It's like they tried to shoot. I was really quite shocked when I first saw the footage.
The 10th February, and Vetevendosje protesters were again confronted by troops from UNMIK, the UN mission in Kosovo.
PROTESTER, (Translation): Independence, freedom…these are the people’s desires they are stepping on.
The protesters' path had been blocked, and as they tried to push through the UN police lines, things quickly spiralled out of control. UN peace-keepers started firing. Two unarmed protesters were killed outright by rubber bullets, and around 60 injured.
NAIM RASHITI:
They were shooting crazy, hundreds and hundreds of tear gas bullets.
Italian UN police drag away this protester after he shouts pro-independence slogans at them.
ALEX ANDERSON: This whole operation, and how it was conducted, and the bringing in of the Italian Carabinieri behind the demonstrators and in fact to sandwich them between these Polish and Romanian forces and to effectively squeeze them, and this random shooting. It all had a punitive feel about it.
If you can think about any headline things they might have changed since we put out a reports in late 2005, what would they be?
While the Crisis Group has a high-powered executive that lobbies governments at a senior level, it's in offices like this all around the world that the most fundamental work is done.
ALEX ANDERSON: We are a field-based organisation. The roots of our reports are found in the research we do down at ground level, and ultimately the benefits of those reports we intend also to be for the people at ground level.
And as the group's project director here in Kosovo, it's Alex's job to come up with ideas to prevent the region from slipping back into open conflict.
ALEX ANDERSON: I'm not defending any institutional interest in Kosovo or elsewhere. I have freedom to be able to write reports based on how I see the possible ways forward to actually resolving this conflict here. And it's going to be a very long road getting there.
To do his job, Alex has to be well connected in the region, and as it turns out, he has a very personal link to one of the demonstrators killed last month.
ALEX ANDERSON: I saw his photo and name in the paper and I just couldn't believe it. This is my former landlord. He was a quiet, reasonable guy. Where he was killed was obviously in the very first moments of confrontation in the demonstration, right at the very front of where the protesters clashed with the riot police. He was hit by a rubber bullet fired straight at his face, it hit him right here. It penetrated his brain and he died.
After their lethal clashes with the police, Vetevendosje are in no mood for comprises with anyone, and Glauk Konjufca doesn't dismiss the possibility of war with Serbia.
GLAUK KONJUFCA: Maybe we cannot finish it with Serbia by demonstrations. But we will look to see what kind of tools and what organization are needed to face with Serbia, maybe even by war. Why not? If Serbia wants so, we are ready.
LIBAN ALIU, INDEPENDENCE CAMPAIGNER: Hot spots will be in this part and this part of Kosovo.
10 years ago, there was war between Serbia and Kosovar Albanians. To avoid yet another bloodbath in the Balkans, NATO forces intervened and the Kosovo province was carved out of the former Yugoslavia. Around 16,000 NATO troops are still here. But according Vetevendosje's Liban Aliu, nothing will be settled until Kosovar Albanians get their own permanent army.
LIBAN ALIU: Whenever I see that Serbia is planning to come back here, and they are getting armed more and more, and whenever I see that UNMIK here and Atissari and all that are not giving us the right to have army, in order to defend ourselves from Serbia, I will keep weapon, and I will hide it somewhere. And one day I will take it out when they will come to kill my children as they did before. There's no chances for people here to think for peace, and to make sure security for the future, there is no security for the future here. We don’t have army, that is first thing, in order to have peace here, we need army.
A new army is exactly what has been proposed as part of a plan for Kosovo's future, put forward by the former Finnish president and former Crisis Group chairman Marti Atissari. And this is most probably where that army will come from.
During the fight with Serbia, ethnic Albanians formed the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA. After the war ended, to keep them out of trouble, former KLA soldiers were absorbed into a new force, the Kosovo Protection Corps, known as the KPC. Trained and supported by NATO, they are marching here today. But according to Serbia, this is a terrorist organisation. Alex and Naim have come to gauge the mood of the crowd.
ALEX ANDERSON: People have been content to let the KPC tread water for the last few years. In a way the KPC also has regarded itself as an organization treading water, waiting for the opportunity to again become a military body, in other words to pick up the baton where the KLA left off.
Today former Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers are paying their respects to the dead. More than 50 members of the extended Jashari family were massacred by Serbian forces at the beginning of the Kosovo war, and they've become icons of the struggle for independence. General Sylejman Selimi, a former senior KLA commander, is now the head of the Kosovo Protection Corps.
GENERAL SYLEJMAN SELIMI, FORMER KLA COMMANDER (Translation): We're waiting for the framework of the new force as proposed by Atissari. We'll play a part in that. And the KPC will work collaboratively with international groups and local institutions. And I hope that many of us are ready and willing to serve in that force.
But Atissari's plan has been completely rejected by Serbia.
REPORTER: What does the Atisasri plan give the Serb community in Kosovo? Will they accept that, or will they en masse go? They don't seem particularly pleased about it.
ALEX ANDERSON: You're right. Kosovo remains a really hugely divided place, with a majority community and a minority community, who do not talk with each other, that live in completely different worlds.
REPORTER: And speak a different language, literally.
ALEX ANDERSON: Oh absolutely, and Kosovar Serbs, seven or eight years after the UN has been here, still regard Belgrade as their capital, do not recognize Pristina’s authority, very few Serbs come into Pristina, they still regard it as a dangerous place, although I think it is far less dangerous now than it was a few years ago.
Just a few kilometres down the road from Pristina is the Serbian enclave of Gracanica. Here, the thought of independence and a Kosovo army is viewed with horror.
DIANA (Translation): It's difficult, both in Gracanica and the surrounding villages. There are many enclaves here. People feel free only in the town. Our children don't have freedom. They should look forward to the future. But we're going backwards. Everyone is frightened. Everyone is buying land and property in Serbia. So people are emigrating gradually. Those who can't, stay here. So I'm staying here because I can't afford to go elsewhere.
The largest Serb community in Kosovo is in the divided northern town of Mitrovecia. We are driving up to talk with a prominent Serbian leader, but the town is literally cut in half, with NATO troops and UN police patrolling the bridge across the river. This is the bridge between north and south Mitrovecia. We can't take our car over the road here we have to get out and walk because the car has Kosovo number plates on it and the police here will not let them cross. On foot, we eventually find the office of Momir Kasalovic, a Kosovar Serb politician with strong links to the Serbian Government. He flatly rejects the Atissari plan for Kosovo, and any idea of independence.
MOMIR KASALOVIC, SERB POLITICIAN, (Translation): Well, you know, the most objectionable thing is that it has provided for Kosovo to become an independent state. I mean, those sorts of things. It can have its own army, join and sign international treaties, have all the attributes of a state.
Despite the complete deadlock between Serbs and ethnic Albanians, the Crisis Group has been able to make some ground in Mitrovecia.
ALEX ANDERSON: We propose that there should be a Serb municipality in the north of the city. This got a very frosty reaction amongst the Kosovar Albanians, particularly here in Pristina who really quite resented this, who have the idea that once the International Crisis Group write something in a report, this tends to become a reality. But when they came to present their own proposals in Vienna in the Atissari process for what to do with Mitrovecia and what to do with the divided North, they effectively raided that very same report for their own proposals. I think we are able to nudge the situation and influence it in good ways.
But as in most other conflict areas where it operates, there is some suspicion of the Crisis Group's motives, and on who's behalf it is really acting.
REPORTER: I've heard it said that in some ways Crisis Group must be tied up with Western intelligence, as the info it produces is so accurate and so on the money. Have you come across that and has it caused you problems?
ALEX ANDERSON: I hear from some critics, the phrase that the International Crisis Group is not a non-government organisation, but a "near-government" organisation.
REPORTER: I heard it said that it's a creature of Western intelligence in some areas, it's gone as far as that.
ALEX ANDERSON: I don't think that holds water. The research that we do, we do it ourselves. We do it as regards to our mandate which is conflict prevention and conflict resolution and our own ideas of how best to realize that. If we have good sources, it's because we try to talk to people all the time. That doesn't need to be the exclusive domain of intelligence agencies in fact we try to operate openly. The product of our work we put out on the Internet for everyone to see, so we try not to act like an intelligence agency. I can see why that some people might regard us that way.
The plan for Kosovo's independence was put before the United Nations Security Council on Monday but already it looks like it will be blocked by Russia. And according to the ICG, if that happens, then it's going to be hard to contain the violence in Kosovo.
ALEX ANDERSON: Now if Kosovar Albanians see this process is not working, if there are more delays in which they have the sense that the international community does not have a sufficient weight of commitment behind this, that certain abstractions seemed to be insuperable, that is the dangerous moment.
DATELINE CREDITS
TX: 28/3/07 Ep: 6/2007
Feature Report: Crisis Work
Reporter/Camera
THOM COOKES
Producer
ASHLEY SMITH
Editors
NICK O’BRIEN
Field Producer
JETON REXHA
Subtitling
EMMA JELENIC
SEIDE RAMADANI
Pristina, the capital of the United Nations-run province of Kosovo. On one side, pro-independence demonstrators, on the other, UN anti-riot police. And watching closely from the sidelines is Naim Rashiti, a local Albanian Kosovar, working as a researcher for the International Crisis Group. These are ethnic Albanians, who make up around 90% of Kosovo's population. The more radical have formed a group called 'Vetevendosje', or 'self-determination'. They've grown impatient with the UN administration and the wrangling over Kosovo's future, and are demanding full independence from Serbia now.
GLAUK KONJUFCA, PROTEST ORGANISER: We are here to say to the people of Kosovo.
According to Glauk Konjufca, one of the protest organisers, they're not looking for trouble today.
GLAUK KONJUFCA: From our side, we guarantee that the demonstrations will be peaceful, but we cannot guarantee anything about police.
The situation suddenly becomes more tense, and UN anti-riot troops from Pakistan appear in front of the marchers.
NAIM RASHITI, INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP: The protesters, they wanted to pass through the road, the normal road to go back to their HQ, and the police has blocked the road.
For a few minutes, things threatened to get ugly and the anti-riot troops prepare to fire tear gas. But the barriers are moved aside to allow the protesters through, and tensions drop. Naim tells me what probably would have happened if the police hadn't backed down.
NAIM RASHITI: Could have been very bad. Automatically the protesters would start attacking the police, throwing everything they have. Could have come even dangerous stuff from back side, not as part of protesters but throwing whatever, could have been. It was very, very close thing and the police managed to avoid it at the very last minute.
Naim had called the police commander on his mobile from the middle of the demonstration, pleading with him to move the police aside. He knew exactly how bad things could have got. The next day, in the International Crisis Group office in Pristina, Naim and Alex Anderson, the group's Kosovo project manager, are playing me footage of a similar demonstration last month.
NAIM RASHITI: Police, as you see was not advancing, moving towards the crowd to make them spread more and more. There were just staying in the same line and shooting, nothing else. Look at it now.
ALEX ANDERSON: It's like they tried to shoot. I was really quite shocked when I first saw the footage.
The 10th February, and Vetevendosje protesters were again confronted by troops from UNMIK, the UN mission in Kosovo.
PROTESTER, (Translation): Independence, freedom…these are the people’s desires they are stepping on.
The protesters' path had been blocked, and as they tried to push through the UN police lines, things quickly spiralled out of control. UN peace-keepers started firing. Two unarmed protesters were killed outright by rubber bullets, and around 60 injured.
NAIM RASHITI:
They were shooting crazy, hundreds and hundreds of tear gas bullets.
Italian UN police drag away this protester after he shouts pro-independence slogans at them.
ALEX ANDERSON: This whole operation, and how it was conducted, and the bringing in of the Italian Carabinieri behind the demonstrators and in fact to sandwich them between these Polish and Romanian forces and to effectively squeeze them, and this random shooting. It all had a punitive feel about it.
If you can think about any headline things they might have changed since we put out a reports in late 2005, what would they be?
While the Crisis Group has a high-powered executive that lobbies governments at a senior level, it's in offices like this all around the world that the most fundamental work is done.
ALEX ANDERSON: We are a field-based organisation. The roots of our reports are found in the research we do down at ground level, and ultimately the benefits of those reports we intend also to be for the people at ground level.
And as the group's project director here in Kosovo, it's Alex's job to come up with ideas to prevent the region from slipping back into open conflict.
ALEX ANDERSON: I'm not defending any institutional interest in Kosovo or elsewhere. I have freedom to be able to write reports based on how I see the possible ways forward to actually resolving this conflict here. And it's going to be a very long road getting there.
To do his job, Alex has to be well connected in the region, and as it turns out, he has a very personal link to one of the demonstrators killed last month.
ALEX ANDERSON: I saw his photo and name in the paper and I just couldn't believe it. This is my former landlord. He was a quiet, reasonable guy. Where he was killed was obviously in the very first moments of confrontation in the demonstration, right at the very front of where the protesters clashed with the riot police. He was hit by a rubber bullet fired straight at his face, it hit him right here. It penetrated his brain and he died.
After their lethal clashes with the police, Vetevendosje are in no mood for comprises with anyone, and Glauk Konjufca doesn't dismiss the possibility of war with Serbia.
GLAUK KONJUFCA: Maybe we cannot finish it with Serbia by demonstrations. But we will look to see what kind of tools and what organization are needed to face with Serbia, maybe even by war. Why not? If Serbia wants so, we are ready.
LIBAN ALIU, INDEPENDENCE CAMPAIGNER: Hot spots will be in this part and this part of Kosovo.
10 years ago, there was war between Serbia and Kosovar Albanians. To avoid yet another bloodbath in the Balkans, NATO forces intervened and the Kosovo province was carved out of the former Yugoslavia. Around 16,000 NATO troops are still here. But according Vetevendosje's Liban Aliu, nothing will be settled until Kosovar Albanians get their own permanent army.
LIBAN ALIU: Whenever I see that Serbia is planning to come back here, and they are getting armed more and more, and whenever I see that UNMIK here and Atissari and all that are not giving us the right to have army, in order to defend ourselves from Serbia, I will keep weapon, and I will hide it somewhere. And one day I will take it out when they will come to kill my children as they did before. There's no chances for people here to think for peace, and to make sure security for the future, there is no security for the future here. We don’t have army, that is first thing, in order to have peace here, we need army.
A new army is exactly what has been proposed as part of a plan for Kosovo's future, put forward by the former Finnish president and former Crisis Group chairman Marti Atissari. And this is most probably where that army will come from.
During the fight with Serbia, ethnic Albanians formed the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA. After the war ended, to keep them out of trouble, former KLA soldiers were absorbed into a new force, the Kosovo Protection Corps, known as the KPC. Trained and supported by NATO, they are marching here today. But according to Serbia, this is a terrorist organisation. Alex and Naim have come to gauge the mood of the crowd.
ALEX ANDERSON: People have been content to let the KPC tread water for the last few years. In a way the KPC also has regarded itself as an organization treading water, waiting for the opportunity to again become a military body, in other words to pick up the baton where the KLA left off.
Today former Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers are paying their respects to the dead. More than 50 members of the extended Jashari family were massacred by Serbian forces at the beginning of the Kosovo war, and they've become icons of the struggle for independence. General Sylejman Selimi, a former senior KLA commander, is now the head of the Kosovo Protection Corps.
GENERAL SYLEJMAN SELIMI, FORMER KLA COMMANDER (Translation): We're waiting for the framework of the new force as proposed by Atissari. We'll play a part in that. And the KPC will work collaboratively with international groups and local institutions. And I hope that many of us are ready and willing to serve in that force.
But Atissari's plan has been completely rejected by Serbia.
REPORTER: What does the Atisasri plan give the Serb community in Kosovo? Will they accept that, or will they en masse go? They don't seem particularly pleased about it.
ALEX ANDERSON: You're right. Kosovo remains a really hugely divided place, with a majority community and a minority community, who do not talk with each other, that live in completely different worlds.
REPORTER: And speak a different language, literally.
ALEX ANDERSON: Oh absolutely, and Kosovar Serbs, seven or eight years after the UN has been here, still regard Belgrade as their capital, do not recognize Pristina’s authority, very few Serbs come into Pristina, they still regard it as a dangerous place, although I think it is far less dangerous now than it was a few years ago.
Just a few kilometres down the road from Pristina is the Serbian enclave of Gracanica. Here, the thought of independence and a Kosovo army is viewed with horror.
DIANA (Translation): It's difficult, both in Gracanica and the surrounding villages. There are many enclaves here. People feel free only in the town. Our children don't have freedom. They should look forward to the future. But we're going backwards. Everyone is frightened. Everyone is buying land and property in Serbia. So people are emigrating gradually. Those who can't, stay here. So I'm staying here because I can't afford to go elsewhere.
The largest Serb community in Kosovo is in the divided northern town of Mitrovecia. We are driving up to talk with a prominent Serbian leader, but the town is literally cut in half, with NATO troops and UN police patrolling the bridge across the river. This is the bridge between north and south Mitrovecia. We can't take our car over the road here we have to get out and walk because the car has Kosovo number plates on it and the police here will not let them cross. On foot, we eventually find the office of Momir Kasalovic, a Kosovar Serb politician with strong links to the Serbian Government. He flatly rejects the Atissari plan for Kosovo, and any idea of independence.
MOMIR KASALOVIC, SERB POLITICIAN, (Translation): Well, you know, the most objectionable thing is that it has provided for Kosovo to become an independent state. I mean, those sorts of things. It can have its own army, join and sign international treaties, have all the attributes of a state.
Despite the complete deadlock between Serbs and ethnic Albanians, the Crisis Group has been able to make some ground in Mitrovecia.
ALEX ANDERSON: We propose that there should be a Serb municipality in the north of the city. This got a very frosty reaction amongst the Kosovar Albanians, particularly here in Pristina who really quite resented this, who have the idea that once the International Crisis Group write something in a report, this tends to become a reality. But when they came to present their own proposals in Vienna in the Atissari process for what to do with Mitrovecia and what to do with the divided North, they effectively raided that very same report for their own proposals. I think we are able to nudge the situation and influence it in good ways.
But as in most other conflict areas where it operates, there is some suspicion of the Crisis Group's motives, and on who's behalf it is really acting.
REPORTER: I've heard it said that in some ways Crisis Group must be tied up with Western intelligence, as the info it produces is so accurate and so on the money. Have you come across that and has it caused you problems?
ALEX ANDERSON: I hear from some critics, the phrase that the International Crisis Group is not a non-government organisation, but a "near-government" organisation.
REPORTER: I heard it said that it's a creature of Western intelligence in some areas, it's gone as far as that.
ALEX ANDERSON: I don't think that holds water. The research that we do, we do it ourselves. We do it as regards to our mandate which is conflict prevention and conflict resolution and our own ideas of how best to realize that. If we have good sources, it's because we try to talk to people all the time. That doesn't need to be the exclusive domain of intelligence agencies in fact we try to operate openly. The product of our work we put out on the Internet for everyone to see, so we try not to act like an intelligence agency. I can see why that some people might regard us that way.
The plan for Kosovo's independence was put before the United Nations Security Council on Monday but already it looks like it will be blocked by Russia. And according to the ICG, if that happens, then it's going to be hard to contain the violence in Kosovo.
ALEX ANDERSON: Now if Kosovar Albanians see this process is not working, if there are more delays in which they have the sense that the international community does not have a sufficient weight of commitment behind this, that certain abstractions seemed to be insuperable, that is the dangerous moment.
DATELINE CREDITS
TX: 28/3/07 Ep: 6/2007
Feature Report: Crisis Work
Reporter/Camera
THOM COOKES
Producer
ASHLEY SMITH
Editors
NICK O’BRIEN
Field Producer
JETON REXHA
Subtitling
EMMA JELENIC
SEIDE RAMADANI