Police checkpoints |
Greg Wilesmith: Kosovo is a police state where the Serbs in uniform stop and search, often politely enough. | 00.00.00.00 |
| On other occasions, and when TV cameras are not around, they harass and arrest ethnic Albanians. And all too frequently there is torture and murder. |
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| Kosovo is a predominantly Muslim province in the Yugoslav state of Serbia, which overwhelmingly made up of Orthodox Christians. | 00.31 |
Mosques and church | The struggle between the ethnic Albanian majority who demand political freedom and the minority Serbs who hold all the power is the most explosive mixture in Europe. |
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| And if there is to be another war in the Balkans it is likely to start here.
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Map
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Wrecked houses | Wilesmith: In the Drenica region of Kosovo the Serbs have been on a killing spree, so apparently mindless that it has forced the world to pay attention.
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Wilesmith to Camera Super:
GREG WILESMITH | What happened here in the village of Prekaz will go down in Albanian history. At least 41 members of the Jashari clan were slaughtered here. For six hours Serbian artillery crashed down on these five houses in this compound. Tear gas was fired into the houses. Some of the houses were set fire. | 01.30 |
| Those that were left alive were sheltering in a basement and about 2 o'clock in the afternoon they finally decided that they must come out. |
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| But even then the slaughter continued.
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| The Serbs say they were chasing members of a shadowy guerrilla group, the Kosovo Liberation Army, known locally as UCK [pron: Oo-chee-ka). | 02.02 |
| The survivors deny that there were any gunmen in the compound.
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Bahtije Jashari
| Bahtije: There were 36 or 37 of us in the house children were screaming, and they started shooting with tear gas. And in front of the house they started burning. There was a lot of wood around the house.
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| Wilesmith: Bahtije Jashari's adult son, Nazmi, helped her through the ordeal until they left the shelter.
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| Bahtije: My son took a boy, eighteen months old - holding him like this to save him. He gave the boy to his mother at the front door and then came back to get me. We hadn't taken two steps when the police took him from me. They pushed him down on his stomach and they wanted to see if he was armed. Then they said, "Stand up!" And again they pushed him down. Then, in front of me, they killed him. I screamed - and they killed him with two machine guns.
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Wrecked buildings | Wilesmith: The remarkable thing about the bombardment of Prekaz is that to get to the village you have to drive directly past a major police base. | 03.42 |
| And it beggars belief the so-called Liberation Army would have set up a guerrilla camp only 500 metres away.
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Serb youths in church | FX: Church bells
Wilesmith: The Serbs run Kosovo as if it were medieval colony; a notion moulded by the myth-making about their history.
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| Wilesmith: Since the 13th century, successive generations of Serbs have been indoctrinated in the view that they have a god given right to much of the Balkans.
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| Kosovo is the spiritual heart of Serbia, for it was here that so much blood was spilt.
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Field of Ravens | Six hundred and nine years ago, the Field of the Ravens in central Kosovo was the scene of a bloody defeat at the hands of the Turks. Serbs still talk as if it happened yesterday. | 04.52 |
| And on the same battlefield, the Serb dominated Yugoslav army is again preparing for war. |
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| The Serbs intend to hold Kosovo by force, whatever the numerical dominance of the ethnic Albanians, and whatever international pressure is brought to bear. |
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Coffee crowd | Yet for the Albanians, Serb repression is normal. It breeds enormously resilient people, like the politician Adem Demaci, flanked as ever by bodyguards. | 05.27 |
| He's called the Nelson Mandela of Kosovo, having spent 28 years in prison for campaigning for Albanian independence.
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Adem Demaci interview
Super: ADEM DEMACI Parliamentary Party of Kosovo | Demaci: Our policy, the policy of my party, is not to support violence. We don't support violence. But we don't condemn it, because we know that Albanian violence is in self defence. It is not violence against Serbian people. But the violence of the Serbian regime is a terrorist regime, and that violence is in function to rob us.
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Pristina street scenes. | Wilesmith: Armed revolution doesn't yet appear to be on the agenda of most Albanians, particularly those in urban areas. But there is huge resentment of the Serbs oppression of the rights of Albanians, who make up nine-tenths of the population.
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Wilesmith to camera | Wilesmith: In the early nineties, when the world's most infamous apartheid system was breaking down in South Africa, a new apartheid was being born here in Kosovo. Albanians were being told they must get out of their jobs in the civil service, out of the hospitals, the high schools and at the university. Albanian radio and television programmes virtually disappeared off the air. Albanians were told they could not use their own language for communication with government. And even the street signs in the capital, Pristina, were being changed from Albanian to Serb.
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School | Blatant segregation of Serbs from Albanians begins in school. | 07.11 |
| Even when free from rigidly divided classrooms, they're banned from playing together. |
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Pristina Uni | At university, Serbs are to be found on the official campus in Pristina. |
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| Albanians, determined to learn in Albanian, gather in rough, unfinished buildings which they call their university.
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Law class |
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| Wilesmith: Under international pressure Serbia has finally conceded that Albanian students can return to Pristina University and be taught in their own language.
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Kurti and Wilesmith | But student leader, Albin Kurti insists there are flaws in the deal.
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Kurti interview | Kurti: The Albanian and the Serbian students are going to be in two different shifts, which is unacceptable for us, because from our point of view, our non-violent point of view, that is a sort of apartheid.
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Street scene | Wilesmith: The Serb police don't understand non-violent protests and regularly break up student demonstrations. | 08.28 |
| In turn, this strengthens the conviction of Albanians to create a parallel state. |
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| It's run from the tiny offices of the Kosovo Democratic League. Its leader, Dr. Ibrahim Rugova, is regarded by Albanians as President of Kosovo. He wants radical political change without recourse to violence.
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Rugova interview | Rugova: I'd like to have one intervention in Kosovo because this the constellation of forces in Europe and in the world.
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| Wilesmith: Okay, but what sort of sanctions are going to make Belgrade agree?
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| Rugova: Economic sanctions, diplomatic and other sanctions. Now we have an embargo for arms and other things and to have one group for implementation of this resolution of UN Security Council.
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Street scene | Wilesmith: Even so, weapons bans are easily avoided and Albanians, seventy percent of whom are unemployed, won't be helped by sanctions. The economy will just slump further.
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| Moreover, Albanians know that international support for Kosovo stops well short of independence. But that's a reality that Dr Rugova tries to ignore.
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Rugova interview
Super: Dr. IBRAHIM RUGOVA Kosovo Democratic League | Rugova: No, I am here as President of Kosovo, to work, to achieve independence. I ask international authorities for a kind of transition period for Kosovo.
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| Wilesmith: One year, two years?
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| Rugova: And understanding about independence.
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Kangeru Bar | Wilesmith: The Kangeru Bar is part of the business empire of Kosovo's most prominent Serb politician, Momcilo Trajkovic. | 10.33 |
| He was once a hard line ally of Milosevic. Now, he says, the Yugoslav president is wrong to oppress Albanians. They must be given some political authority inside the Serbian system. |
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| Nonetheless in the moderate quiet of his office, Mr Trajkovic labels Dr Rugova an extremist.
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Trajkovic interview | Trajkovic: Dr Rugova already knows that the Serb side won't accept dialogue about Kosovo becoming an independent state. If he sincerely wants11.18 to be a man for peace then he must accept resolving this inside the democratic Serbia.
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Drenica | Wilesmith: Outside of Pristina though, political theory is less important than dodging Serb snipers.
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| Special police units are laying siege to a network of valleys throughout Drenica. |
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School house | Some sixty refugees sleep every night in the school house. They dare not return to their homes. | 11.32 |
| There's adequate water and no one's yet starving. But frustration with the Serbs is high and I asked a gathering of the refugees whether they wanted the liberation army - the UCK - to lead an armed rebellion against Serbian control.
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Man | Man: I believe that UCK exists. I think it should exist and we should all be soldiers of Kosovo until independence.
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Rugova interview | Wilesmith: Dr Rugova though ridicules the notion that Kosovo's independence can be gained through guerrilla war.
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| Rugova: I don't know that you could call it an army. It might be frustrated groups of people. But Serbs are using this as a pretext and it might be a ploy for the Serbian secret services.
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Newspaper office | Wilesmith: Reporters on the Albanian daily, Koha Dotore, know the Serb security forces only too well. | 12.40 |
| They're frequently under surveillance, arrested, intimidated.
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| The editor of the newspaper is Veton Surroi. He believes UCK is a growing force.
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Surroi interview | Surroi: I think we have a guerrilla movement now, in the making that at some point will be a full scale guerrilla organisation, in the same way in which we have seen similar situations in Latin America. People feel threatened. And I've seen the intensity, the capacity of this regime to kill is enormous and it doesn't care if it's women and children - it will kill.
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Prizren panorama | Wilesmith: The Bosnian war was catastrophic for the Serbs. And because of that a civil war in Kosovo will be fought even harder.
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| The Americans and Europeans, mindful of their own failures in Bosnia, are keen to stop the spiral of bloodletting. |
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| Wilesmith: It's far from clear that they can.
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ENDS |
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