Kosovar Albanians have become increasingly aggressive in their attacks not only against Serbs in this battered province but also against Gypsies and members of other ethnic minorities, according to foreign officials charged with restoring peaceful administration in Kosovo.
A joint report issued Wednesday by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees described “a climate of violence and impunity” in Kosovo.
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Attacks by the ethnic Albanians against the dwindling Serbian population and the Gypsies are continuing unabated, officials of the OSCE said, and in a new development, Muslim Slavs in the Prizren area in southern Kosovo are suffering intense intimidation and violence.
The officials said there is growing evidence that the Kosovar Albanian leadership is behind some of the activity and is encouraging the formation of an intolerant, monoethnic state.
Moderate Albanians who have spoken out against what is happening have been subjected to threats. Meanwhile, Kosovo minorities, confused and frightened, are retreating behind a wall of silence as they lose faith in the international organizations charged with protecting them.
Monitors of the OSCE, the institution entrusted with the program of democratization of Kosovo and preparations for multiparty elections next year, have expressed especially strong alarm at the ugly atmosphere spreading across the province.
Prizren and its surroundings have become a source of particular concern, according to Benedicte Giaever, the head of the regional OSCE mission there.
A center of culture and learning, Prizren has been perceived as an example of tolerance and multiethnic harmony in Kosovo.
The townspeople largely escaped the wave of ethnic purges that ravaged the province earlier this year, yet they have not avoided the purging of Serbs and other minorities since.
Eighty-year-old Vojislav Stankovic, a retired government clerk, was one of the few Serbs still living in his own house. That was until last weekend when local youths broke into his house and struck him in the face with a stone. The next day they returned, tied him up and threatened him with a knife. They told him they wanted his house and he should leave.
“They said they would slaughter me,” he recounted, sitting on a bed in the Serbian Orthodox seminary in Prizren where he had sought refuge. “I asked them why, what have I done, and they said if you do not leave by 10 tomorrow we will cut you into pieces and throw you into the river.”
In the western part of Prizren, the 2,000 Gypsies are starting to experience a similar fate to that of the Serbs. On Monday night Isa Viseli, a 27-year-old street cleaner, had to flee with his family when Albanians shouted a warning that they had come to burn their house.
“They shouted, `Leave the house! Go!’ so we left,” Viseli said. “When we had gone halfway, I looked back and saw the house was burning.” He scrambled down the hill with his family. They are now living in a relative’s house.