Freedom gained as homes are lost

Published on Saturday 16 February 2008 18:58

THE nine-year-old ethnic Albanian boy screamed until he was red in the face, pounding his fists on the door of a small concrete house that only minutes before he had called home.

"This is my house! Let me in!" he cried, before collapsing outside the front door, freshly sealed with yellow police tape.

The swift eviction of the boy's family was the work of Toncho Zourlev, aka the Enforcer, a no-nonsense Bulgarian who leads an eviction squad set up by the United Nations in Kosovo in 2006 to restore properties to their legal owners. To him, the family was simply squatting illegally in a Serbian house.

As a locksmith changed the lock on the front door, the family hastily wrapped belongings and carried them to the street: a rusty cabinet; a teddy bear; six pairs of shoes; a kitchen table and chairs. The women and children huddled in the rain.

"We have nowhere to go, we have no money, what will we do?" pleaded Qamile Nuhiu, 42. The boy, Valon, is one of her five children.

Her husband, she said, was unemployed. The family has been living in abandoned Serbian homes in this poor agricultural town about 35 miles south-east of Pristina since the aftermath of the 1999 Nato bombing campaign to halt Slobodan Milosevic's repression of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. They came to Gjilan from their hometown of Presovo, in another part of Serbia, where Serbs had clashed with ethnic Albanians after the Nato bombing.

With Kosovo poised to declare independence from Serbia today, in the culmination of a long and violent struggle over who controls and owns this land, the property restitution effort has taken on added importance.

Yesterday, the EU gave the go-ahead for a 1,800-strong policing and administration team to be sent to Kosovo to replace the current UN mission.

Many inhabitants on either side of the ethnic divide in Kosovo – now about 95% Albanian in what was the heartland of Serbia's medieval empire – can tell tales of property theft and other misdeeds stretching back decades, if not centuries.

The United Nations has been trying to right the most recent of those wrongs, committed during the civil war in 1998 and 1999, when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians and Serbs fled their homes in this poor, landlocked territory, only to seize a house belonging to somebody else.

The attempt to reverse these misdeeds underlines the challenge facing conflict zones around the world, where ensuring the right of returning minorities to take possession of their homes is deemed essential to reconstruction.

In the case of Kosovo, fewer than 18,000 of the 250,000 Serbs, Roma and others displaced since 1999 have returned, according to Human Rights Watch, which cites the inability of refugees to return home as a major obstacle.

As the Nuhiu family scrambled to assemble its worldly possessions, Sami Miftari, 31, an ethnic Albanian newly-evicted from the house next door, put forward another view: that in Kosovo, where government sources put unemployment at 60% and monthly earnings average about $240, squatting can be the only way to survive.

"Kicking us out is not justice," he said. "It is revenge."

Zourlev insisted that he was simply restoring law and order to a territory riven by bloody disputes over land.

"Putting families onto the street is not fun," he said. "But if Kosovo wants to be an independent country, people have to learn to respect the law. Otherwise, this place will continue to be the wild west."

Since 2001, the Kosovo Property Agency and its predecessor, the UN Housing and Property Directorate, have fielded 29,000 residential property claims, about 90% of them filed by Serbs whose homes are being illegally occupied by ethnic Albanians. Of those, 17,500 properties have been restored to their rightful owners, said Lars Olsen, a Norwegian and spokesman for the property agency. He said 2,500 cases had been dismissed.

The property agency, whose mandate will continue under European Union auspices, expects to settle 40,000 more cases by 2010.

Zourlev, who sets out on evictions accompanied by a locksmith, several movers, a translator and local police officers, notes that the operations can be fraught with danger, including resistance by illegal tenants hoarding AK-47s and shotguns. Things can get especially tense, he said, when the evictees are former soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the separatist guerrilla group that fought the Serbs.

He recalls that during a recent eviction in Obilic, a poor industrial area outside Pristina, a former KLA fighter summoned his friends. Before long, the eviction team found itself surrounded. Zourlev says a policeman wedged himself in front of the apartment door until reinforcements came.

UN officials say the property settlement system offers a model for other regions recovering from conflict because the justice is fair and swift. While in most countries, property and land disputes are usually settled in local courts – a process that can drag on for years – the UN has set up a special commission of judges to rule on the claims for Kosovo.

After a claim is made, a team of investigators at the property agency's headquarters in Pristina, made up of both ethnic Albanians and Serbs, conducts interviews, scours property registries and verifies contracts to determine legal ownership.

After a ruling, the illegal occupants are given 30 days to leave. If the owner does not wish to live there, the agency puts the property under its administration and collects rent on the owner's behalf.

Not everyone believes justice is being done. Suezana Borzanovic, 50, a Serbian factory worker, fled Pristina during the bombing raids in 1999 and returned three years later to discover that an ethnic Albanian taxi driver had illegally occupied her apartment and was renting it out.

She filed a claim with the property agency in April 2002, which reinstated her ownership of the apartment eight months later. She said that when she finally returned, the furniture and windows had been broken.

Today, she said, she is the only Serb living among ethnic Albanian families in what was once a Serb-dominated building. She said she would never recognise an independent Kosovo.

"I don't believe justice was done because I lost out on two years' worth of rent," she said.

"I say hello and goodbye to my Albanian neighbours. I have not had any problems. But if they brought me a cake, I would refuse. You never know, it could be poisoned."

Historic day for a tiny nation

AFTER centuries of dominance by Serbia, a war that killed 10,000 people, and a decade of UN rule, tiny Kosovo – poor, mostly Muslim but feverishly pro-Western – is ready to make a historic declaration of independence from Serbia today.

Sunday will be "a big day, a peaceful day", prime minister Hashim Thaci said yesterday.

Spontaneous street celebrations broke out as a new reality – the birth of a nation – finally sank in for the province's ethnic Albanian majority.

"Independence is a dream for all the people of Kosovo, and I am very happy, like everybody," said a giddy Lumturije Bytyqi, 20.

But tensions soared among Kosovo's small Serb minority. Many vowed never to accept the loss of a region they consider the heart of their ancestral homeland.

"I'm asking all the Serbs to reject the monster state of Kosovo, and to do everything to prevent its birth," said Marko Jaksic, a Kosovo Serb hardline leader.

Although it formally remains part of Serbia, Kosovo has been administered by the UN since 1999, when Nato airstrikes ended the late Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic's brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.

Some 90% of Kosovo's two million people are ethnic Albanian – most moderate or non-practising Muslims, the rest Roman Catholics – and they see no reason to stay joined to the rest of Christian Orthodox Serbia.

Thaci, a former leader of the now-disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army, is expected to call a special session of parliament this afternoon to vote on a declaration of independence and unveil a new flag and national crest.