[ALBSA-Info] {QIKSH =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=AB?=ALBEUROPA=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=BB?=} PRESS: Havel stars as Kosovo goes to vote (Prague Post, October 11, 2000)

[Wolfgang Plarre]

http://www.praguepost.cz/news101100f.html

Wednesday, October 11, 2000

Havel stars as Kosovo goes to vote 

Prague native Hrebickova sees change as province prepares tally
By Jeffrey Donovan 

Move over, Shakespeare. It's Havel time. 

In a tiny theater in the capital of Kosovo, cultural life is awakening
for the first time since NATO bombed Serbia last year in a bid to stop
recently deposed President Slobodan Milosevic from "cleansing" the
province of its ethnic Albanian majority. 
     Othello was the first play to captivate Pristina theatergoers. Now
it's Audience, a piece by the former dissident playwright turned Czech
president. 
     "You'd be surprised how deep and intelligent the Albanians in
Pristina are," said Janina Hrebickova, a Prague native who runs United
Nations Television in Kosovo and has lived in or covered former
Yugoslavia since the early 1990s. "The educated people -- the doctors,
the teachers, the artists -- actually know a lot about Czech history and
literature. They're even performing this play by Havel now. 
     "And, of course, they love Czech beer." 
     A revived interest in the arts is a measure of how far life in
Kosovo has come since last fall, when the embattled Yugoslav province
was reeling in the wake of war and a refugee crisis involving hundreds
of thousands of Albanians and ethnic Serbs. 
     Now, it is Yugoslavia that is struggling with unrest as its new
president, Vojislav Kostunica, tries to emerge from Milosevic's shadow. 
     For Hrebickova, who says cultural and linguistic ties between
Czechs and Yugoslavs helped her understand the Balkans, much has also
changed. "Since the bombing, Czechs are not popular with Serbs at all,"
she said. 
     But they are popular with Albanians in Kosovo. 
     The province will have a historic chance to put the war era behind
it when 2 million people cast ballots in municipal elections across the
region on Oct. 28. 
     "Kosovars and all non-Albanian people -- Goran, Roma, Bosniac,
Turk, Greek -- will be able to show what sort of political behavior,
what sort of life they really want," she said. 
     In recent months, several political parties have emerged in Kosovo,
where Albanians make up 95 percent of the population. Yet the election
is fraught with risk, as one of the two top parties reportedly still has
ties to armed groups of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). 
     The Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) of Sorbonne-educated Ibrahim
Rugova -- nicknamed "Gandhi" for his nonviolent resistance to Serbian
aggression over the last decade -- is pitted against the party of Hashim
Thaci, a former KLA warlord. 
     "Thaci's line is, 'We saved Kosovo. Without us, NATO wouldn't have
been able to do anything, you would all be dead or raped and the whole
exodus of refugees would never have come back,'" Hrebickova said.
"Rugova, on the other hand, says, 'We have to win our existence with
democratic means, no arms, no wars, no killing, and we have to do it by
persuading people and cooperating with the West.'" 
     Few believe that Thaci, who ac-cused the LDK of treachery after it
provided a file of alleged KLA atrocities to the International War
Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, will step aside peacefully in the event of
an LDK victory. 
     "If [Thaci] loses, there could be conflict because people opposed
to him could just start disappearing," said Hrebickova, who was in
Prague recently. "This is a problem the international police is not yet
ready for." 
     Young people tend to favor Thaci, while professionals lean toward
Ru-gova. "The younger group didn't get their education, having grown up
during wartime," she said. "They see Thaci as a good fighter who can
save Kosovo, and they can get independence and they can get rich." 
     The elections will be staged and monitored by the UN, NATO and the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) -- the
organizations that have run Kosovo, technically still part of
Yugoslavia, as an international protectorate over the last year. 

Serbian minority 

One uncertainty, Hrebickova said, is what will happen to the
100,000-strong Serbian minority, which has refused to take part in
rebuilding the region or in the upcoming elections, opting instead to
vote in last month's Serbian polls in which they overwhelmingly
supported Milosevic. 
     "They have refused to accept the new reality of Kosovo and are
still living in the past, going through Belgrade for everything,"
Hrebickova said. "They all support Milos-evic as if he were a God, while
most people in Serbia voted against him." 
     But even with the big changes in Serbia, Hrebickova doesn't see
Belgrade fundamentally altering its approach to Kosovo. "It is obviously
a major step forward with Kostunica," she said. "But we must be careful
not to think that all will be perfect now. He is also a Serbian
nationalist." 
     A democratic Yugoslavia, some say, stands a better chance of
holding onto Kosovo as well as competing with it for international
financial aid. 
     But if democracy does make it to Belgrade, Czech visitors to Kosovo
should beware of the mood here. 
     "[People here] are quite angry," Hrebickova said. "They say, 'When
the Russians invaded your country in 1968, your parents and grandparents
chanted "Tito, Dubcek!" against the Soviets, yet now you are against us,
bombing us.'" 
     Yugoslavia's Marshal Josip Broz Tito was the only Eastern European
leader to gain a measure of independence from Moscow, while Alexander
Dubcek was the head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party whose "socialism
with a human face" was quashed by Warsaw Pact tanks in 1968. 
     "The Serbs hate NATO and they hate Havel for supporting its bombing
campaign," Hrebickova concluded. 
     Havel, meanwhile, has quite a big "Audience" in Pristina. 

Jeffrey Donovan's e-mail address is jdonovan at praguepost.cz

The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been
printed in  The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech
Republic. 
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.


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