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Looking across the block-long bridge, on the other side of which sit Serbs equally disgruntled with the situation, Kadriu, standing with his young son, adds: "The Serbs created this situation. They have blood on their hands."

But the Serbs sitting in an outdoor cafe on the northern side of the bridge believe they are the lone victims. The Albanians, they argue, have all of NATO, the United States and the world on their side.

"The Albanian people have the UCK," the Albanian acronym for the Kosovo Liberation Army, says 22-year-old literature student Vasil Avic, sitting among friends at this Serbian cafe. "The Serbian people don't have anybody. Only KFOR can save the lives of the Serbian people."

Avic and other Serbs sit drinking bottles of beer on the northern side of the bridge, while keeping a wary eye on the span, as if it were their job to watch it. Instead, it is the obsession eating at the entire city, which is slowly coming back to life in the weeks since NATO ended its airstrikes against Serbia and Kosovo. While the southern, Albanian-held part of the city is largely burned down, the northern part, now held by Serbs, and only 18 miles from the border of Serbia proper, is largely intact, if somewhat more abandoned.

While Avic, who plays bass guitar in a rock band when not studying Serbian postmodernist poetry, denies that Serbian police ever maltreated Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority, he does recall a time when the city's Serbs and Albanians got on better.

"Here in communist times, 10, 15 years ago, in Mitrovica, there were several good rock bands," the heavyset Avic, in a white T-shirt and jeans and sneakers, his long hair pulled into a ponytail, says. "If there was a Serbian rock group with three Serbs, its fourth member had to be an Albanian. If an Albanian group had three Albanians, then the fourth member had to be a Serb. When they played music together, and drank, and traveled around performing, the relationship between Serbs and Albanians was good. Music was the only place where people could discuss politics."

"I guess that was the only good thing about communism," he muses.

Intermingling between the two groups also existed among medical staff at Mitrovica's hospital, in the northern part of the city, and along this deserted bridge as well as in the rock and jazz clubs fondly remembered by Avic.

Avic's friend, Milan, used to go south across the bridge every week to the university in the Kosovo capital of Pristina. But now he says he is afraid of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and feels trapped here in Mitrovica until the tensions wear down.

"Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic must go," Milan, thin, with shoulder-length blond hair, says, speaking quietly Tuesday. "I think he is wrong. His politics caused this situation. He's had power for 10 years, and we've had war for nine years."

Among Serbs, fear of the Kosovo Liberation Army and uncertainty about the willingness of KFOR troops to intervene to protect them is overwhelming. On Tuesday, a KFOR spokesman announced in Pristina that the KLA was largely complying with a demilitarization agreement that has forced its soldiers to turn over their weapons to sites manned by KFOR forces, and to trade their KLA uniforms for civilian dress. For Serbian civilians in Mitrovica, there is hope that if the city remains calm over the next few weeks and the KLA continues to demilitarize, the partition of the city will be forgotten, and normal life can resume.

There are a few rays of hope. Despite his fear of Albanians, for instance, Avic is visibly happy to hear about an ethnic Albanian drummer from Mitrovica who is returning to Kosovo after having been deported to Macedonia by Serbian police back in May.

"In the future we must live together, like the Serbs, Croats and Muslims in Bosnia," says Avic. "I don't want to live in fear of the KLA. And I don't want the Albanians to live in fear of the Serb people. They can live their life, and I will live mine."

Milan adds, "If it's very calm, we can all go live together. But not if something bad happens. Then the Serbs will leave for Serbia, and they will live horribly there."
salon.com | June 29, 1999

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