Saturday, February 24, 2001

Story and photos by Terry Boyd
Kosovo bureau

PASJANE, Kosovo — If the Serb enclave of Pasjane wasn’t such a grim, profoundly hopeless place, Thursday’s brief showdown between U.S. troops and villagers would have been faintly comical.

Every day this week, a small number of the 3,000 Serbs living in this broken-down village turned out to protest, walking to the tiny outpost the Americans call Red Base. The complaints are similar to ones Serbs have throughout the region, and they spring out of a feeling of justified frustration, not any single issue.

"They usually tell us they’re going to protest," said Cpl. Ronald Byrd, 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Armor Division.

Sometimes, the Serbs protest peacefully. But the past few days — since the killing of the 11 Serbs in the Pudujevo bus bombing — the group has thrown rocks and the big, bleached cow bones that litter the road into town. On Tuesday, the Americans had to fire rubber bullets at the Serbs to quell them.

Thursday was not much better.

Trouble started just before noon when about 60 men and two women showed up to block the road connecting the Serbian border with Gnjilane.

As the 2nd Battalion troops forced the group off the road, Stojanica Phillipovich waded into a cluster of U.S. soldiers demanding to see her son, Ljubisha.

American troops had arrested him 10 days earlier for smuggling cigarettes, said Sgt. Thomas Heinze, a U.N. Mission in Kosovo policeman on the scene.

As the mother screeched, about 10 townsmen challenged the Americans verbally, then started throwing rocks and bones. The 1st AD troops rallied quickly, seizing Phillipovich and her nephew, a middle-aged man. Then, the main body of Serbs backed off about 25 yards away, lined up across the road and started slinging more rocks and bones.

With riot shields in place, the troops stood their ground. After about a minute of flying debris, cooler heads prevailed.

First Lt. Jason Rankin used the standoff to begin a lengthy negotiation. Basically, Rankin told the crowd that if it dispersed, he’d have the soldiers he needed for a convoy to take Phillipovich to see her son in jail at Camp Bondsteel.

"Ne! Ne!" the crowd chanted. "You have to cut loose the nephew, too!" they said.

"OK, OK," Rankin countered. "If I take her to see her son, and I come back and you all are still here, I’m going lock her up!" he bluffed.

Recalling the negotiations, Rankin smiled and said, "And that’s when they started giggling."

"Neeeeee!" the crowd roared in unison, but the anger had broken. Finally, Rankin cut a deal that he’d take Phillipovich to see her son and release the nephew "if and only if you give me your word that you won’t be right back out here tomorrow doing the same thing."

Deal, said the mob leaders, and the crowd melted away in minutes, two hours after the incident began.

Asked how he hit on the right quid pro quo, Rankin smiled, shrugged and said, "It just came to me."

With the streets clear, Pasjane Mayor Dragan Bujic apologized to Maj. Patrick Clark for the confrontation, blaming it on "outsiders with an agenda." Bujic added: "Unfortunately, respectful people are not popular now. They say to me, ‘Who are you to say no protests?’ "

Then he and Clark to headed to Bujic’s house for cake and a quick cup of coffee.

For the three months Clark has been in Pasjane, it has been quiet. Only a small minority is restive, he said.

"They don’t hate us," he says.

But some townspeople deeply disagree.

"Americans love only the Albanians," a man in a green coat shouted before the demonstration. "Americans occupy my country."

He listed four men whom he claimed were kidnapped by Kosovar Albanian terrorists from nearby villages since June 1999. He and others remembered another nine men from Pasjane who have been killed since KFOR pushed out the Yugoslav army 18 months ago.

"Nobody cares. Nobody listens to us. Nobody helps. The Americans work together with the terrorists," yelled a man in blue jacket.

Both men refuse to give their names.

"You’ll give it to the UCK," the man in the green jacked said, using the Albanian initials of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

The only person in the crowd who agreed to be quoted by name was Zoran Nikolic, 27.

In his final year of veterinarian school when the war came, Nikolic finds himself unemployed — just like most of the men in Pasjane.

The village’s men worked in factories in Gnjilane before the war. Now, Muslims have those jobs, and it’s too dangerous to even think of driving into Gnjilane. Aid and development officials came to Pasjane for a year, then just quit coming, Nikolic said. It was just as well.

"It was only talking. It was only meetings," he said. A nearby Serb enclave got a tractor, he said. But in Pasjane, the process never started, according to Nikolic.

Because of the Podujevo bus bombing, the people of Pasjane are taking out their anger on the Americans, convinced Americans are unable or unwilling to protect Serbs from Albanian terrorists.

"The American soldiers didn’t come here for ballet dancing," Nikolic said. "When you come here to be a soldier, be a soldier."

Then, Nikolic summeds up the prevailing sentiment in Pasjane: "America did this. America has to fix it."

Two American soldiers on the scene as observers agreed that KFOR hasn’t helped the Serbs. And they weren’t optimistic that the Serbs’ problems would disappear.

"Their basic gripe today is, ‘If the UCPMB can have a checkpoint in the ground safety zone, why can’t they have one here?’ " said one soldier. Muslim guerrillas of the Liberation Army for Presevo, Medveda and Bujanovac operate a checkpoint perhaps five miles away, just inside the neutral zone separating eastern Kosovo from southwestern Serbia.

Compared to the Kosovar Albanians, the Serbs are prisoners in their own homes, he said. "When you look around, [the unrest] is a reflection of the differences," said the second soldier. "The Albanians are moving around. They have jobs. They’re building [homes and businesses]. They’re basically free, by [the Serbs’] definition," he said. "If [the Serbs] had anything else to do, they wouldn’t be here today."

In Pristina, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees and KFOR are doing a safety assessment, working to make good on their word to restart convoys into Serbia, said Astrid Van Genderen Stort, UNCHR spokesman. "We’re as anxious as they are. The last thing we want is to stop [the convoys] so [the bombers] get exactly what they want," Van Genderen Stort said.

At noon Friday, the usual time for the Pasjane protests, the Serbs had kept their word, too. The only Serb to be found was an old shepherd, standing silently next to a KFOR armored personnel carrier, silently tending his flock.

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