Last Friday the main road out of Pristina was clogged with a long line of Serb military vehicles–and hundreds of civilians. A few tractors pulled carts piled high with household goods. But the exodus was mainly composed of small cars, their roof racks and open trunks stuffed with suitcases and blankets; some had a freezer or large toys crammed into the back seat. “The end of the war doesn’t mean the end of the suffering,” says Ljiljana Lucic, deputy president of the Belgrade-based opposition Democratic Party. “It doesn’t mean the end of the plagues of refugees–Serb refugees.”
It’s not hard to figure out why the Serbs are leaving. They fear that it’s payback time. Though the peacekeeping forces are meant to disarm the Kosovo Liberation Army, many Serbs are convinced the KLA will exact revenge for all the murders and ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians. Take the town of Podujevo; its Albanian majority was “cleansed” in March and April. But when Serb forces left last Thursday, their local supporters were completely defenseless. On Thursday morning, panic spread throughout the city, and the flight began.
The trail is familiar. On the day that the bombing started in March, Danijela Knezevic, a Serb nurse from Pristina, took her two little girls and went to stay with her mother-in-law in Skopje, Macedonia. She’s spent the war huddled in a tiny apartment, watching the news and waiting for the moment when she can go home. But when Danijela’s husband, Branislav, called from Pristina last week, he said all their neighbors were packing. “There are rumors that the KLA have lists of families, and lists of names,” she says. “They’re worried they will be slaughtered.”
Kosovo is supposed to be the cradle of Serb civilization. Yet even before the war, only about 10 percent of the population was Serb; a government program to attract Serb settlers with cheap land deals was a failure. By the beginning of the school year, scared Serb parents were packing off their children to stay with relatives in Belgrade. Monks at the Decani Monastery near Pec, the most famous of the sacred Orthodox sites, were complaining that there was nobody around to come to hear mass. The pews will be even emptier now.
Political leaders in Pristina have urged Serbs to remain. Few will heed them. But when they flee, they won’t have much to look forward to. Thousands of them are destitute, refugees themselves from Serb defeats in Bosnia and Croatia. “Some of them have moved 14 times,” says a UNHCR official. Make that 15.
