Volume 41, Number 3 · February 3, 1994
Kosovo Survives!
By Aryeh Neier
When I arrived in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, in December, one of the first things I noticed was the fresh fruit—including large quantities of imported clementine oranges—on display in the windows of several grocery stores. I had just left Belgrade, where the food shops were empty or had only a few cans on the shelves, and the restaurants were deserted except for a handful of foreigners and politicians entertaining their cronies. In Pristina, the restaurants were fairly crowded with local ethnic Albanians, who make up 90 percent of the population. Because of the gas shortage Belgrade's streets are nearly empty, except for police cars and luxury cars said to belong to gangsters with political connections who have got rich through smuggling. Traffic was light in Pristina too, but there was more of it than in Belgrade. Yet the international sanctions that President Slobodan Milosevic's government blames for Serbia's severe shortages also apply to Kosovo, whose autonomy was revoked by Milosevic in 1990, and which is now ruled directly, and with a heavy hand, from Belgrade.
Feature, 3750 words
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