Kosovo goes to hell

Tom Walker says that Tony Blair is too busy doing global management to bother much about the consequences of Nato’s humanitarian intervention in the Balkans

From the kitchen balcony of our old flat in Pristina, we used to look out on a rubbish dump in the foreground, then the precipitous and rutted Plevljanska Street, and across that to the old Orthodox church of St Nikola. To the right of our flat were some tumbledown one-storey buildings housing Serbs and gypsies.

The gypsies used to clean up the rubbish now and again, but never to the point where it all disappeared. Sasa the Serb used to sell us bootlegged petrol, which he nonchalantly glugged into our car tanks while pulling on a cigarette. Thus it was that generally we kept our distance from Sasa — as we did from the youths who lived in the priest’s house by the church, who took a pot shot at our balcony once and removed a large piece of masonry. But Pop Rade, the priest, was an OK sort of guy, and I once sold him a Crooklock for his stolen Audi. Life in the ’hood was a little uneasy at times, but by and large we muddled along all right.

That was back in 1999. Sasa is long gone, as are the gypsies, their impoverished little shacks demolished and built over. But until a fortnight ago the church had survived, albeit thanks to regular sentries being posted on its gates by Nato’s Kosovo force. Then it too was burned to the ground, leaving only the rubbish dump as a sort of immutable legacy of the UN/Nato recipe for multi-ethnic harmony.

This was the sort of thing that we were told wasn’t meant to happen again: 3,600 Serbs pushed from their homes, which were then looted and burned along with a good number of their churches and monasteries.