"Kosovo Madness" posted by Richard Seymour

On the south side of the filthy Ibar River, 130,000 Albanians control a near-perfectly ethnically cleansed area; on the North, about 18,000 Serbs, 2,000 Albanians, and another 1,000 gypsies, Turks, Gorani and Bosniaks (the latter two Slavic Muslim people) co-exist uneasily. Only about five or ten Serbs remain on the south Albanian side, half of them priests holed up in a monastery, protected by barbed wire, trip wires, tanks and troops. That's 5-10 Serbs in a population of 130,000 Albanians. That's all they'll tolerate; or rather, that's all that KFOR can manage to protect. South Mitrovica used to have a massive gypsy quarter, at least 7,000 of them. If you walk up to the miners' monument on the high hill on the north Serb side, you can look down and see what happened to Mitrovica's gypsies: an entire section of south Mitrovica, along the south bank of the river, of burned-out white houses, charred white, roofless, blackened beams like burnt ribs. Every last gypsy who wasn't capped or torched had to flee the Albanian pogrom, right under NATO's nose. Some live here in North Mitrovica. Others live in Serb-held Zvecan, most in tents. The remainder are scattered around Serbia.

Labels: albanians, ethnic cleansing, kosovo, roma gypsies, serbia, yugoslavia