Serb civilians said that Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas had rampaged through their houses the last three days, stealing valuables and kidnapping young men. On Wednesday afternoon, Didac Boban, 36, and his mother, Mila, were driving through their ethnically mixed neighborhood in the lower part of Orahovac when their car broke down, Mila said. She claims that KLA troops ordered her son–a Yugoslav Army reservist–out of the car, placed him in another vehicle and sped off. “I went to the KLA headquarters to ask if my son was there,” Boban’s father said, as his wife wiped the tears from her face. “The commander told me that my son wasn’t there. He offered me no more information.” Boban said that the NATO troops had promised to help him locate his son; but German soldiers stationed in the enclave told NEWSWEEK that they had little time–or resources–to investigate individual kidnappings.
NATO had problems enough simply keeping peace between the two ethnic groups. As dozens of Serbs gathered fearfully around the tanks, a slight Albanian man wearing orange shorts and a T shirt asked the soldiers for help recovering his aunt’s car, which he claimed had been stolen by the Serbs. A tense crowd followed a German sergeant–who had borrowed NEWSWEEK’s interpreter to serve as an intermediary–to the home of the alleged thief. A burly bearded man in a black shirt and black warm-up pants emerged from his stone house. “He’s the one!” the Albanian shouted. The Serb insisted the aunt had entrusted the vehicle to him for safekeeping. “He’s a liar,” the Albanian shouted. “Give me the keys.” The Serb shook his head vehemently. “I’ll return the car, but only to his aunt,” he said. After half an hour of heated negotiation, the Serb handed the keys to the car–a battered blue German-made Ford–to the NATO soldier, who drove out of the Serb quarter, past a bullet-riddled minaret, toward the aunt’s house.
The Germans say they aren’t comfortable playing the role of police force in Orahovac. “We didn’t come here to bring people’s cars back for them,” said one young soldier. “But there’s no civil authority at the moment.” As he spoke, more Serbs clustered around his tank begging for help. One old man wanted to retrieve important documents from his house in a mixed neighborhood; a German officer promised to help. A black-haired woman holding a baby cried hysterically, saying her husband had been snatched off the street by the KLA. None of the Serbs believed the two ethnic groups could live together again. At the very least, some said, the Serbs should be given the same courtesy that their Albanian neighbors received three months ago. “We took the Albanians by buses out of Orahovac,” said one young Serb in the quarter’s square. “Now all we want is the same treatment.”
