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Leposavić, KOSOVO — North Kosovo’s “Last Bastion” is still standing. Just.
“I don’t feel safe,” says Vlado, the bar’s owner as he gazes from the patio towards several rifle-toting American soldiers standing behind a cordon of concertina wire across the street. “Nothing’s OK here.”
That last point may be one of the few things upon which just about everyone in this hard-scrabble mining town would agree.
Tensions flares anew on Wednesday after Serbia arrested three Kosovar border police guards. Belgrade claimed they ventured across the border (which Serbia doesn’t recognize), but Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti insisted they were abducted and taken to Serbia. The incident is just the latest twist in a spiraling crisis that threatens to rekindle a violent clash between the two sworn enemies despite intense efforts by the U.S. and Europe to restore calm.
For the past two weeks, American and Italian peacekeepers from KFOR — the international peacekeeping force stationed here since the nineties war that paved the way for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia — have been standing sentry in front of the Leposavić town hall.
For the past two weeks, American and Italian peacekeepers from KFOR — the international peacekeeping force stationed here since the nineties war that paved the way for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia — have been standing sentry in front of the town hall.
They’ve been tasked with making sure nothing happens to the man inside: Ljuljzim Hetemi, an ethnic Albanian Kosovar who was elected mayor in April with just 100 votes after local Serbs, who comprise more than 90 percent of the local population, boycotted the election.
Kosovar special police installed Hetemi as mayor on May 26, breaking open the town hall door — and decades-old wounds — to get him inside under a cloud of tear gas. Hetemi hasn’t left the building since.
Similar scenes played out at the three other Serb-dominated municipalities in the region, igniting one of the most serious crises the small republic has seen since it declared independence in 2008. At issue is whether the Kosovo Albanian mayors, who garnered less than 3.5 percent of the vote, have the democratic legitimacy to serve. Kosovo’s central government insists they do, arguing that nothing less than the sanctity of the rule of law in Kosovo is at stake; if local Serbs decided not to vote, so be it.
Like just about everything else in this region, however, it’s more complicated.
As far as local Serbs are concerned, the situation in northern Kosovo was calm until Prime Minister Albin Kurti began to stoke the coals by dispatching “special police,” a heavily armed paramilitary force, to their territory in 2021.
“This has begun to look like a permanent presence,” said Aleksandar Arsenijević, the leader of the Civic Initiative, a local political party. “People see it as an occupation.”
A self-described “moderate,” Arsenijević sees himself not just as a Serb, but as a “Kosovo Serb” and believes his people have a future in the country with their Albanian neighbors.
Yet after being beaten by the special police at a recent protest — he says he was trying to mediate between protestors and police officers — he began to doubt whether Kurti’s government is interested in compromise.
“We can’t coexist in this manner,” he said.
Special police
The installment of the mayors came as tensions were running high between Pristina and Belgrade over license plates issued by Serbia for the northern Kosovo region, a predominantly Serbian area of four municipalities with a total population of about 50,000. Pristina threatened to impose fines on everyone in the region who failed to apply for a Kosovar plate.
Kosovo’s Serbs have been pushing for formal autonomy for years, a prospect held out to them in a 2013 agreement with Pristina brokered by the EU. The deal calls for talks on the creation of an “association of Serbian communities” within Kosovo.
Kurti, who inherited the agreement from a previous government, worries that the arrangement could lead to de-facto secession similar to what has happened with the Serbian region of Bosnia, and has put on the brakes. The EU has made the “normalization” of relations between Kosovo and Serbia a prerequisite for both countries to join the bloc, a prospect that has kept both sides at the negotiation table.
While local Serbs accuse Kurti of reneging on a promise to grant them more independence, the prime minister blames Serbia’s strongman President Aleksandar Vučić for fomenting the unrest in the region, which is surrounded on three sides by southern Serbia.
In early November, Serbian public workers, including local mayors and nearly 600 police, resigned at Vučić’s order in protest of Pristina’s demand that everyone in the region apply for a Kosovar license plate. A few weeks later, the EU brokered a compromise between Belgrade and Pristina that defused the immediate row without resolving the underlying problem.
What fueled the simmering tensions, local Serbs say, was the continued presence of the special police, which signaled its intention to remain for the long term by establishing permanent bases in the region near the Serbian border.
The force, comprised solely of Kosovo Albanians, most of whom don’t speak Serbian, also set up checkpoints on key roads, further angering the locals. Authorities argue that the checkpoints were necessary after Serbs blockaded border crossings during protests in December.
Two shootings — one in January and another in April — at a police checkpoint on the two-lane road to Leposavić, further exacerbated tensions. In both cases, special police fired at Serbs, wounding them. Four officers were arrested following the second incident after failing to report it.
Demands by local Serbs for Pristina to withdraw the local police continue to fall on deaf ears. Indeed, the unrest that followed Kurti’s decision to forcibly install the mayors appears to have hardened the prime minister’s resolve to leave them in place. He and his supporters blame the recent violence on “organized gangs” sent by Vučić from Serbia to cause trouble.
A POLITICO correspondent was stopped last week at the same checkpoint where the recent shootings occurred. Three policemen in battle gear, assault rifles at the ready, stood guard as a fourth officer examined the reporter’s ID before waving him on. Tensions flared again this week in Mitrovica, the region’s urban center, after police arrested a Serb suspected of helping to organize a violent protest in a nearby town that left dozens of KFOR troops injured.
‘Camp Nothing Hill’
In Leposavić, the administrative center of a district comprising 72 villages, the police have retreated from sight, but everyone knows they’re still there.
Pointing at the town hall, Zoran Todić, who resigned as mayor in November, says around 30 special police have holed up with Hetemi, his Albanian successor.
“It’s a classic case of militarization,” said Todić, a member of the Serbian List, a pro-Vučić party.
“We don’t have a problem with Albanians, but with the people in the government,” he insisted, a line often heard from Serbs in the region.
Asked how he would describe his current location in Leposavić — Kosovo or Serbia — Todić didn’t hesitate: “Always Serbia.”
He’s not alone. Like in other towns in North Kosovo, Leposavić is a sea of red, blue and white, Serbia’s national colors. Every street and country road is flanked by seemingly unending rows of the Serbian national standard.
Leposavić is nestled in the foothills of the Kopaonik mountains, the highest in the region, and was a thriving mining center until Yugoslavia disintegrated.
These days, the main employer in the town is the public administration. Municipal workers who walked off the job in November continue to be paid by Serbia. Overall, unemployment remains high at about 30 percent, however, as the region continues to suffer from the frozen conflict. Since Hetemi took over, the former public workers have been gathering daily during working hours to protest what they regard as an illegal takeover of their administration by Kosovo’s Albanian leadership.
Every morning they congregate next to the Last Bastion on chairs and benches on loan from the neighboring Orthodox church. One day last week, an amplifier directed at the town hall — where a lonely Kosovo flag protruded from the top floor next to the mayor’s corner office — blasted a motley playlist of Serbian nationalist folk music, Orthodox hymns and chants, and resistance standards such as “Bella Ciao.”
The U.S. KFOR soldiers, who stood alongside several Humvees emblazoned with American flags, appeared unfazed by the barrage.
“We’re just trying to keep things calm,” the commander said.
Indeed, the foreign troops appear to be broadly accepted by the local population. One day last week, the Americans, who are based a few kilometers from town at a post dubbed “Camp Nothing Hill,” crossed to the other side of the barbed wire for a tug-of-war contest with some local men (The soldiers won 2-1).
As tensions receded, KFOR decided last Thursday to remove most of the barbed wire surrounding the town hall. By late afternoon, the American soldiers were kicking soccer balls with local kids gathered on the square.
Exodus
Hetemi, who is from one of only three Albanian villages in the Leposavić district, received just 100 of 143 votes cast in the April ballot, or about 1 percent of the registered voters. A member of Kurti’s nationalist left-wing Vetëvendosje (“self-determination movement”), Hetemi agreed to stay put in the town hall. He declined a request for an interview.
But Izmir Zeqiri, the newly elected Albanian mayor in Zubin Potok, one of the other majority-Serb districts, said he and his colleagues weren’t surprised by the reaction to their installment.
“We knew we were going to face challenges from day one,” Zeqiri, 59, said over coffee in front of his temporary office — a roadside café.
Unlike Hetemi, Zeqiri, who belongs to the center-right Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), acquiesced to a request by the American ambassador to Kosovo not to stay in the town hall. After the recent violence in Leposavić and neighboring Zvečan, where the most serious clashes between Serbs and KFOR soldiers took place last month, Zeqiri said he believed it was important to de-escalate the tensions.
“We don’t want to add fuel to the fire,” Zeqiri said between puffs on a Lucky Strike.
The café, which is next to an auto repair shop, belongs to a friend and has a better internet connection than his village, he explained.
He’s hoping it will be temporary.
“I don’t think we should be contested,” Zeqiri, who received 197 votes, said. “We had the election and I got the most votes.”
Given that Kosovo is a multi-ethnic society, it shouldn’t be a problem for an Albanian to serve as a major in a Serbian area, he said with a smile, comparing his situation to that of U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and former U.S. President Barack Obama.
He added he would do “everything to find a solution.”
In Çabër, a nearby Albanian village, the mood was less optimistic.
A police car is parked at the entrance to the town, one of just a handful of Albanian settlements in the area, which is dominated by Serbs.
“I’m just a peasant and want a normal life,” said a 46-year-old Serbian fruit seller who was in town to register his car with Kosovo plates. He declined to give his name, saying he didn’t want “trouble.”
“We’ve been living around violence for 20 years,” he said.
Bajarm Hasani, a 51-year-old Albanian who runs the small village store across from an imposing monument for Kosovo’s Albanian war dead, said the most anyone can hope for here is that the politicians can resolve the crisis without violence. Even if they do, he said from behind his small desk, the region’s outlook was bleak.
“Our Albanian minority doesn’t have a future here,” he said. “The young people are leaving.”
One of them is his daughter, Vesa, 18, who stocked shelves as her father spoke. She plans to become a nurse and move to Germany.
“I won’t stop her,” Hasani said.
Back at the Last Bastion, Vlado is also dreaming of a life abroad.
The 38-year-old father of three said he’s been unnerved ever since May 26, the day Hetemi entered town hall. At one point, the special police were in front of his house.
“It was really scary,” Vlado said over shots of his father’s homemade šljivovica, a brandy. “They’re not my police.”
Most of his friends left long ago, but so far he has stayed. His savings are tied up in the Last Bastion.
“I’m condemned,” he said. “On the other hand, it’s my homeland.”