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Western Donors Warn Muslims In Kosovo To Stop Violence
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Feb 26 (News Agencies) - Representatives of major international donors financing post-war reconstruction in Kosovo warned Monday that aid could dry up if deadly ethnic violence does not stop soon.
"The donors are concerned about the violence here in Kosovo. It is a recurrent theme time and time again, and quite rightly so," said Andy Bearpark, a deputy to the U.N. Kosovo administrator Hans Haekkerup.
"If Kosovo is to maintain donor interest it will have to find a way of addressing these problems," he said, calling the flare-up in violence this month a "ridiculous tragedy".
The international community has taken a tough stance on the recent spate of attacks on Serbs in Kosovo. It has also denounced armed Albanian gangs, mostly Muslims, operating along the province's border with southern Serbia and Macedonia.
European Commissioner for external affairs, Chris Patten, said at a Balkans economic summit in Skopje last week the violence amounted to "ethnic cleansing" of Serbs by extremist Albanians.
The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR has also slammed the reluctance by Kosovo Albanians to help the province's international security forces to put an end to the violence or even publicly condemn the killings, including a bus bomb that left 10 Serbs dead two weeks ago.
Bearpark said his warning was not a threat but a reflection of a growing international perception that the former victims of the ousted Belgrade regime have themselves become oppressors.
"We are not talking about a form of pressure, we are talking about a form of reality," he said. He said immediately after the war the international community stumped up a massive aid program to help rebuild Kosovo.
"But this is not magical money, it is money from taxpayers in the EU, in the United States, and they are saying through their politicians 'What's going on here?'" said Bearpark, adding that "alarm bells are ringing very loudly" in donor states.
He said no donors had directly threatened to stop aid payments however.
But Therese Sobieski of the European Commission cautioned: "If the violence continues to escalate we'll have probably to take difficult decisions."
The two-day meeting in Pristina was the first donors' conference to be held in Pristina. It started just two days after Balkans leaders met in the Macedonian capital to condemn violence in the region, which has left more than a dozen people dead in the past two weeks, including three Serb police.
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