MITROVICA, Yugoslavia, Aug. 28 -- While many Kosovar Albanians have checked out their houses on the north side of this now divided city this week, only 15 families have returned home. 'Many just can't put up with threats and intimidation from Serbs who live there,' 37-year-old Sevdije Azemi said today. She, her husband and three children moved last Friday to her sister's apartment, which overlooks the bridge dividing Serbs on the north from ethnic Albanians in the south. Azemi and her husband Rexhep, 40, stay in the apartment most of the time. Blankets hung over broken windows make things dark and gloomy inside. Their children leave only to get food handed out by humanitarian aid agencies. When Sevdije and Rexhep go outside, usually to visit their parents on the south side of the bridge, Serbs taunt her with stares and threats. Sometimes they throw rocks. 'It's too difficult to live here. We have passed through this hell during the war, but it continues,' she said. 'I have nothing against them, but why do they have to harass us?' Their insistence in living on the north side of the city is a measure of success, however, for United Nations officials here. 'Nobody believed we could start resettlement without a freedom of movement agreement,' said Mary Pat Silviera, deputy district administrator for the United Nations Mission in Kosovo's Mitrovica office. 'It's working. Anything that moves fairly gradually seems to work.' Kosovo Albanians and Serbs here were unable to come to an agreement about allowing families to move back and forth across the bridge.
Women and children are free to travel back and forth, but military-age men are often stopped by Serbs on the north side of the bridge and sent away. The family left all of its important belongings packed, just in case they have to move again, Azemi said. As Serbs in a cafe start chanting to belittle someone on the street, six floors below the apartment, Rexhep Azemi sighs, then shakes his head. 'If you stay here, you'll go crazy,' he said. But Sevdije is trying to convince more of her friends and neighbors to move back into their old apartments. Even though she is scared, she would rather live with her sister than in the empty factory on the south side of the bridge where she and her family first found shelter when they tried to move back home. 'When there are more of us here, they won't have a chance to intimidate us as much,' she said. ---
Copyright 1999 by United Press International. All rights reserved. ---
