Kosovars Who Fought for Land Are Now Eager to Leave

Slide Show By ALISON SMALEMARCH 7, 2015
The New York Times


STANOVC, Kosovo — The extended Cakaj family has built a few dozen homes here, along Tony Blair Street, between the Dubai supermarket and the French peacekeepers base, in a clannish faith that closeness would bring security. But recently the family of Kosovo Albanians has begun to splinter, as a disastrous economy, static politics and a newly created opening in the border with Serbia have enticed tens of thousands of Kosovars to leave their troubled land in search of opportunity and work.

“My son had no choice,” said Xhevat Cakaj, but to leave their enclave for Germany with his wife and their five girls. They had only one cow, he said, whose milk they sold in a market in nearby Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, and their only other source of income was running a minibus service until the local authorities clamped down.

Squinting to survey the land where his family hid from the Serbs in the 1999 war, he wept at the irony of fate. “No one leaves for pleasure,” said Mr. Cakaj, 64.

Afrim Syla, 48, of Pristina, who makes pancakes for a living and recently had a son join the exodus, concurred: Once, Kosovars were laying down their lives to stay here. “Now,” he said, “we have come to a situation where we leave of our own free will.”

The New York Times

Sixteen years after NATO, in its only war, drove out Serbian security forces so 850,000 Kosovo Albanians expelled by the Serbs could return home, the flow of Kosovo Albanians has reversed. For months now, buses have been bringing Kosovo Albanians through Serbia to the porous land border with Hungary, in the European Union.

The Albanians cross on foot, often undetected. When picked up by Hungarian officials, they have been detained only briefly. Many are enticed by the promises of a paid Serbian “guide” or have a friend or relative in Austria, Switzerland, Germany or Scandinavia and, moving freely among European Union nations, make their way toward them.

But Kosovo’s Albanians, most of whom are Muslims, are not being greeted with open arms. In another twist, they are being forced back to their land, deemed too physically — if not financially — secure to warrant asylum status.

The turnaround says as much about Western Europe’s struggle to handle its torrent of refugees and other immigrants seeking stability and opportunity, as it does about the isolation and deprivation of the people in the Balkans.

At Pristina’s grim bus station, the flow of buses leaving each night is down to two, from a reported 12. There, a large notice lists 10 reasons not to emigrate, first among them that the Kosovo state for which Albanians fought so hard needs people if it is to exist.

But persuading people to remain and reintegrating those who are being forced to return remains a challenge.

“It’s going to be a very difficult spring,” said Samuel Zbogar, a Slovenian diplomat who heads the European Union’s mission here.

No one seems to know exactly when and why the exodus started, but it has been startling in its swiftness and intensity. Officials in Austria and Germany sounded alarms in January, after registering huge increases in Kosovo Albanians seeking asylum.
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The immediate trigger was a fresh opportunity at the border. Kosovars — unlike impoverished Balkan neighbors in Albania, Macedonia and Bosnia — do not have access to European visa programs, contributing to their sense of abandonment and isolation, political leaders, officials and independent researchers say.


European-brokered agreements last fall — part of continuing Western efforts to foster cooperation between Kosovo Albanians and Serbs — created more entry points for Kosovars to enter neighboring Serbia and freer passage across Serbia, as well as broader mutual recognition of identity documents. The buses started to roll northward.

While Kosovars felt hope in the aftermath of their brutal war with the Serbs and their declaration of independence in 2008, many — particularly the young — say they now see few prospects.

Many feel a stifling sense of uncertainty rooted, in part, in the territory’s status. Russia, a longtime ally of Serbia, does not recognize it, and some nations see its independence as a signal to their own separatists: China, which is under pressure for a free Tibet and five of the 28 members of the European Union — most notably Spain, which worries about Catalonia.

Domestically, Kosovo is reeling. Elections last June went unresolved for months, until the party of the former prime minister, Hashim Thaci, a hero of the war against Serbia lately accused by critics of being power hungry and corrupt, muscled its way into a governing coalition. Mr. Thaci is now foreign minister.

Adding to this brew of troubles is the economy. In a region plagued by aging demographics, it is Europe’s youngest territory, with 27 the average age of its two million citizens. Kosovo would need an impossible 7 percent annual economic growth to offer work to the 25,000 to 30,000 youths the government says finish school each year. Direct investment from foreign sources is about $270 million a year, half what it was in 2007, said Lumir Abdixhiku, executive director of Riinvest, an independent research group.

Austria registered 1,901 asylum applications from Kosovo citizens in 2014, but saw 1,029 in January alone, said Karl-Heinz Grundböck of the Interior Ministry in Vienna. By mid-February, Germany had some 18,000 applications from Kosovars since Jan. 1.

Within Kosovo, the Education Ministry counts some 5,600 absent pupils.

But Western Europe is already swamped with refugees from war and turbulence in the Middle East and Africa, and is struggling to integrate Muslim immigrants. Accommodation is so scarce that some Kosovo arrivals were housed in old United States Army barracks in Heidelberg, Germany.

In Germany, the flood from Kosovo has now slowed to about 200 arrivals a day, from 1,400 a day in early February.

Children playing in a housing estate in Pristina. More than 5,000 children have disappeared from Kosovo's schools during the recent migration of Kosovars to Hungary. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Prime Minister Isa Mustafa, 63, now faces the challenge of keeping Kosovo Albanians at home. A veteran of Kosovo politics, he said he hoped to ease youth discontent by spreading the city’s sports and cultural facilities across Kosovo — a region that broils in summer, but still has no public swimming pool — and improving education.


“We have to free people from this isolation,” he said.

Many here see the solution in a regulated flow of visas for Europe. Mr. Abdixhiku, the analyst, said providing 100,000 Kosovars opportunities in Europe could compensate for neglect. “It was not fair,” he said, “to leave Kosovo as a black hole for all these years,” limiting even business travel.

But European governments are troubled by rising populism and nationalism, along with voters’ complaints about immigration from even European Union member states like Romania and Bulgaria. Germany expects 300,000 asylum applications this year after just over 200,000 in 2014. So visas are unlikely.

Mr. Zbogar, the European Union diplomat, talked of an increase in European spending, to about $90 million this year, from $80 million. Germany and others are also promising more aid.

Critics said corruption is rampant, undermining development. They point to new government highways recently built, linking Pristina with Albania and its coast, whose costs ballooned.

Ardian Gjini, a leader of the opposition party Alliance for the Freedom of Kosovo, likened the highway project — and corruption in general — to giving one’s son a 100 euro note (about $110) and asking him to buy two glasses of wine. The son proudly returns with the wine, but cannot say where the change went, Mr. Gjini said bitterly.

For the Cakaj family, the problems have prompted some reinvention. Isa Cakaj, 42, showed a visitor around his neat food store and compound, including a two-story home, cow stall and apple orchard. He has a degree in geological engineering, but Kosovo’s mineral mines are either drying up, or still untapped. So he is retraining in forensics, supporting his wife, father and five children as best he can.

Opposite his home is the well-appointed but deserted compound of a cousin who works year-round in Germany and visits in summer — and is among those who send an estimated $650 million in remittances back to Kosovo each year.

“If you don’t have connections and know people, there is no way for you to get a job,” said Isa Cakaj’s father, Sherif. Officials, he said angrily, “don’t care if you have a job or not; they just want you to pay the utility bills.”

In his 75 years, he insisted, things had never been so bad. “The worst thing is when you are alive, but you are dead,” he said. “If I was not so old, I would leave myself.”

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