A.G. was born in a small town in northern Kosovo, to an Albanian father and a Serb mother. He was an only child. Since his father was Albanian he was considered and considered himself to be Albanian, and as a young boy he attended an Albanian school. In his home town, which before the war was ethnically split only loosely between a Serbian enclave to the north, where the family lived, and an Albanian enclave to the south, his early problems came only from the Serbs. Later, after the war began and the town became more formally divided, A.G. encountered trouble wherever he went, accused by both sides of being a collaborator.
Badly tortured by the Serbs, he has fled to the United Kingdom, where he has asked for asylum under the recognised category of the child of ethnically mixed marriages, in danger were he to return home. His application has been turned down, on the grounds that Kosovo is now safe. But not, it seems, for A.G. His home town happens to lie within an area of extreme ethnic tensions, where the two communities are totally divided, a fact recognised by the UN High Commission for Refugees in a document issued in April. It is on this that A.G. is hoping to base his appeal.
No escape from the Serbs
I was at school early in 1995 when the Serb police arrived. This was a private school, held in the home of one of my friends, where we studied in secret, A.G. explains. We didnt even carry Albanian schoolbooks around with us in case we were caught. We were taken to the police station and put into individual cells. There were five policemen and one civilian and they beat us with wooden batons, like baseball bats, and plastic truncheons. One hit me on the head, and I lost consciousness. When I came to, I found myself in hospital. Later, the police told my parents that they had found me in the street and that I must have fallen and knocked myself out. After a few days, a bump appeared just above my eye. My parents took me to hospital in Belgrade, where they gave me some kind of laser treatment. They said that I really needed an operation, but that I was too young and it would have to wait.
A.G. was then 17. Now, at 24, his head is misshapen, the large protuberance over his left eye distorting that side of his face. He has constant headaches, and they are getting worse.
In the years that followed, A.G. and his Albanian friends were picked up by the police from time to time, and held overnight in different police stations. They were invariably beaten, sometimes on their palms and the soles of their feet, after which they would lose consciousness; but they were never charged. His father worked in an office issuing birth certificates, where as an Albanian, in order to keep his job, he was forced to sign a document confirming that he accepted Serb rules and regulations.
In May 1999, NATO planes bombed our town. My mother went to stay with her family in a Serb area some way away. My father stayed in our flat to stop it being looted. I was sent to hide in the woods. When I heard that the peacekeeping forces had arrived in the town, I went home. I found my father hanging in the bathroom. His clothes had been stripped off him and on his chest had been carved a cross, and four large Cs, two written backwards. I knew this was the sign of an extremist Serb group.
A.G. left his fathers body and ran to find help. By the time he had persuaded his neighbours to come back with him, the body had disappeared. No one was able to tell him who had taken it or where it had gone, but he was told that his father was assumed to have been a spy.
Some time later, his mother returned. Mother and son, not certain what to do, stayed on in the flat they had occupied for many years. Despite the presence of the peacekeepers, they were often visited by vigilante squads of Serbs, who left his mother alone but beat him about. One day, with a knife, they stabbed and injured his hand. The local Serb hospital refused to treat him. He seldom left the flat, for fear of what might happen to him in the streets, but he knew that Albanians were being killed and that the peacekeepers seemed unable to protect them. On 3 November 2001, with the help of the French peacekeepers, he moved south, to a cousin in Albanian territory. He left his mother behind, and worried constantly about what might happen to her. Even so, the attacks on him went on.
or the Albanians
One day, some Albanians came to the house and questioned me about my father. They asked me how it was that we had managed to go on living for so long in Serbian territory. They said that they believed that I had moved in order to spy for the Serbs, and that they would kill me if they discovered that this was so.
On 10 January 2002, A.G. went to the local market to shop and was attacked by two of the men who had visited his cousins house. They punched me and started beating me with iron bars that they were carrying. At last they stopped and went away and I was carried to a hospital. I was badly bruised all over. My attackers came back and threatened me again while I was still in hospital. When I went back to my cousins house, they came again, and threatened us all. I did not know what to do. Then, towards the middle of June, they came back and took me to a hut in the countryside. It was dark inside and I was very frightened. This time they told me I had to leave, or they would kill me, and not only me but also my cousin and his family.
From time to time, A.G. and his mother had met at a bridge where the peacekeepers patrolled. Locally, this was known as the agreement area. She said that the vigilantes had been back several times, telling her they believed that her son had left in order to spy for the Albanians, and that if they ever caught him they would kill him.
A.G. and his mother now decided that he had no choice but to leave. Frequent appeals to the peacekeepers for protection had done nothing to make them feel safe. Kosovo is very small. There was nowhere I could go to stay alive.
