Ethnic tensions dominate life in divided Kosovan city, decades after war

By Fatos Bytyci

MITROVICA, Kosovo (Reuters) - Since a new cafe called Missini Sweets opened this month in North Mitrovica, Kosovo, a smattering of guests have enjoyed its drinks and sweets. But the business has faced headwinds: it is run by ethnic Albanians and local ethnic Serbs refuse to enter.

A video posted in August on a Telegram channel popular with Serbs, viewed thousands of times, called for the cafe to be boycotted once open because it is in a Serb-dominated part of the city. An Albanian-run supermarket nearby, also highlighted in the video, has had similar treatment, a worker there said.

"At the moment we are not getting Serb customers because there is a campaign on social media and people are told not to enter my shop," said the owner of Missini Sweets in Mitrovica Astrit Misini.

Violence has flared repeatedly in Mitrovica since it became ethnically divided after the 1999 Kosovo war, as Serbs left southern Kosovo and concentrated in the north, and Albanians moved south. Now, 25 years on, relations in the city are deteriorating again, residents, officials and shop owners said, amid official moves to reopen a flashpoint bridge between the communities.

Independence for ethnic Albanian-majority Kosovo came in 2008, almost a decade after a guerrilla uprising against Serbian rule. However tensions persist mainly in the north where the Serb minority refuses to recognise Kosovo's statehood and still see Belgrade as their capital.

The situation worries western officials and peacekeepers who fear problems in Mitrovica could spark wider tensions between Serbia and Kosovo, just as both are being considered for accession to the European Union - on the condition that they solve their differences.

Mitrovica, with a population of 84,000, is split between 20,000 Serbs living north of the River Ibar, which snakes through the city centre, and ethnic Albanians living in the southern districts.

There is no law governing who can establish a business where, although store owners have generally stuck to their own ethnic communities in the Serb-dominated north or the Albanian south.

But the government of Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti has encouraged Albanian enterprises to move north, and he sometimes visits the area under heavy security to eat in Albanian restaurants. Kurti says he wants to unite communities.

Misini does not see himself as part of some government agenda. However, he said he opened his cafe in the north after receiving "suggestions from the state that there are the right conditions to be there, that there is security now".

Ethnic Serbs see it as part of a wider move by Kurti to extend ethnic Albanian influence across northern Kosovo.

"The Kurti government's moves in the north in the past years, albeit legal... often feel like a hostile takeover," said Frauke Seebass, Visiting Fellow, German Institute of Foreign and Security Affairs Brussels.

For their part, many ethnic Albanians say Serbs are stoking hate online and on the streets, evidenced in the shooting of a police officer by ethnic Serbs in a north Kosovo village in 2023. Serbs deny that they are the problem, but acknowledge the divide.

"This place is gone. You cannot live here," said a north Mitrovica resident named Bojana, commenting on the new shops and mood in the area. She did not give her full name for fear of reprisals from fellow ethnic Serbs.

"I once entered these Albanian shops and I was told by my own people that I am a traitor. But, I also saw I was not welcomed by Albanians in these shops because the waiters were looking at me all the time."

BRIDGING THE GAP

Kosovo has been a culturally diverse area for centuries. Tensions escalated in the late 1980s as Yugoslavia crumbled and Serbia's populist firebrand President Slobodan Milosevic rescinded Kosovo's provincial autonomy.

A NATO bombing campaign pushed Milosevic back in 1999 and the west guaranteed Kosovo's independence from Serbia in 2008. NATO troops have since helped secure a fragile peace.

Tensions came to the fore last month when Kurti said he wanted to reopen the Mitrovica Bridge that crosses the Ibar and links the communities. The bridge was the epicentre of post-war clashes since 2000 and has been mostly closed to road traffic since.

Troops from the Kosovo Force (KFOR), a NATO-led peacekeeping force, still guard it today.

Western officials have warned Kurti that the opening could trigger ethnic violence and endanger NATO troops stationed there. NATO officials have visited Kosovo in recent months to persuade Kurti to back down. The director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns, also urged caution in a meeting with Kurti in August, sources said.

"We are dead set against a unilateral push to open the bridge," a senior NATO official told Reuters. "We do not want to run the risk of any kind of violence that would put KFOR soldiers at risk."

Kurti says re-opening the bridge will unite a divided community. In an interview with Reuters he said that Belgrade wanted to keep the bridge closed to split the majority-Serb north from the rest of Kosovo.

"I think those in Serbia who insist on keeping the bridge closed, they want to keep the dream of partitioning Kosovo alive," he said.

Back by Missini Sweets, Ognen Zravkovic, an ethnic Serb resident of Mitrovica, said he would not enter the cafe. The area "is ours still," he said.

(Reporting by Fatos Bytyci in Mitrovica. Additional reporting by Andrew Gray in Brussels and Jonathan Landay in Washington. Writing by Edward McAllister; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)