U.N. Takes Over Mining Complex in Kosovo
Aug. 17, 2000 -- The most important economic asset in Yugoslavia, the Trepca mining complex, is now firmly in the hands of a NATO-led peacekeeping force (KFOR) and the U.N. Interim Administration in Kosovo.
“We are now the administration of all the complex of Trepca,” announced the U.N.’s chief of mission in Kosovo Bernard Kouchner.
The pounce on Kosovo’s main asset, previously controlled by Serbs and managed by bosses appointed by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, confirms the worst fears of Kosovo’s dwindling Serb minority.
Kouchner was visiting the Zvecan lead smelting plant which was seized by 900 KFOR troops from Britain, France and Denmark in a dawn raid on Monday.
Rejected NATO Demands
It has been closed down. Serb bosses had refused to listen to NATO’s demand that it should be shut down for repairs because it was polluting the whole region.
Lead emissions in the atmosphere were 200 times the maximum considered safe. Poison smoke now no longer belches from its chimneys.
The first act by the new U.N. administrators, who were hassled and pelted with stones as they moved in, was to throw out the Milosevic-appointed boss Novak Bjelic, who refused to comply with the order to close down the plant.
The U.N. has offered to pay layoff wages of $24 a month to the 600 employees at the lead plant. This is more than they were paid on the job by Belgrade.
In spite of radical Serb pickets half of them have taken up the offer so far. Half again have volunteered blood tests, since the U.N. suspects that their health could have suffered permanent damage.
A 500-strong contingent of KFOR troops, most of them British, have been withdrawn from the area, which is now secured by the French and Danes.
The U.N. and the KFOR will now get their first chance to try to check out claims that hundreds of bodies of Kosovo Albanians were incinerated in some of the complex’s blast furnaces, particularly in a nickel smelting plant.
Other sources said that more hundreds of bodies of Kosovo Albanians slaughtered in the Serb rampage before and during NATO bombing last year were tipped into disused mine shafts in order to cover up evidence of war crimes.
Threats of Violence
The Trepca complex contains industrial complexes, 41 factories and mines, and represents three quarters of the mineral and industrial wealth of Yugoslavia, of which Kosovo is still nominally a part.
Without it, Milosevic cannot revive his ailing economy in Serbia. He had threatened to spark another armed conflict in order to get it back, but had so far managed to keep control of it through henchmen from Belgrade.
Kouchner described conditions in the lead smelting plant as desperate.
“It’s as if we were living in the 19th century,” he said after his inspection tour. “We cannot accept that people risk their lives as slaves at the beginning of the 21st century.”
A consortium of French, U.S. and Swedish companies has been hired to come in and bring the Trepca complex up to modern industrial standards.
The Serbs employed there will keep their jobs, Kouchner, promised. More jobs would be created, and Kosovo Albanians pushed out of jobs in the past 10 years, especially in management and engineering, will be allowed to return to the best-paid employment in the region.
It is doubtful if many Serbs will want to stay and work under inevitable Kosovo Albanian control. Another exodus of the estimated 200,000 left in Kosovo is predicted.