Hello from Kosovo,

It has been a while since I last wrote an update on my mission here so I thought it time to do so. I have been here for seven months now and things are going as well as can be expected. The water and power situation is better than when I first got here but there still are times when there are problems for a few days. Just last month we had power rationing. The power was on for three hours and then off for three. You just have to get used to it. The water situation may be a problem since there was not much snowfall this winter. The reservoir is low and I expect water problems this summer. I am already stocking up on the bottles of water. The winter was thankfully pretty mild, although there were days when I could see my breath inside the house. The cold was only a problem for the officers from tropical areas, especially the African countries. They were surprised to see me wearing short sleeve shirts when they were wrapped up in their heaviest coats. That brings up a funny story. One of my police colleagues from one of the African countries was explaining his police duties back home. He is an “Elephant Officer.” He explained that it is his job to sit all day in a watchtower and keep a lookout for elephants nearing his village. If elephants come near he is to sound a warning to the village, as elephants are very dangerous and destructive. He is a second-generation “Elephant Officer” as his father before him. I asked him how many times he has spotted elephants and he said that he has never seen one yet. As a point of fact, he doesn’t think his father ever saw one either. I am still conducting classroom training for the new Kosovo Police Service (KPS) officers as they are assigned to our station from the police academy. They have to undergo four weeks of classroom training at the station level before being released to their Field Training Officers. The training is going well and the young officers seem eager to learn; especially from U.S. officers. I was involved last week in the return of one hundred Albanian Prisoners of War from Serbia. They have been in prison since the 1999 war; some of them for no other reason but that they are Albanian. It was quite an experience. American police and military had to escort the buses from the Serbian border to the release point here in Pristina. It was a pretty tense situation because a bus load of Serbian civilians was bombed while under military escort just three weeks ago on the same road. There thankfully were no problems this time. I was assigned to control traffic at the entrance to the release point. There were over five thousand people at the release point to welcome the prisoners back. I was surprised to see the types of people the prisoners turned out to be. The kind of Prisoners of War you would expect to see would be men of fighting age between 18 and 45. These POWs were men and women, old and young. Some looked very thin and all were in civilian clothes. Not one of them was in uniform. As the prisoners were released they left the area in the company of many of their family and friends. There were a lot of tearful reunions and a steady stream of people leaving the area, waving Albanian flags. The most memorable thing about the whole event for me was being approached by several of the prisoners as they left. Several of them stopped to shake my hand and thank me just because I was an American. They had seen the American flag on the sleeve of my uniform and wanted to thank me for getting them released. We are still the heroes to these people. I hope it stays that way. On the negative, there has been another outbreak of hostilities. There are two separate groups of Albanian guerilla armies. One is called the UCPMB and is operating on the eastern border between Kosovo and Serbia. They have been attacking Serbian forces in the NATO “buffer zone.” The other group, the NLA, is fighting on the southern border between Kosovo and Macedonia. There is a fear that this fighting may escalate into a civil war in Macedonia. Supplies for Kosovo come through the border with Macedonia and there are already shortages and increased prices because of the fighting. Our gasoline is also being rationed now. Things here in Pristina are still fairly safe but the fighting is only fifty miles from here. Time will tell how, or if, the new hostilities will affect the mission here. Well, that’s all the Balkan news I have for now. For those of you who can get it, the BBC World News has good coverage of the area. I’ll be home again soon. So long for now form Kosovo.
Clay Coker