Frédéric Sautereau

Kosovo: nervous breakdown

With an unemployment rate of more than 50%, the state of Kosovo is overwhelmed with corruption. Under United Nation authority for the past eight years, the population only grows poorer. In Mitrovica, a city symbolic of the division between the Serbian and Albanian communities, the tense situation has not changed much since the end of the war in 1999. 

Displaced Serb, Albanian and Rrom families still live in slums and have stopped believing in the empty promises made by politicians and the international community. The Serbian population in the north of Mitrovica still feel abandoned and under siege.
However, the Albanian population of the south, living in abject poverty concerns itself with frequent power shortages and increasing unemployment rates. The south of Mitrovica is drowning in an economic depression has spread throughout society.

December 2007.