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Archaeotechnology Feature
This article presents a short history of the Kosovo mining-metallurgy industry within the course of the last 800 years. Kosovo, as a relatively small piece of land in the Balkans, contains that region's highest concentration of mineral wealth (silver, lead, zinc, tin, coal). This paper explains the social and political impacts of metal production in medieval Serbia, the Ottoman Empire, and Yugoslavia. The recent clashes between Serbs and Albanians are viewed in the light of the "geopolitics of minerals."
INTRODUCTION
It was early morning (3:30 a.rn:) on August 14, 2000, when hundreds of NATO-led peacekeepers, wearing surgical masks for protection from toxic smoke, swept into a Serb-run metal-melting complex in Kosovo's town of Zvecan to shut down a lead smelter.
According to the United Nations (U.N.) administration that runs Kosovo, the smelter represented an environmental danger. Kosovo's top administrator, Bernard Kouchner, was quoted as saying: "We had to act. As a doctor and a chief administrator of Kosovo, I would be derelict if I let this threat to the health of children and pregnant women continue for one day."1 Kouchner also criticized Zvecan's managers: "The managers have failed. A few profited while the community suffered. They failed in their duty to protect their children. Such managers would play no further part in the running of Zvecan".2
On the other hand, Serb leaders said that the U.N.'s professed environmental concerns were only a ruse to get rid of Serb managers with close ties to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Yugoslav officials described the takeover as "robbery" and as a violation of a U.N. resolution that allowed the peacekeepers to operate in Kosovo.2
The smelter in dispute is part of the Treoca mining complex, a collection of about 40 mines that produce gold, silver, lead, zinc, and cadmium. Serbs and Albanians have long fought over resources, as have others (for instance, the British and Germans in the eve of World War II).
The Trepca mine, located near K. Mitrovica and 48 kilometers north of Pristina (the capital of Kosovo), was developed by a British company in the 1920s. However, when Hitler partitioned Kosovo into occupation zones with his Axis Allies (Italy and Bulgaria) after the occupation of Serbia in 1941, he took care...