As Kosovo Rebuilds, U.N. Hurries to Return Property

from The New York Times

The 9-year-old ethnic Albanian boy screamed until he was red in the face, pounding his fists on the door of a small concrete house that only minutes before he had called home.

“This is my house! Let me in!” he cried, before collapsing outside the front door, freshly sealed with yellow police tape.

The swift eviction of the boy’s family was the work of Toncho Zourlev, a k a the Enforcer, a no-nonsense Bulgarian who leads an eviction squad set up by the United Nations in Kosovo in 2006 to restore properties to their legal owners. To him, the family was simply squatting illegally in a Serbian house.

Read on