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The centuries of conflict over a sacred heartland

8 March 1998

Like earlier Balkan wars, the battle in Kosovo, the impoverished southern province of former Yugoslavia, has its roots in history. For the Serbs the region is the sacred heartland of their long-lost medieval state. For the ethnic Albanians who make up 90% of its population, it has been home for centuries.

The rise of virulent Serbian nationalism was the trigger for the current conflict. In the Yugoslavia of Josip Broz Tito, the former communist leader, Kosovo, although extremely poor, enjoyed a degree of formal autonomy within Serbia.

Under Slobodan Milosevic, the bullet-headed Serbian nationalist, everything changed. In 1989, two years after he came to power as Serbian Communist party leader, he visited Kosovo and proclaimed himself the protector of local Serbs claiming to be the victims of discrimination. He rescinded Kosovo’s autonomous status later that year.

The province is seen as the spiritual home of the Serbian nation: in 1389, at Kosovo Polje, the Serbs lost a battle with Turkish troops that consigned them to 500 years of rule by the Ottoman empire.

Milosevic’s initiative to reclaim Kosovo prompted riots in 1989 and 1990. He sent tanks against the protesters and their leaders fled or were killed.

The ethnic Albanians have never given up their demand for independence. They have ignored the state network, setting up a ‘parallel society’ of schools and hospitals. The driving force behind the policy of passive resistance has been Ibrahim Rugova, known as the ‘Gandhi of the Balkans’ – a quiet intellectual who is president of the self-styled republic of Kosovo.

The present violence appears to have been provoked by younger, more militant Kosovans who feel frustrated at Rugova’s failure to win concessions for them. The Kosovo Liberation Army, an armed guerrilla group, emerged 18 months ago, claiming responsibility for the killings of Serbian policemen and informers. It appears to be funded by Kosovan emigrés in Germany and Switzerland.

By last month the attacks had grown so lethal that the Serbian police withdrew from much of the Drenica region, a stronghold of separatists northwest of Pristina, the capital. Milosevic responded last week by ordering troops to raze villages there.

The fear now is that fighting in Kosovo, which was largely unaffected by the conflicts that engulfed Croatia and Bosnia in the early 1990s, may lead to a wider Balkan war. This could drag in Albania and Macedonia, which has its own ethnic Albanian population. Turkey is sympathetic to fellow Muslims in Kosovo, while Greece could be drawn in on the side of the Orthodox Serbs.

Kosovo’s silent houses of the dead

PREKAZ

15 March 1998

All 11-year-old Basorta Jashari knew was that the artillery shells had stopped crashing into her house. For hours, the noise had been unbearable.

As she hugged herself tightly beneath the table her mother used to prepare bread, the ceiling had collapsed and the walls had appeared to explode. Now it was the silence that was terrifying. Choking on smoke and dust, she screamed for her mother.

Weeping as she crawled through the rubble, she found her sisters, Lirie, 10, Fatima, 8, and seven-year-old Blerina. She tried to shake them awake and was covered in blood by the time she realised they were dead.

Then Basorta saw her brothers: Selvete, 20, Afeti, 17, Besim, 14, and Blerin, 12. They had always seemed so strong. Now, all were dead.

Finally, there was her mother, Ferida, whose dark shiny hair and beautiful voice Basorta had cherished, lying with her limbs protruding at impossible angles. She would never again respond to her daughter’s cry of ‘nene’ (mummy).

Basorta climbed through a hole in the wall and ran round the house, shouting: ‘Anybody … is anybody still alive?’ When nobody answered, she crawled back under the table.

The pause in the shelling was all too brief. Basorta would spend the night and the next day alone, with her family dead all around her, as the Serbs’ rockets came again and again, smashing into the whitewashed house with red-tiled roof that had once been home.

A bright, happy pupil at school, Basorta was the sole survivor of an attack that can now be revealed as nothing less than a calculated, cold-blooded massacre.

The house in Prekaz, a village in a pastoral landscape of neatly tilled fields and rolling hills, had sheltered 22 members of the families of two brothers, Hamza Jashari, Basorta’s father, and Adem Jashari, her uncle – ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the southernmost province of what remains of Serb-ruled Yugoslavia.

Their deaths were no accident of war. I pieced together the horror last week from the account Basorta – now in hiding in the nearby town of Srbica – gave to relatives who managed to escape from other homes in Prekaz. I saw the gaping holes in the roofs and walls of the three Jashari homes in the compound – one for Basorta’s grandparents and one each for Hamza and Adem – and the brown pockmarks left by close-range machinegun fire on the walls.

In the muddy farmyard lay strewn the detritus of domestic life: a little boy’s shredded sports bag, postcards from relatives in Germany and a satellite dish dented by bullets. The nose cones and tailfins of two rockets were scattered amid the debris.

Yesterday all that moved in the compound that once teemed with children were two black and white cows and a flock of chickens pecking at the rubble. On the other side of the dirt road that runs in front of the compound were 51 fresh graves with mounds of dark earth and wooden crosses.

These were the final resting places of the Jasharis who died in the house, four relatives who were killed nearby and neighbours who got in the way of the Serbian forces.

There is little doubt that the Jashari brothers were connected to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a militant force that emerged last November dedicated to fighting for the interests of the ethnic Albanians who make up 90% of Kosovo’s population.

They had grown impatient with the policies of the mainstream Kosovo Democratic League. The league advocates passive resistance to the strong-arm tactics of Slobodan Milosevic, the nationalist Serbian president of Yugoslavia, who revoked the province’s autonomous status 10 years ago.

However, this was not the killing of suspected terrorists in a firefight, nor the ambush of dangerous outlaws. It was a military assault on three family homes without warning: on men, women and children asleep in their beds.

The Serbian offensive in the Drenica valley, a region of farming villages that is the stronghold of Albanian resistance, began on 28 February, the day after four Serbian policemen were killed in an ambush as they chased KLA guerrillas. The Serbs moved first against the village of Llaushe, killing 24 Albanians. Then they prepared to attack Prekaz, where the Jasharis were the principal family.

Jetish Durmishi, a bus driver, was alerted to danger when a friend telephoned from his home near the local police station in Mitrovica with the warning that a convoy of buses full of Serbian police was moving towards Prekaz.

Durmishi escaped to the woods, leaving his family behind; in the past the Serbs had targeted only men. He saw what happened from the woods above the Jashari compound.

‘Within minutes it seemed, the police came and the village was surrounded by a cordon of Serbs,’ Durmishi said. ‘They were standing about half a yard apart all along the road and up across the hills.’

The artillery fire came at 6am from a Serbian base above Prekaz. There was no warning. The first to die were the Agas, members of a gypsy family who panicked and tried to flee their house.

The mother, a small boy and a girl were gunned down in their garden. The next victim was Nazmi Jashari, who ran a kiosk in Prekaz selling cigarettes and sundries and lived opposite the main family compound.

He tried to carry his elderly mother, Naile, out of the back door, and was shot in front of her. The signal was clear. Anyone seen leaving their home would be a target for Serbian snipers.

The extended Jashari family gathered in what they thought would be the safest room, which had a new brick wall. But they were trapped: they faced gunfire if they came out or bombing if they remained inside. Soon, the shells were coming through the roof, then the walls. Basorta’s last memory of her family is that her uncle, Adem, was singing Albanian folk songs above the noise to keep up their spirits. She remembers the moment he stopped singing. Then, for 36 hours, there was only the sound of the bombs.

When they thought everybody inside was dead, the police entered the house, throwing grenades into several rooms ahead of them. One officer stood guard while another sprayed the bodies with bullets.

Perhaps they had had their fill of killing when they found Basorta cowering. Perhaps they thought she was too young to accuse them. Or perhaps they could not look a terrified schoolgirl in the eye and shoot her. But she is the reason the truth can be told.

‘I tried to pretend I was dead,’ she said to her uncle Hilmi. ‘But one of the soldiers put his hand on my chest and he felt I was alive.’

Still dressed in her red shirt and black trousers, by now covered with blood, she had to step over the bodies of her family to leave the room, surrounded by Serbs. She was taken to the military base nearby and interrogated for three hours.

Basorta believed her only chance was to lie. She denied that she was a Jashari, claiming her father was abroad and she was merely a guest in the compound. ‘They asked about my father and about Uncle Adem,’ she said. ‘I told them nothing, nothing.’

The Serbs dumped her on a road in Srbica and she ran to the home of a school friend. Yesterday, shocked and finding it increasingly difficult to speak, she was being moved from house to house for protection.

Unbeknown to Basorta, the bodies of her father, mother, uncle, aunt and all her cousins were lined up by the police at a bus depot in Mitrovica last week.

When nobody from the family turned up to identify them and friends tried to insist on post-mortem examinations, the Serbs dumped them in the graveyard they had dug opposite the remains of their house, leaving the coffins poking through the earth. The surviving villagers came back in the night to finish the job with respect.

All that was left of Basorta’s family was a pile of numbered black bin bags at the bus station, each filled with the bloody clothing they had been wearing when they died.

Kosovo guerrillas fight Serb shells with bullets

25 April 1999

Marie Colvin, the first reporter to enter Kosovo from Albania, is with a KLA unit fighting to open supply lines. She braved sniper fire and shelling to send this report.

At night, the foothills of Kosovo are silent except for the sporadic sound of gunfire. The silence makes them even more terrifying to walk through. Serbian snipers are in the woods but we do not know where they are. The anticipation of a shot at any moment is unnerving. Nobody speaks.

There are no civilians left in these woods or villages. It is dark and cold and when the shooting starts the crossfire can be petrifying. Bullets slam into trees.

I walked in single file on Friday night with a KLA special forces unit advancing towards the distant lights of the city of Djakovica. The Serbs were 500 metres away.

We walked through a village of six houses. All the red roofs had been holed by shells and half of one house was a pile of rubble. First the Serbs had driven out the ethnic Albanian farmers, then the KLA had driven out the Serbs. There is little for the families to return to.

Our goal was a gully in the forest overlooking Serbian positions in the village of Batusa. It was cold and wet and I slipped off a log when I was trying to cross a stream. A soldier held me up with the butt of his Kalashnikov.

Camp for the night was in camouflaged tarpaulins strung over branches. A pile of sleeping bags stashed earlier was sodden with the cold rain that had fallen all day and into the night. It is difficult to sleep in a flak jacket on a slope; it is like being an upended turtle with a detached shell. I keep slipping down the slope.

A patrol set out into the darkness and the night was broken intermittently by gunfire: single shots, automatic weapons fire and the crack of snipers’ rifles resounding off the hills. At 1am there was a long exchange of fire. Shells boomed intermittently though none landed close. One man in a returning patrol said he had killed a Serb, but nothing is sure here.

The watch came in for breakfast and a soldier passed round packets of cigarettes, bread and tins of sardines. This unit travels light. We overheard the Serbs on the radio asking to go back to their bunkers.

Every night has been like this for the past two months for this unit on the front line of the KLA offensive. The last weeks have been the worst. The Serbs have not attacked on foot; they have just shelled. Their tanks and artillery are beyond the hills. Two shells landed during breakfast.

It is heartbreaking for these men to hear Nato planes fly overhead on their way to Belgrade and Novi Sad. Everyone asks me when Nato will start bombing Serbian tanks and artillery and when the Apache helicopters will arrive.

The men in this special forces unit are different from the raw recruits one sees in most of the KLA camps. They have been fighting together for a year and seem like the units seen in old war movies.

There is ‘Doc’, who looks after communications as well as the wounded and to whom most of the men turn in time of crisis. Their commander was killed by a sniper 10 days ago. Another soldier, Morina, remembers his village and how the old men wept when he left. Another refuses to get out of bed, saying he cares more about the cold than the Serbs.

Few have heard from their families for months. They accept that there will be no news until the Serbs leave.

The KLA holds a small but strategic foothold in Kosovo at this point. The group I am with has so far penetrated about 8 kilometres from Kosare, a Serbian border post captured by the KLA just over two weeks ago.

Kosare is in a small cleft between the mountains and the KLA holds the mountains, including a towering, snow-bound peak where KLA soldiers sleep in 3 foot of snow. They will dominate the valley as soon as they take Batusa, the next target.

The KLA is trying to meet up with other units inside Kosovo who have been besieged and are running low on food and ammunition. They can hear that the Serbs are low on food and ammunition and constantly requesting to go back to their bunkers. The spirits among the units are rising.

There is still a big question of whether any of these units will be able to join up with the inside forces because of the superior armaments of the Serbs. They have tanks and artillery and the KLA is fighting with Kalashnikovs and a few modern Nato-issue guns; but their spirit and courage are extraordinary.

On the first day when the KLA fought its way into Kosare, the Serbs replied with a welter of shells; now shells fall three or four times a day. Shards of broken flowerpots cover two unexploded shells in a concrete courtyard outside the former Yugoslav barracks – now KLA headquarters in Kosovo – and there are six shellholes in its red-brick facade.

When the sun came out for a moment on Friday, I took a bowl of bread and soup outside for my lunch. Within minutes there was a whistle of a shell, which burst 100 metres away. As I moved inside, another whistled down.

In between shells, the men waited to go on their 24-hour shifts at the front, smoking, sleeping, talking about home. The uniforms are from Switzerland, Germany and America – all bought by the KLA recruits on their way to war. One man wears a black jacket that says ‘Let’s go!’ on the sleeve. Most have good boots but some set off to battle in black rubber wellingtons.

Those returning from patrol collapse onto iron bunk beds still in their clothes. The beds are warm from those who have left to replace them.

It is a barracks with no comfort. The windows have been blown out by shellfire. Off-duty soldiers cook on wood-burning stoves, heating up big pots of stew from tins left behind by the Serbs. There is no electricity. There is a generator but the base commander thinks it makes too much noise so it goes unused. At night those who cannot sleep stand in the halls lit by a fire and talk of home – never of war.

Coffee, cigarettes and sometimes bread arrive by donkey from Albania. Soldiers cluster around to greet them. Days are spent cleaning out the barracks. A sodden pile of detritus from Serbs is in the courtyard – fatigues, sweaters, playing cards, empty soft-drinks bottles and letters. Soldiers amuse themselves by looking through photographs of Serbs in uniforms with their girlfriends.

Last week they passed around one letter that horrified even these people who are used to news of Serbian attrocities. It was written by a Serbian doctor, Bojan Mihailovic, to his son at the front. It closed by saying: ‘When you come back home, can you bring me the body of one dead Albanian so that I can cut its neck.’ The letter went on to say love from ‘Jasna, mother Anka and grandmother Milica’.

From the front line overlooking Batusa yesterday, a landscape that would under normal circumstances be a lovely valley of red roofs, farmhouses and green fields instead looked empty and dangerous. We could see through binoculars that Djakovica, in the distance, had been burnt and shelled. Only Serbs were left.

All the ethnic Albanians fled or were bused out. All the villages I have walked through are empty. Many of the men with me know these villages. There is almost nothing left behind in them. Whatever was not stolen has been smashed or broken.

On two days last week the Serbs fired shells that emitted white smoke. It seemed to be some kind of chemical. Those who breathed it suffer red eyes, an inability to breathe, small pupils and disorientation. Doctors do not know what it is. A few gas masks have now arrived.

The spirit of the men here is extraordinary. Many are young and have no experience. Most have families in Kosovo and are constantly worried about mothers, fathers, children, sisters and brothers.

There is Burim, 19, an architectural student, who after being expelled from Kosovo by the Serbs joined the KLA as soon as he crossed the border.

Angel left his restaurant in Sweden and told his mother he was going to find a wife in Albania. ‘I am not a soldier and I have no experience, but I have come to Kosovo with all my heart,’ he said.

Pren left his friends and family in Zurich without a word because he feared they would try to stop him.

All are very young. It is somehow more heartbreaking that some of these men will die with the end of Serbian occupation in sight.

Massacre in a spring meadow: war in Europe

2 May 1999

In a war of numerous atrocities Marie Colvin talks to over 100 witnesses of the most horrifying slaughter Kosovo has endured.

Seven-year-old Egzon Zyberi interrupted adult conversations late last week with a childish monotone. ‘Long live Milosevic!’ he chanted. ‘Kosovo is Serbian!’

The little boy in orange trousers seemed to want an explanation, his brown eyes darting about for a reaction.

They were strange words to hear from a young Kosovan refugee but everyone around him knew what had happened.

They were what Serbs in uniforms and black masks had made Egzon, his brothers and cousins shout as the children watched their fathers and grandfather being dragged away to a killing field at the village of Meja in southwestern Kosovo on Tuesday morning.

‘I didn’t feel well to say this,’ Egzon muttered to a translator, when asked what had happened at Meja.

Egzon’s 40-year-old father, Dani, his 30-year-old uncle, Skandar, and his 65-year-old grandfather, Burim, were all pulled out of a refugee convoy by the Serbs. Arbur Hajosaj, a 16-year-old boy they had picked up on the road with his grandmother, was also taken.

They appear to have been some of the many victims of what is emerging as the worst Serbian atrocity of the war in Kosovo.

The women and children last saw them being escorted into a field in the centre of Meja where lines of men already sat in the open under the barrels of what they described as hundreds of Serbian gunmen. Then the Serbian forces on a narrow road shouted at the family to move, move, move. There was no chance to say goodbye.

None of the women knew how to drive a tractor so a 12-year-old neighbour jumped into the seat. ‘He kept bumping into the other tractors,’ said Egzon, perking up at something he could talk about. ‘He didn’t even know how to drive.’

Egzon and what remains of the Zyberi family now live in a tent in a muddy field outside the city of Kukes in northern Albania. Snow-capped peaks tower over them. Their tent shelters Egzon’s mother, grandmother and two aunts, his three small brothers and his two little cousins, one only two months old.

In a corner, weeping silently, is Fawze Hajosaj, the elderly woman who lost her grandson to the Serbs. The Zyberi family does not know her; but she has nobody else so they have taken her in.

The Zyberis are far from alone in their affliction. They are in a camp, run by Médecins sans Frontières which shelters most of the families who arrived last week from the latest wave of Serbian ethnic cleansing around the city of Djakovica.

Women wash clothes in brightly coloured plastic basins, children play in the dirt, a few old men gather in little clusters. But in row after row of dark green tents there are no fathers. Family after family tells the same story and it always ends with Meja.

Yesterday the Zyberi women were still hoping their men had somehow escaped the Serbs. They had not been told that other families who passed through Meja after them had seen a pile of bodies in the field in the centre of the village. ‘There has certainly been a mass killing,’ confirmed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Estimates of the total dead ranged yesterday from 200 to more than 1,000. Whichever proves correct, the Serbian forces are now killing on a scale that matches their bloodlust in the Bosnian and Croatian wars. In Bosnia, they reached a peak of savagery shortly before their strategic position began to deteriorate.

The trigger that turned Meja into a killing field may have been the assassination there of a senior Serbian officer and several of his bodyguards by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) about 10 days ago. Shortly afterwards, a renewed wave of ethnic cleansing began in the area.

The Zyberi family had already been ‘cleansed’ once from its farmland around a remote village called Molic.

A month ago, under pressure from the Serbs, Nushe Zyberi, the grandmother and matriarch of the family, took her husband, her two sons and their families to live with her sister’s family in the village of Dobros. They hoped to sit out the Serbian offensive there and return to their farm instead of ending up homeless in Albania or Macedonia.

There was no work and little food. The only shops open in nearby Djakovica were Serbian and the owners had started refusing to sell food – even bread and milk – to ethnic Albanians.

Last Monday night, the adults and children went to sleep as usual crowded together in blankets on the floor. Tuesday morning dawned cold and rainy. While the children slept, the adults rose early. The women started a wood fire and began baking bread.

At 6am gunfire sounded throughout the village. The children awoke, crying and frightened. Dobros had been surrounded by what seemed to the Zyberis like hundreds of Serbs with tanks. Soldiers were firing into the air. Others were shouting at the villagers to leave their homes: ‘Go to Nato if you like them so much. Go to Albania, this is not your home, this is Serbia.’

The time had arrived at last to submit to Serbia’s systematic programme to ‘cleanse’ Kosovo of its 1.2 million ethnic Albanians. The men moved quickly. Dani and Skandar hitched their two tractors to metal carts and the families piled in. Their wives, young children, mother and father went into one cart, driven by Skandar; their mother’s sister and her family were in the second, with Dani at the wheel.

There was no time to take clothes or supplies. They grabbed some blankets to wrap the frightened children in and tacked a plastic sheet over the carts to protect them from the rain, before heading for Albania. They had only been on the road for a few minutes when the farmhouse burst into flames behind them, torched by the Serbs who were rampaging through the village.

Similar scenes were taking place in other villages around Djakovica, once a lovely city of white stone houses but now an armed Serbian encampment, and the road towards the border was becoming clogged with tractors, trailers and their human cargo. Serbian soldiers and police with tanks and armoured personnel carriers lined the route.

At Meja, a hitherto insignificant village on the route, Serbian soldiers and paramilitaries began stopping the convoy. The Zyberi family reached Meja at about 8am. They saw Serbian soldiers walking down the convoy, pulling men from tractors and beating and kicking some of them by the roadside. There was nowhere to turn off and escape.

Skandar Zyberi twice ignored Serbian demands to get off his tractor; then they hauled him off by his sleeve. Describing the scene later, his wife Sheribone, 28, wept and cuddled their two-month-old daughter, Ezuntina.

Skandar’s brother and father were ordered out of the cart at gunpoint by Serbs wearing black masks. ‘The children started crying and yelling “daddy, daddy” but the Serbs laughed,’ said Nushe, who watched in horror as her husband and two grown-up sons were led away.

‘Then they made the children say the Serbian things, terrible things. The children were so frightened.’

The last the family saw of the three men was their backs as they walked at gunpoint into the field where several hundred men were sitting surrounded by armed Serbs. With his hands clasped on his lap, Egzon apes the way they sat.

Another member of the family, Aphrodite Zyberi, 19, said the Serbs had shouted: ‘You killed seven of us; we will kill 700 of you.’ In Yugoslavia during the Second World War, the Nazis killed 100 people in retribution for every German slain by partisans.

Family after family reaching the refugee camp outside Kukes last week was interviewed separately yet described the same scene at the same place. Males aged from 16 to 60-plus had been forced from their families into the meadow at Meja. Serbs had shouted and beaten anyone who did not move quickly enough.

Xhamal Rama, a 58-year-old farmer, a neighbour of the Zyberis in Dubros, had held out for as long as he could at home; but at 9am he had also piled his wife and 10 children into a cart and had driven off on his tractor. His brother and family followed. ‘The Serbs were firing their guns and setting fire to the houses,’ he said. ‘They had masks and some had red handkerchiefs. They ordered us to leave and we could do nothing.’

Reaching Meja after the Zyberis, he found the Serbs behaving like ‘beasts’. Three of his nephews were hauled off his brother’s tractor and taken to the field, where about 250 men were being made to show the Serbian three-finger sign and shout, ‘Long live Serbia.’

Zek, 55, another farmer, who would not give his full name, had bruises on his arm and said he had been beaten by the Serbs for shouting, ‘Leave him alone’, when they took his 16-year-old nephew. Zek looked far older than his years, which may have saved his own life.

A slight, frail woman called Birami described how Serbs had arrived early on Tuesday at her village, Dalasaj, shooting and shouting that they would kill anyone who did not leave in five minutes.

Her husband, Alban, had piled their four children and their parents into his tractor-drawn cart and departed. As houses went up in flames behind them, Alban balanced Blerim, his blonde, five-year-old son, on his knee.

On reaching Meja, said Birami, they were confronted by masked Serbian paramilitaries or soldiers; she was not sure which.

Ordered off his tractor, Alban handed her Blerim and walked away into the meadow to join the other men. She could not drive and a neighbour had to take the wheel.

Another of the families caught in this terrible exodus had already been in a fleeing convoy a little more than two weeks ago but had been attacked from the sky.

‘A tractor in front of us burst into flames,’ recalled Fana, the mother of the family, who had seen too much to reveal her full name. People had been burnt in front of her eyes. Other people had jumped from their tractors off a bridge and drowned.

Nato later admitted it had mistakenly bombed the convoy but – like all the refugees – Fana and her family would not say a word against Nato. They insisted the plane must have been Serbian.

After that incident, they had camped in a ruined house in a village called Dalas. At 7am on Tuesday, they said, Dalas was surrounded by Serbs, some wearing black balaclavas, shooting in the air. The family took to the tractor again – and, again, the houses went up in flames behind them.

‘Serbs with guns and tanks stopped us at the village of Meja,’ Fana said. ‘They took my nephews and my son, he was only 16. We began to cry and scream but we could do nothing because they had guns. They were pushed to the ground and then made to walk into the field where other men were sitting.’

Her youngest son, 12-year-old Vilsan, began driving the tractor. ‘I couldn’t see for my tears,’ Vilsan said quietly as the family replayed the scene at the refugee camp.

‘They knocked my father down on the ground and beat him with their guns. But we had to drive because the Serbian soldiers said move immediately. I was afraid to look back.’

Vilsan is now the oldest male in the family. Two young women, the wives of Fana’s nephews, sat crying near him surrounded by young children. They had only the clothes they were wearing.

Several miles after Meja, the family had been stopped by other Serbian soldiers and robbed of all their money, DM700. Another family, the Salihus, had travelled from the village of Ramizi on foot after Serbs forced them to leave at 5am. They reached Meja at dusk on Tuesday.

‘We were so afraid,’ said Rucka Salihu, 23. ‘I saw dead bodies in a field in the middle of Meja. I was too frightened to look for long. I could only see that they were lying across each other on their stomachs, in this pasture near some bushes. Hundreds of them. Maybe 200.’

She crossed her hands, one over the other, to show how she saw the bodies lying. She said other men were sitting in the meadow, still alive and under Serbian guard.

Serbian soldiers pulled her uncle, Niman Salihu, 50, and a neighbour off the road into the meadow. Two soldiers then spotted Rucka’s brother, Kiytim, 18, who is small and dark and looks young for his age. ‘Two Serbian soldiers shouted to me to put down my bag and stop,’ said Kiytim. ‘The bag was full of bread. Then my sisters began weeping and surrounded me and I was so afraid I was sick.

‘One of the Serbian soldiers, the older one, shouted at me again but the other one said, “Oh, let him go, he’s too young”, and we kept walking and I was surrounded by my family and they just let me go. My sisters’ tears saved me.’

He cannot forget the sight of the meadow in Meja. ‘There were bodies in the field. A pile of bodies. I was too scared to make any accurate count. I tried not to look for long because the Serbs would notice me.’

After five minutes of walking, the Salihu family heard a burst of gunfire that went on for about 10 minutes.

The first news of the massacre at Meja came in the hours after the refugees started crossing into Albania at the Morina border post under a full moon late on Tuesday night.

Nobody expected them, as the Serbs had closed the border days earlier. The only aid agency to meet them was Action Hunger whose workers began dispensing hot tea in the chilly air. UNHCR officials raced to the border.

In all, 47 tractors hauling carts full of women and children and a few elderly men reached Albania that night. The first arrivals looked merely anxious.

By the time the last tractor rolled across the border, the road down to the refugee camp at Kukes was a trail of misery. Their faces etched with horror, the last to arrive could barely speak.

More refugees from Djakovica poured across the border all week, with 10,000 arriving on Friday alone.

Madeleine Albright, the American secretary of state, has announced that the events at Meja will be investigated as a possible war crime. But no international outrage comforts the families who had to leave their men in Meja. ‘I feel like I want to die,’ said Safeta Zyberi, Egzon’s mother.

THE MACEDONIAN BUSINESSMAN

Petrovski Gupco runs an import/export company in Skopje.

‘I can no longer see a future in Macedonia for me or my children. We were lucky to avoid the war, but it will go on around us for many more years. You cannot look for serious investment. When you have poor neighbours, you cannot expect your economy to grow. Albania is the poorest country in Europe. The Serbian economy is destroyed.

‘I am seriously considering leaving, to live in a normal country, maybe to Singapore. If these refugees stay in Macedonia, no one will be happy. They cost money. The UN and Nato help out, but it also costs our government. We have 200,000 unemployed and now we have the same number of refugees. We have excellent relations with the Albanians who have lived in Macedonia for generations.

‘I have visited the refugee camps. The conditions are very poor. I feel sorry for them. But there is a background to this. This century, when Serbs began to rule Macedonia, they started to kill Albanians. When Bulgarians took Macedonia in World War Two, they killed Albanians. After the war, Albanians killed the Macedonians. But I do not approve of Milosevic. Only a madman would.’

THE TEENAGER

Arta Abizi, 15, a refugee with a family in Kumanovo, Macedonia.

‘When we were forced to leave our home in Pristina by the Serbs, I just cried. Not only because we were frightened, but for the things I had to leave behind. I left my photographs that told my whole life’s story from when I was three. I left my rings, my earrings, my nice socks. Emin, my brother, who is nearly 12, had to leave his parrot.

‘We tried to go to the border but we were turned back to Presovo, a Serbian town near the Kosovan border. The soldiers made us walk back in a line along the tracks. We had to sleep in the open but we could not light a fire because they told us Nato would shoot us. The nights were so cold. When we finally got to the border, we spent six nights in no-man’s land. I did not sleep one night. I was frozen and it was so very dirty that I was afraid to sleep.

‘Since I came here I have started going to school in Kumanovo. People from the school invited me to come to class, because I was a refugee. I hate being a refugee; you have nothing and everything is so uncertain. I don’t want to stay here. Every day, all day, all I think is what am I doing here?’

Letter from … Kosare

4 June 1999

The Times Literary Supplement

The Kosare Barracks of the Kosovo Liberation Army was never much to look at. The fight to capture it from the Serbs had been fierce. Six shell-holes pierced one red-brick wall and there was a hole in the roof. When the wind blew at night, glass fell from the shattered windows. It looked lonely. To get there, you had to walk down a narrow path from Albania, across a barbed wire fence that used to be the international border, past a deserted farmhouse now half tumbled into stones and the corpses of four horses in a grassy field pitted with craters of black soil. Everyone said the border minefield had been cleared, but everyone stayed on the narrow winding path which bore the comforting footprints of those who had walked that way before.

The barracks stood alone in a narrow valley between mountains covered with scrub oak. No one ever sat outside in the spring sun; the Serbs might see you and fire off a shell. There was no electricity. The Serbs were on the next hill and the commander thought the noise of the generator might attract their attention, although since they had lived there first and clearly knew where it was, that really didn’t make too much sense. But there were always bean stews cooking in cauldrons over wood-fired stoves, and there was always someone to talk to at night when you couldn’t sleep.

When I heard Nato had bombed the KLA barracks at Kosare, it was those late-night conversations I thought of. They never started out as war conversations. Someone would come out of the sleeping rooms that were crowded with bunk-beds and Kalashnikovs hanging over the metal bedsteads and pour some oil in a tin pot or whatever he could find, dip in a rag until it was soaked, light the cloth and then a cigarette. It would draw the other non-sleepers and we would stand around, offering each other cigarettes, smoking. There was always the boom of artillery in the background, but no one talked about it – it wasn’t close enough to worry about – and we had learned you only really had to worry when you heard a whistle that meant an incoming shell was close, and then there was not much you could do except dive for the ground. It was from Kosare Barracks that KLA units walked out at night, in single file, up into the mountains to fight the Serbs, to push them back. The gains and losses were unspectacular but dependable: a mile a week, a comrade killed when he was shot trying to lob a grenade into a Serb bunker. Kosare Barracks, for all its discomforts, was somewhere safe before you had to walk out and try again.

The talk would always start with families, now lost in Kosovo. We were in Kosovo, of course, the young men talking at night were proud that they had fought and captured this small piece of their homeland, but the Serb army was between us and where their families lived. The only villages we saw were those we walked through late at night, remaining silent in honour and in awe of the bombed and destroyed homes and the absence of people.

Perhaps in all barracks in a war there is a camaraderie that – intensified by the ever-present possibility of sudden death – thrives on deep and immediate intimacy, that removes the need for formalities, and that, once established, is only broken by death. One night in the hole lit by the flicker of an oil fire, Xhavit said it was his son’s sixth birthday, and showed us pictures of his boy and two older daughters. He was a big beefy man and had been working in Switzerland, sending home money when the war started. He hadn’t seen his family for four months and now he didn’t know if his son had turned six or was dead. He was a sniper. He didn’t even need to say why he was there; everyone in the barracks had reached a point where years of Serb oppression meant they were ready when the time came to pick up a gun. Burim, who had left his restaurant and his girlfriend in Spain, where he had lived for fourteen years, would tell us again about how he found his sister in the mountains. He had not seen her in all that time, but had found her lying exhausted on the ground with her three children, the nephews and nieces he had never met. He had taken his sister and her children to a refugee camp in Kukes in Northern Albania and returned to join his fellow KLA guerrillas. He told us this story every night in the barracks, as if by telling it he would somehow understand how that miracle could happen.

Standing in the oil-lit hallway, everyone knew when the next patrol was due to return, but never talked about it. When the returning KLA soldiers walked in, tired and wet after three days in the mountains, the group around the fire would line up and solemnly, ceremoniously, embrace the arriving men and, anxiously but without saying it, never asking, look to see if anyone who had walked out of Kosare three nights ago had not come back.

Eventually, the talk would always turn to Nato. The KLA soldiers, young men who had grown up quickly or at least tried to seem as if they had, were proud that they were now allied with Nato; when they said it, it was as if they stood a bit straighter, looked a bit taller. They were fighting for their country and it had to turn out okay because Nato, the West, the Americans and the British, those countries where people had unimaginable choices, unimaginable freedoms, were on their side. They would always talk about Nato with awe in their voices. They liked to joke that Nato was the KLA air force. And yes, they would always ask when the Apaches were coming.

The Apaches, of course, are helicopters. That was important because the KLA are fighting with light weapons. Some had bought themselves expensive kit in Europe, but mostly they all carried battered Chinese copies of Russian Kalashnikovs or even just single-round hunting rifles. They were trying to fight their way across Serb lines, but they faced three emplacements of artillery and tanks – at Batusha, Mount Plahnik and Morine. Against all odds, they had captured not just Kosare Barracks, but fought their way ten kilometres into Serb-held Kosovo, and taken the mountains for another ten kilometres horizontally along the front (Kosare Barracks is at the centre), carving out a foothold of almost 100 square kilometres. Testimony to the continued fighting came to Kosare every day when KLA soldiers carried back injured comrades, and put them on donkeys for the journey up the narrow path to Albania, where they would be put on carts pulled by tractors and, it was hoped, arrive at a hospital two hours away.

Nato could break this stalemate, could destroy those tanks and artillery in hours. If the KLA rushed those positions head on, however, with no weapons other than Kalashnikovs, they would lose hundreds of men. Nato did not strike. There was news of bridges bombed, oil refineries hit, electricity grids destroyed, but never those artillery guns or tanks. The positions of the Serb heavy weapons were no secret. KLA commanders would call Astrit Huskaj, the KLA–American liaison officer in Kukes, give him the co-ordinates of the Serb positions and the KLA positions so that there could be no mistakes. Everyone at Kosare Barracks believed that one day, soon, Nato would take out those Serb tanks and guns blocking their offensive. They all heard the BBC reporting on the reluctance of Nato to send ground troops, but for these KLA men that made no sense. Tell them, they would say to me, an American working for a British newspaper (‘so you must know them’), tell them just arm us and we will go in. We need weapons against tanks, not much more. Our families are there. Our homes are there. We can fight, we have to.

That was before Nato bombed the Kosare Barracks and killed seven of these young men, men I knew, although no one has bothered to list the names of the dead. It was a small place. There is no doubt it was a mistake. The KLA has been anxious to say they understand mistakes can happen and Nato must continue bombing, because it is the only way to end the reign of their enemy, Slobodan Milosevic. Since returning from Kosovo, I have heard all the reservations about arming the KLA, but none has really made sense when I thought of the young men I met and with whom I travelled into the mountains. There was Ramis, very proud that a British journalist was with his unit, a village boy whose family was only about ten miles away in the village of Ratkovac, if they were still alive. We could see the lights of Djakovica, the nearest city, at night, and the fires of the houses the Serbs were burning. He would point to where his village was and tell me it was dark because people slept early, but neither of us believed that. He told me about how the old men in the village had cried when he left and how he told them not to worry: his generation would free Kosovo. There was Ghani, a young philosophy student who would never talk seriously but made a bet with everyone else in the unit that he could eat eight hamburgers and drink two pints of beer when they arrived in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. Doc, laconic, bespectacled, who held the unit together after their commander was shot in the head and killed by a Serb sniper. Doc never talked about bravery; no one did. He had had to travel outside Kosovo for education because Albanians cannot become doctors under the Serbs.

‘You don’t understand freedom,’ he said one day, during a lull in fighting, sitting in a freezing mountain bivouac: ‘you can’t. You grow up with freedom, you’ve never thought about it. I picked up a gun because there is no way we can live under the Serbs any more. This will be over soon. The West understands that.’

I’m not sure how any of these young men feel now that the planes we saw flying overhead every day and that were supposed to destroy the artillery and tanks between them and their villages and families have instead bombed their barracks. I’m not sure whether they are still alive. I do think anyone who met them would also feel it is hypocritical for a Nato spokesman to get up on television every day and talk about the success of hundreds of warplane sorties, and for diplomats to brief journalists that Nato is doing all it can to defeat Milosevic, and not to help the only people who are fighting his troops and paramilitaries every day and are willing to die doing it. There was no talk in the Kosare Barracks about zero tolerance for returning body bags. They saw too many.

The neighbour who burned with hate

DJAKOVICA

20 June 1999

Bozhidar Dogancic was a loser who for the duration of the war had the power to decide whether his neighbours lived or died at the hands of the Serb paramilitaries, reports Marie Colvin in Djakovica.

In Djakovica, a quaint, cobbled town that used to be home to many of Kosovo’s leading writers, artists and intellectuals, Bozhidar Dogancic was a nobody.

He lived near the bus station in a concrete, single-storey house with peeling paint and dirty curtains. His front windows looked out on to a dank garden of earth and weeds, darkened by unkempt trees that hid the property from passers-by.

Dogancic, known in his neighbourhood as Bozho, liked to sit on his porch and drink slivovitz from half-gallon bottles, shouting, singing and talking with friends. What he enjoyed talking about most of all was how much he hated Albanians.

The day before Nato troops entered Kosovo last weekend, Dogancic dumped all the food from his refrigerator into a rotting heap on his living room floor. He could not take it with him and he did not want to leave it for his neighbours. They were Albanians and Dogancic was a Serb.

Dogancic, 65, left Kosovo, knowing he could never return. There was too much blood on his hands.

In almost any other country, he would have remained nothing more than a resentful loser. Neighbours regarded him as something of a bully and avoided him. He rarely troubled them except when his noisy drinking sessions kept them awake at night.

But this was Kosovo and for 10 years, since Slobodan Milosevic rose to high office with passionate promises to protect the Serbs of Kosovo, Dogancic had also exercised power.

Milosevic rode a wave of Serbian nationalism that led to a decade of war in the Balkans. Dogancic did the same thing, on a smaller scale, in his little district of Djakovica. His power over Albanians enabled him to exact intoxicating revenge for slights, imagined and real.

The son of a saddler, Dogancic grew up in Djakovica’s tiny minority community of Serbs and worked for local government. His job was to patrol the forests to stop people felling trees illegally. He was a handsome youth and married a pretty local girl, Radmilla. They had four children.

Albanians, who made up 90& of Kosovo’s population, dominated senior positions in the government at that time and ran most of the businesses. Many had big houses and sent their sons abroad for education and work. Dogancic lived in squalor with little money and few prospects. Everything changed when Milosevic rescinded Kosovo’s autonomy in 1990 and Albanians were kicked out of their jobs. Dogancic had what were considered the right opinions. He told anyone who would listen that Albanians should be deported from Kosovo. After all, he would say, they had Albania, didn’t they?

His mentors were two pairs of brothers from similarly inauspicious backgrounds. Momcilo and Sava Stanovic, and their first cousins, Milan and Jokica Stanovic, are infamous among ethnic Albanians in Djakovica.

There was little education among them; Milan was a sheep farmer, Momcilo a building inspector’s clerk. Under Milosevic’s regime, however, they were able to establish a semi-autonomous dictatorship. Jokica Stanovic, who had friends in Milosevic’s circle, was appointed mayor by Belgrade in 1991. He made Milan his police chief.

Momcilo, his cousin, became a local minister in charge of government property, including state factories. He gave Dogancic, the lowly forest patrol man, the job of director in a brick and tile plant.

In 1996 Momcilo took over as mayor when Jokica became a deputy in the Yugoslav senate. He built several Serbian Orthodox churches and soon became a priest. But his religious beliefs did not stop him from intensifying repression of Djakovica’s ethnic Albanians.

He built up a private police force and was under investigation by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe for suspected war crimes when it became obvious that Nato was about to launch its airstrikes and the OSCE pulled out.

While Milan arranged for the deportation of countless local Albanians from Djakovica, Momcilo directed squads of special police and paramilitaries into the town. The separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had waged guerrilla warfare against these forces in the surrounding area since early this year. The hatred between them was fierce.

Djakovica, with its thuggish Serbian leadership, ruthless paramilitaries and poorly defended Albanian community, was about to became a microcosm of Kosovo as it was torn apart. Dogancic would exercise the power he held in his community to devastatingly lethal effect.

The local Albanians had been growing increasingly fearful of Dogancic for years. He walked around with a pistol in his belt. Serbian police and members of the security forces in civilian clothes came in and out of his house. Whenever he had an argument in his part of town, the neighbour concerned would be taken into the local police station and beaten.

The danger in the rise of such a man is evident now in the devastation that surrounds his house. The homes of all his Albanian neighbours – mechanics, shopkeepers, barbers – are blackened ruins with overgrown gardens. No more than a cherished rose bush still blooms here and there.

Dogancic has gone, but there is no jubilation at his departure. His neighbours paid too high a price for living next door. Last week, as the first of them returned to begin clearing out their homes, they spat his name with fury and contempt.

The Serbs started burning Djakovica on 24 March, the night Nato began bombing. About 100 high street shops were looted and then torched. The homes of professional men and anyone who had had contact with international organisations were set alight.

For the first few days, people were killed one at a time. Izat Hima, Djakovica’s most prominent ethnic Albanian doctor, was shot dead on his doorstep. Paramilitaries cut the throat of Kujtim Dula, a lawyer who had defended political prisoners, in front of his wife.

But as the bombing went on, the Serbs launched a systematic campaign to murder the Albanians who remained in the town and to empty the surrounding villages.

Dogancic would walk through the streets pointing out houses to long-haired men in dark camouflage uniforms with black cowboy hats characteristic of the so-called Frenki’s Boys, a paramilitary group that reports to Frenki Simatovic, Milosevic’s state security chief.

‘The paramilitaries didn’t know the neighbourhood,’ said Xhavet Beqa, a heavily built man who got his wife and four children out to Albania but stayed in Djakovica, slipping back to his district through Serbian patrols. ‘They needed Bozho to tell them where to go. He told them who was in hiding.’

Beqa said Dogancic, his wife Radmilla and their eldest son, Nebojsha, a 26-year-old policeman, had stood in the middle of his street, arms folded, as they watched Beqa’s three houses burn. The paramilitaries surrounded Dogancic, he said, joking and congratulating themselves on a job well done. Radmilla also had a pistol.

After choosing which houses should be the first to burn, Dogancic asserted his authority over the fate of people. He meted out virtual death sentences, simply by identifying places of concealment.

Beqa led me through the overgrown back garden of the building opposite his home to a cellar where Dogancic had pointed out the hiding place of the Vesja family. They were poor and frightened and did not want to risk fleeing to Albania. Twenty-four people were hiding in the basement when Dogancic and the paramilitaries arrived.

Five men ran; they had been taken in by the Vesjas and had no relatives to worry about. Lurzim Vesja, a shopkeeper, stayed with his family.

Scorched bed springs and a child’s partly burnt boot are all that is left to testify to their presence in the shelter. Nineteen men, women and children, including Lurzim, were led to a row of garages behind the house. The paramilitaries shot them in one of the garages and set fire to the row. Nobody escaped. They were people Dogancic would have seen every day.

Few traces of the massacre remain. There are bullet holes in the scorched grey walls and shells on the overgrown garden in front. The bodies lay untouched for two days. Beqa and other men from the neighbourhood who were too afraid to give their names – ‘I know we are free now, but you can’t know how deep the fear is in us’ – saw them that night, a charred huddle.

Finally, gypsies pulled up with a tractor and cart and hauled the bodies away for burial in the Djakovica cemetery under wooden markers with numbers and a date. ‘I saw them put the bodies in the cart,’ Beqa said. ‘I couldn’t believe how small they were.’

If you have ever seen a charred body, you know he was telling the truth. The human body, when burnt, is reduced to an almost childlike size. It is a horrible piece of knowledge that comes with reporting from Kosovo. In house after house, village after village, I have seen those bodies, so small that it seems they must be those of children, yet they are not.

Dogancic’s reign of terror did not end with the Vesja family. Around the corner, amid the burnt-out skeletons of other houses, is the home of the family of Skandar Dylatahus, a barber. In front of the walled garden is a jar of pickles and a silver-plated tray. This family also tried to hide rather than risk their men on the road to Albania.