After Scotland Yard Inquiry, a Kosova Village Buries 64; Serbs Had Killed 7 Children Under 12 (NY Times)

By JOHN KIFNER

Bella Cerke, Kosova -- This ruined little village buried its dead Monday in a bitter, tearful ceremony.

Reburied them, actually.

Most of the 64 people laid to their final rest on a sun-baked hilltop this afternoon had been hastily, furtively buried at night by other villagers near where they were reportedly shot dead by Serbian forces early on the morning of March 25, hours after the NATO bombing began.

The well-documented account of a massacre here that day, along with reports of other massacres in a chain of villages along the main road running southeast from Djakovica, marked the beginning of the violent Serbian campaign that seemed intended to purge Kosova of its Albanians, 90 percent of the province's population.

The bodies of the victims in Bela Crkva (pronounced BELL-a SER-ka) were carried from a makeshift morgue set up by war crimes investigators in a winding caravan of farm tractors and trucks. It was a ceremony so emotional that the local custom banning women from funerals was set aside by a village decision. And the crowd of thousands was packed with weeping, wailing women in white head scarves of mourning.

For six days, Chief Superintendent John T. Bunn of Scotland Yard had been digging up the first rough graves. He was camped in a white tent down a nearly impassable mud track in a field by a river where villagers say most of the killings occurred. The "crime scene," as he called it, where the river runs under a railroad bridge, is one of six murder sites listed by the international war crimes tribunal in its indictment against President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and four of his top associates for crimes against humanity.

The portly British detective, wearing big black rubber boots in the mud, climbed up the railroad embankment the other day and pointed out a big trench where 32 bodies had been exhumed and other, smaller graves among the bushes, trees and hedges. He described how villagers had turned out to help and had driven the bodies to the morgue in a procession of tractors.

He finished his investigation for the war crimes tribunal on Saturday evening and turned the bodies over to the villagers for burial.

Monday, Superintendent Bunn stood quietly to the rear of the ceremony with a few of his team members and summed up his findings briefly.

"There were 60 bodies, all shot," he said. "There were seven children under 12, including a 4-year-old. There were three women, one over 60. They were killed in individual little groups along the river. It was all quite deliberate." Four people who were killed elsewhere were also buried Monday.

Professionally, he said in his matter-of-fact tone, the investigation had been "quite satisfying." Then, with a bit more emotion, he added that he was pleased that "these people, whose relatives have been shot and taken away from them, can grieve in a proper fashion."

The day began with a line of tractors and trucks pulling up to the makeshift morgue that the British had set up in an empty warehouse on the highway intersection at the village of Zrze.

The bodies were taken out of the morgue in black plastic body bags -- with evidence tags marked ''Metropolitan Police" still attached -- and loaded onto rough pine pallets, for Muslims are not buried in coffins. A small red-and-black Albanian flag with a double-headed eagle was placed on each body bag.

The villagers gathered in the yard of the local school throughout the morning. A line of men stretched along the fence at the entrance, solemnly greeting each visitor with a right hand across the chest, along with a short bow or a handshake.

A group of older men -- local dignitaries, most wearing the traditional white conical hat of the Albanian mountains -- sat on a row of benches and desks from the school. Beside them, on lower benches, was a row of children, each holding a framed photograph of one or more of the dead, the kind of stiff, formal portraits people put in their living rooms.

As more and more people drifted in, wailing women clustered in the shade of a row of trees, their cries splitting the air.

Like most villages here, Bela Crkva is a close-knit group of extended families. The printed list of victims contained 21 people with the family name of Popaj and 24 with that of Zhuniqi, along with 4 from the Fetoshi family and 7 from the Spahiu family.

Among the people gathered here today was Isuf Zhenigi, who first gave an account of the massacre to The New York Times in April, describing how he had been saved by falling under the bodies as men were machine-gunned into the river.

"This is the most terrible, black day I ever had," he said as he looked around the mourners and the portraits of the dead people he knew so well. He lost his uncle and 23 other relatives in the massacre.

Asked if he had returned to the riverbank to see the scene of the killings, Zhenigi, who had appeared composed, nodded. Then, suddenly, he began crying, leaned against a building, then slumped to the ground. Other men from the village squatted down with him, patting his shoulder, giving him a cigarette.

"All my best friends were killed," he said finally. "They killed 12 children." And the future? he was asked. "What can I do?" he said. "I had two buses. They burned them. I had a home. They destroyed it."

Now, he said, he must figure out how to provide for his family: "I have two children. They are sleeping in the yard."

At noon the procession of close relatives, carrying mourning wreaths that are a custom here, began filing along the main dirt road of the village, and the schoolyard emptied out as people joined them.

The procession wound past the village's burned-out houses -- nearly every one destroyed -- and the mosque, scorched, its dome full of holes, its minaret gone. Past the ruins, the mourners mounted a steep hill, known locally as Paskiddle.

They were accompanied by a small honor guard of soldiers from the rebel Kosova Liberation Army in a mixture of camouflage outfits, including six with Kalashnikov rifles with fixed bayonets.

The group is no longer supposed to wear uniforms or carry guns, under the peacekeeping agreement for Kosova. German NATO troops on the scene did not interfere, though, except -- briefly and unsuccessfully -- to try to keep out foreign journalists.

Under a burning sun, the procession reached the crest of the hill, and 8 trucks and 11 tractors groaned into the field with the bodies. The graves had already been dug, and a long process began of unloading each body, the grave surrounded by mourners, while thousands of other people sat silently around the hillside and men of the village pushed dirt into the grave.

The graves were marked with simple wooden stakes bearing the name of the deceased and a birth date. Each stake also bore the date 25-3-99.

Finally, the honor guard fired a volley of three bursts of automatic weapons fire in honor of the dead, and the people of Bela Crkva began drifting down the hill.

Superintendent Bunn, later in the afternoon, set up his white investigation tent in the village of Celina, a few miles across the rolling hills to the southeast.

Villagers there say they have 88 bodies.