Massacre in Gjakova, When will the Serbs Pay for This? Kosova Exiles Document Atrocities (W. Post)

By Peter Finn and R. Jeffrey Smith Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, April 30, 1999; Page A1

TIRANA, Albania, April 29 – At 11:15 p.m. on April 1, a night of hard rain, Serbian forces swept into a neighborhood of 1,300 houses beside the Krena River in the southwestern Kosova city of Djakovica.

Moving house to house, dozens of police and militiamen, all wearing black masks, unleashed a spasm of terror. Six hours later, at least 55 people had been gunned down, including 20 women and children who were shot when they were found hiding in the basement of a pool hall. Many of the corpses were consumed by flames as the uniformed gunmen systematically torched homes and buildings after killing their occupants.

Unlike many reported atrocities in Kosova, the violence in Djakovica that night was witnessed by residents who had set up an elaborate neighborhood watch system and who are now mapping out a detailed, murder-by-murder, house-by-house, street-by-street account of the destruction for international war crimes investigators.

As a result of their testimony, and that of others who have since fled the city, investigators have identified Djakovica as the site of some of the most wholesale atrocities committed by Serbian police and paramilitarya units since the Serb-led Yugoslav government began a massive campaign of expulsions and terror against Kosova's ethnic Albanian population 36 days ago.

While refugees in recent weeks have told of killings, brutality and destruction across the Serbian province, Djakovica and its surrounding villages are emerging as, in the words of one Western official, Kosova's "heart of darkness."

The killings continue, most recently on Tuesday, when, according to refugees arriving in Albania, Yugoslav troops forces pulled 100 to 200 men from a convoy of Kosova Albanians fleeing villages near Djakovica and executed them in a field.

The testimony of Djakovica's survivors may prove central to efforts by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague as it seeks to bring charges against the civilian and military leadership of both Yugoslavia and its dominant republic, Serbia. Witnesses are still being interviewed. But The tribunal is already building a clear portrait of what has occurred.

"We have numerous, independent accounts of killings in Djakovica," said one tribunal official. "We may be looking at hundreds of dead. And that may be a conservative figure."

Bodies Dripping Blood

In dozens of interviews with Western officials, Djakovica residents have provided both minute details of killings in particular neighborhoods and described widespread violence and destruction across the city. One refugee told investigators that he saw bulldozers moving through Djakovica laden with bodies that were dripping blood. The bodies reportedly were buried in a single grave at the city cemetery.

Another resident said he saw a the body of a young man dangling from a rope on a a pole near the police station, while another reported seeing 30 to 40 bodies lying in the street.

Residents of Djakovica – pronounced Jah-koh-VEET-sah – anticipated an onslaught by government security forces once NATO bombing began on March 24, but nothing could have prepared them for the level of barbarity that descended on the city in the ensuing weeks. "We expected them to come," said Afrim Berisha, 45, an engineer and a neighborhood organizer, in an interview at a refugee camp in Tirana, the Albanian capital. "But not with this intensity."

Djakovica is a historic industrial city of dark-stained wood buildings that date to the Ottoman Empire. The city's old town, an area of 300 stores, Turkish architecture and an ancient mosque, bustled daily; an industrial base of textile production, metalwrok and winemaking underlay the city's prosperity.

A month before the NATO bombing began, Djakovica, which is named after the Biblical Patriarch Jacob, had a population of 100,000, swollen from 60,000 by refugees fleeing Yugoslav troops and Serbian police and paramilitary units that had swept through nearby villages. Long known as a center of ethnic Albanian business and cultural activitiy, its population included physicians, merchants, skilled tradesmen and goldsmiths.

But government forces had other motives for focusing on Djakovica – and for using it as a base of operations against separatist ethnic Albanian rebels who were active in villages surrounding the city during more than a year of guerriila warfare. One Yugoslav army base in Djakovica was a key logistics center for troops responsible for guarding the nearby border with Albania, across which the Kosova Liberation Army, the main rebel group, was trying to to smuggle weapons and combatants into the country. "The KLA was in the villages around the city, but not in the city itself," said Neshti Buza, 33, a refugee from the city who fled to Macedonia.

According to refugee accounts, tensions in the city erupted into full-scale violence on March 20. That was the day that international monitors who had been stationed in Kosova since the previous fall withdrew from the province because they feared for their safety. In Djakovica, Serbian Interior Ministry policemen and antiterrorist squads began going door-to-door, searching for young men suspected of being members of the KLA. One refugee told Western investigators that his uncle was executed in front of his family during this operation; others said that over a four-day period, more than a dozen men were found slain on their own doorsteps.

At the same time, Serbian police warned residents that once NATO airstrikes began, they would execute more ethnic Albanians. As a result, scores of residents went into hiding after the first NATO cruise missiles struck Yugoslav military targets, emerging from basements for only a few hours a day to collect food and water. On March 29, five days after the NATO bombardment began, the Yugoslav army issued a general order that all remaining ethnic Albanians must leave the city.

"They came at 4 p.m. with armored cars equipped with loudspeakers and said you should evacuate because everyone who stays will be executed," one refugee said. Government troops shelled the city and then fanned out to set fire to shops, homes and marketplaces. The oldest part of the city – an ethnic Albanian district of small shops built of dark-stained wood with large plate glass windows – was burned first, refugees said.

Active in the region, according to U.S. intelligence reports, were the Yugoslav 3rd Army's 125th Motorized Brigade, commanded by Col. Seba Zdravkovic, its 252 Armored Brigade, commanded by Col. Milos Mandic, and its 52nd Mixed Artillery Brigade, commanded by Col. Rudojko Stefanovic.

On April 1, the punishment of Djakovica intensified.

A Night of Gunfire

Among those who have spoken to officials from the war-crimes tribunal is that of Berisha, whose account of the depredations in Djakovica has been corroborated by others. Berisha's brother-in-law, Ilirjan Dushi, 35, separately confirmed the details of his story to investigators. Their's is an account of the systematic emptying of the city's Qerim neighborhood and the killing of dozens of its inhabitants.

Forty-five minutes before midnight on April 1, a convoy of police cars pulled up at the edge of the neighborhood, just off Marshall Tito Street near the city's bus station. Dozens of masked men emerged.

Running perpendicular to Tito Street is a thoroughfare called Sadik Stavaleci. A long loop, with numerous off-shoots, runs off Sadik Stavaleci, then curves back into it. One group of the masked Serbian militiamen occupied the loop; another group the main street and its off-shoots. Then the killing began, according to the accounts. It would continue for the next six hours, ending at 5:15 a.m., shortly before sunrise.

At the top of Sadik Stavaleci, a refugee from a nearby village emerged from a house where he was sheltering and was shot and killed. Around the corner, on Sadik Pozhegu street, Rexh Guci, 43, and his brother, a barber, also came out onto the street. They, too, were shot dead.

But, according to survivors' accounts, the gunmen had a particular target in the neighborhood – Besim Bokshi, a retired professor of Albanian literature, who was general secretary of the local branch of the moderate League of Democratic Kosova political party. Bokshi, who is now in Tirana, had fled to the nearby home of Ali Bytyci.

Bokshi's house was torched. Two doors from it, the gunmen found Fehim Lleshi, 46, who was hiding with his wife. Both were executed, and their house was set on fire. The militiamen then moved down the block, burning as they went.

Just below Bukoshi's house they found Hysem Deda, 77, his wife, Saja, 65, their daughter, Drita, 33, and her six-year-old son. Drita's husband had fled, believing that the militiamen were searching only for fighting age men and would not target women, children or the elderly. All four were shot dead, and the house was set alight.

Around midnight, most residents of area had fled through their back yards to Berisha's walled house on a cul-de-dac between Sadik Stavalaci and the loop. Three hundred people huddled in the family compound, moe then 40 in the basement alone. Fourteen men, including Berisha and Dushi, moved back and forth between the compound and the streets, watching the police and militamen spread terror.

"We wanted to know which way to go if we had to flee," said Dushi. Many of those who remained in their homes believed they were safe because the younger men in their families had already fled to the hills.

Berisha watched as the masked gunmen crossed from the Deda house to a pool hall across the street. Twenty people were hiding in a cellar in the building, mostly old people, women and children whose male relatives had already fled. Berisha heard bursts of gunfire and watched the building go up in flames.

The next morning, Berisha and others who surveyed the carnage walked into the pool hall. "They were just in a pile, burned," he said of the victim's bodies. "The only thing I could see that wasn't burned almost unrecognizable was a child's hand. It just hung out of the pile."

One 9-year-old boy, Drene Caka, whose mother perished in the pool hall, survived the massacre with a bullet wound to the shoulder. When the building was set aflame he fled through a broken window. Drene, who was treated in Tirana a number of days ago, is believed to have been removed from Albania with his father, Ali, by officials of the war-crimes tribunal. His father, like other men in the Qerem, had fled the neighborhood before the security forces arrived.

The Walk to Albania

After burning down the pool hall, the militiamen crossed the street to the home of Jonuz Cana, 65, a teacher; his wife, Ganimete, 55; their daughter, Shpresa, an economist in her early thirties; and their son Fatmir, also in his thirties.

All four were killed and their house burned. The gunmenthen continued along the loop, called Millosh Gilic Street, burning each house up the point where the loop it turned back into Sadik Stavaleci. In a house there, they found Hasan Hasani, his wife, daughter and brother in law; next door, they found Hasani's borther, Adem, 45, with his son and daughter. All seven were shot dead, but their houses were not burned because they stood alongise houses owned by Serbs.

As the pool hall burned, the second paramilitary detachment moving along Sadik Stavaleci began its killing spree, beginning with a cul-de sac behind the bus station. They first killed Melahim Carkaxhiu, 36; moved two doors down and killed Gezim Berdeniqui, 40, an architectural engineer. Skipping one house, they found Osman Dika, 70, and his sons, Skender, 50, Blerim 37, and Albert, 23. All were executed in front of Dika's wife before she was hustled out and told to flee to Albania. The gunmen then crossed the street and killed Skender Dylatanhu, 34, and his 30-year-old brother.

The militiamen skipped over the next three streets, which were mostly occupied by Serbs. At the end of Sadik Stavaleci, however, they entered the home of Myrteza Dinaj, 55. There, Dinaj, his son, Lulzim, 24, and four male refugees from the nearby village of Herec were shot dead in front of the women and children.

It was now shortly after 5 a.m., and dawn was approaching. The police and militiamen returned to their vehicles without ever entering the streets between Sadik Stavaleci and the loop where 300 ethnic Albanians were hiding. That morning – after neighborhood men walked through charred houses to bear witness to the dead – all 300 left by foot for Albania.

Today, Djakovica is a bloody ruin of gutted buildings and decomposing bodies. "[Djakovica] is a Sahara," said Luljeta Morina, 32, who fled the city with her three children. "We don't have houses. We don't have shops. We don't have schools. We don't have factories. There is nothing."

SEQUENCE OF EVENTS

1. One refugee shot dead.
2. Rexh Guci, 43, and brother shot dead.
3. Fehim Lleshi, 46, butcher, and wife killed.
4. Besim Bokshi, retired professor; he was able to flee, but his house was torched.
5. Hysem Deda, 77, his wife, Saja, 65, daughter Drita, 33, and her son, 6, killed.
6. Berisha compound, where about 300 townspeople hid.
7. Billiard hall burned down; 20 burned bodies found.
8. Jonuz Cana, 65, wife, daughter and son killed.
9. Hasan Hasani, his wife, daughter and brother-in-law killed.
10. Hasani's brother, son and daughter killed.
11. Melahim Carkaxhiu, 36, executed.
12. Gezim Berdeniqui, 40, executed.
13. Osam Dika, 70, and three sons killed.
14. Skender Dylatanhu, 34, and his brother killed.
15. Myrteza Dinaj, 55, his son and four refugees killed.