Horror by Design: The Ravaging of Kosova

By JOHN KIFNER

Although the purge of more than one million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo since late March seemed to be a random kaleidoscope of violence, a reconstruction of the early days of the operation shows that it was meticulously organized from the outset.

Western officials say the plans were drawn up by the Yugoslav Army and the Interior Ministry of the Serbian Republic, then carried out by a variety of Serbian forces acting under a single command.

It seems evident now that the operation had at least two major goals: crushing the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army and permanently changing the ethnic balance of Kosovo by driving out as many Albanians as possible.

By early May, the State Department says, 90 percent of all ethnic Albanians in Kosovo had been expelled from their homes; 900,000 were driven across the province’s borders and 500,000 more were displaced inside Kosovo. An additional 4,600 were reported killed—a number that is likely to increase as time goes on and more is known.

By expelling ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, Serbian forces aimed to restrict the guerrillas’ base of support and cover. By controlling the borders and the devastated corridors along the major highways, the Serbs planned to isolate and then eradicate the Kosovo Liberation Army in the forests and mountains.

The violent emptying of the Djakovica region is an example of such an operation. Hours after the first NATO bombs fell, special police, paramilitary officers and local police used a focused fury of violence and fear to clear the area of ethnic Albanians. In just seven days—March 30 to April 5 -- some 51,880 people were herded on foot from Djakovica to a tiny remote border crossing in the mountains, according to records of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

But the Serbs did not limit their attention to suspected KLA strongholds. Another opening assault of the drive to empty Kosovo, this one in the troubled province’s capital city of Pristina, illustrates another apparent aim of the Serb offensive: depopulation.

By expelling ethnic Albanians from Pristina and other large cities, Serb officials were seeking to defuse a potential demographic time bomb. At the beginning of the Serb offensives, ethnic Albanians accounted for 90 percent of Kosovo’s population. Moreover, the Albanian population was growing at a far faster rate than the Serb population.

Still, for all the signs of logic and planning behind the purge, many of the individual episodes—including the systematic gunning down of women and children—appears inexplicable in military terms, except perhaps as an indication of the unpredictability and savagery that drove the exodus.

Part I

How Serb Forces Purged One Million Albanians

In the night of March 24, as NATO bombs began falling over Yugoslavia, Hani Hoxha said he saw black-masked Serbs swaggering through Djakovica, shooting, cutting throats and burning houses.

At 3:30 in the morning, about nine miles east, a tank pulled up and parked in front of Isuf Zhenigi’s farmhouse in the village of Bela Crkva. At daybreak the slaughter began there.

That day, in Pec, 22 miles to the northwest, and Prizren, 15 miles southeast, Serbian forces began firing wildly and burning Albanian-owned shops.

Meanwhile, in Pristina, about 44 miles to the northeast, Serbian operatives driving military jeeps and private cars set fire to Albanian-owned cafes, clinics and the printing presses of Kosova Sot, an independent Albanian newspaper.

These were the opening assaults in what quickly became a drive to empty the city, the provincial and intellectual center of Kosovo.

As it began, the Serbs’ purge of more than one million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo seemed from the outside to be a random kaleidoscope of violence. But a reconstruction of the early days of the operation—based on interviews with scores of refugees, and with senior officials in Washington and NATO, as well as on a computer analysis of reported horrors from many sources— shows that it was meticulously organized and aimed, from the outset, at expelling huge numbers of people.

From this reporting over the last nine weeks, it is possible to see the design behind the roster of atrocities cited by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague in its indictment on Thursday of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and four of his top officials for crimes against humanity.

With specific charges including the wave of killings in Djakovica and its surrounding villages and the forced expulsion of Albanians from Pristina, the indictment charged the Serbian forces with a "campaign of terror" that "intentionally created an atmosphere of fear and oppression through the use of force, threats of force and acts of violence" in order to drive out Kosovo’s majority Albanians.

The Serbs have insisted in recent months that most of the refugees fled Kosovo because of NATO’s bombing. Western officials, however, say the plans were drawn up by the Yugoslav Army and the Interior Ministry of the Serbian Republic and carried out, under a single command, by a variety of Serbian forces acting in concert: regular soldiers, the blue-uniformed Special Police of the Interior Ministry and the dreaded private armies of ultra-nationalist warlords who had achieved a reputation for blood lust and looting in Bosnia and Croatia.

The plan was a harsh refinement of a campaign last summer by Interior Ministry forces that failed to crush Albanian rebels. It was put into effect after a mounting campaign of terrorism on both sides, including the ambushing of Serbian police patrols and officials by the Albanians and several instances of the kidnapping and killing of Serbian civilians.

But in retrospect, it seems evident that the operation had at least two major goals from its inception: crushing the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army and permanently changing the ethnic balance of Kosovo by driving out as many Albanians as possible.

Hounding more than a million Albanians from their homes accomplished two purposes for the Serbs.

First, it removed the guerrillas’ base of support and cover, in effect, drying up the sea in which the guerrilla fish swam.

With the Serbs controlling the borders and scorched earth along the highways, they could isolate and mop up the Kosovo Liberation Army in the forests and mountains. Young men viewed as potential rebel recruits were singled out and either killed or removed to an unknown fate.

In the longer run, depopulating Kosovo defused a demographic time bomb for the Serbs: Albanians already made up 90 percent of the population and were reproducing at a far higher rate than the Serbs.

Although killing and torching were plentiful, the Serbs’ most potent weapon was fear. The seemingly random, flamboyantly public killings of the first few days meant that as the campaign progressed, all it took was a handful of armed, masked Serbs to drive thousands of people from their homes, rob them and send them off in caravans, their houses in flames.

Independent accounts indicate that there have been mass killings of from a dozen to roughly 100 people in more than 40 places. The State Department now puts the death toll at 4,600, a number only likely to increase as time goes on and more is known. But even that horrifying statistic indicates a goal of depopulation rather than extermination; it is low by comparison with the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, where in one massacre alone, at Srebrenica, the Serbs were accused of killing 7,000 people.

To amplify the effect of the killings in Kosovo, Serbs gunned down Albanians in the streets and in their homes, sometimes at random, sometimes from target lists. Bodies have been mutilated, with ears cut off, eyes gouged out or a cross, a Serbian symbol, carved into foreheads or chests.

In many places the Serbs compounded the fear with humiliation. Older men were beaten for wearing the white conical hats of the Albanian mountains or forced to make the Serbian Orthodox three-fingered sign. One refugee convoy passed row on row of white conical hats set atop fence posts.

Two months into the campaign now, the terror has been devastatingly effective and virtually unhampered by NATO’s bombing campaign, judging by accounts from refugees, relief workers and officials from international agencies, NATO and the United States Government.

By early May, 90 percent of all ethnic Albanians in Kosovo had been expelled from their homes, the State Department says, 900,000 driven across the province’s borders and 500,000 more displaced inside Kosovo. Most of those remaining have been chased into hiding in forests and mountains, huddled together in villages penned in by snipers waiting to be allowed to flee, or captured, their fate unknown.

More than 500 villages have been emptied and burned, the State Department said.

And there was another element to the pattern: The Serbs made every effort to insure that those who fled abroad would not come back. Almost universally, refugees reported that they had been not only robbed but also systematically stripped of all identity papers, rendering them, in effect, stateless nonpersons, at least in the eyes of the Serbian government, and making it difficult for them ever to return home. Even the license plates of their cars—the Serbs kept the good ones—were methodically unscrewed at the borders. "This is not your land—you will never see it again," the refugees were told. "Go to your NATO—go to your Clinton."

Part II

GJAKOVA : Emptying a City of All but Bodies

 

"They were burning the houses and they started to scream like a wolf - ‘woo, woo’ - and they shot people in the back." Dr. Flori Bakalli

The Serbs began attacking Kosovo Liberation Army strongholds on March 19, but their attack kicked into high gear on March 24, the night NATO began bombing Yugoslavia.

Djakovica was one of the Serbs’ first major targets.

A look at a map explains the strategic significance of this city of 60,000, which was populated almost entirely by Albanians. The city and its surrounding chain of villages, stretching between Junik and Prizren, lie in the shadow of the Accursed Mountains, a remote, rugged range running along the border between Albania and Kosovo.

The Kosovo Liberation Army maintains its camps and staging areas on the Albanian side of the mountains. A Western military officer, sketching out a map, slashed a series of lines down the mountains into the valleys around Djakovica, indicating rebel infiltration routes. Clearly, he said, the Serbs want to empty the area of ethnic Albanians, fortify and control it to block the rebels.

Those who survived it say they will never forget the focused fury of the Serbian forces who attacked Djakovica in the hundreds hours after the first NATO bombs fell.

"A group of six men with masks came, and they took the women and children out of the houses, and they burned the houses," said Mehdi Halilaj, a 27-year-old economist, recalling that first night. "The first night they burned 50 or more shops and about 35 houses. They were helped by the police."

"They took 11 men and killed them, and some they cut up their bodies," he continued, speaking in English. "They left their bodies in the street for everybody to see, and nobody dared take them away. The city was very scared from Wednesday on."

A woman called Ardina, who asked that her family name not be used, said: "The second night we saw their lights, cars, trucks, an armored vehicle. They started shooting like I have never heard in my life. I thought everyone was dead."

"We were lucky," she said, speaking in English. "All the houses around us were burned and people killed. That night killed two brothers were, a man about 40 burned in his house and my sister-in-law with Down syndrome, they burned her in her house. She is dead. There was a body on the street, nobody could touch that body all day long."

As in many places, the Serbs were guided to the most affluent and influential families, the people who helped give the Albanian community its cohesion. It is not known whether this was on instruction, or perhaps motivated by the greed, or grudges, of individual attackers, but one effect may be to damage Albanian prospects for rebuilding their communities.

"In this block, they burned a lot of houses," Ardina said. "They were the best houses in town, the rich people," she said. "There was a Serb from the city guiding them. He told them: ‘Burn this house. Kill this one.’ Everyone in Djakovica knows him. They killed a large number of intellectuals, especially doctors. They shot a prominent surgeon, Dr. Izet Hima. They went for the rich people, to steal their television sets or whatever they see, burn their houses and kill them."

From the first days, the speed and scale of the Serbian campaign were stunning, even by the violent standards of Balkan wars as waves of paramilitary thugs, special policemen, regular soldiers and armed Serbian civilians swept through region after region of Kosovo, acting in concert.

The burning and killing in the center of Djakovica went on for three weeks beginning in the narrow streets and small Ottoman-style houses of the Old Town, and then moved on to the newer high-rise buildings in the more modern section. "In the beginning they were just burning at night," Ardina said. "But after a week they were burning all day long, starting at 9 o’clock in the morning."

"There were selected homes burned in the beginning, after that it was all the buildings," Dr. Flori Bakalli said, in English. "There were special police, local police, paramilitaries, and some of them civilians, armed. They were burning the houses and they started to scream like a wolf—‘woo, woo’—and they shot people in the back. Near my house there were five of them I saw myself."

Ethnic Albanians moved from house to house and apartment to apartment, fleeing and moving in with relatives and friends, they said, to stay ahead of the advancing Serbs. In the old town, where many of the dwellings were built close together, Albanians broke holes through the walls so they could run from one home to another to escape if the Serbs knocked on the door.

Everybody, children included, slept fitfully in their clothes and shoes, ready to run. Someone had to be always awake, peering through a window or the peepholes of steel gates to see if the Serbs were coming.

Hoxha, a dignified white-haired man, took a reporter’s notebook to sketch his family’s compound and their futile attempts to elude Serbian attackers as they killed and burned their way through the neighborhood.

"We moved from one house to another and finally to my older daughter Tringa’s house," he said. "That night I saw an old man, about 80, killed and burned and a 15-year-old boy as well. We stayed there for four nights, and the fifth night the Serbs came."

"It was around 12 o’clock, and we didn’t have any electricity, when they came, about 30 people, paramilitary, V.J. and Serbs from Djakovica who had been given uniforms and guns," Hoxha said, using the initials by which the Yugoslav Army is known. "We were sleeping. My son-in-law was watching through the hole in the steel gate and came and told us to wake up."

They had parked a car sideways across the gate to block it, but the Serbs pushed through with a heavier vehicle. Thinking that the Serbs were looking only for men of military age, Hoxha and two other men climbed out a second-story window, dropped onto a wall and escaped.

He spent the next seven hours hiding in the narrow space between two buildings, squeezed between the concrete walls, listening to shouts and screams and gunshots.

In the morning he came back to the compound and found the bodies of everyone who had been left behind, some of the bodies burned. Later he said he had learned that the Serbs had first shot his 15-year-old daughter, Flaka, in front of her mother, then the older daughter, Tringa. His wife pleaded with them not to kill the children, but then they killed her. One of his granddaughters, Shihana, a spunky girl of 6, ran away and tried to hide in a closet, but they killed her there and set fire to the closet.

After he explained all this, he put his head in his hands and cried.

Next door, in the Caka family house, 20 people were hiding in the basement, when the Serbian forces broke in. They shot 18 people in the back of the head. A 10-year-old boy, Dren Caka, was somehow only wounded in the left arm, and escaped by pretending to be dead, and later gave his account to reporters at the medical tent set up at the Morini border crossing. After the Serbs left, he said, he managed to slip out a window, but he could not take his 2-year-old sister with him and she was burned alive when the Serbs torched the house. It was he who witnessed the killing of Hoxha’s family.

Over the course of the assault, more than 100 boys—presumably regarded as potential Kosovo Liberation Army recruits—were captured, refugees said, and taken to a sports center. No one knows what has happened to them.

In just seven days, March 30 to April 5, some 51,880 people were herded on foot, according to records of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, from Djakovica to a tiny remote border crossing in the mountains called Qafar-e-Prushit. The way looks like a road on a map, but it really becomes just a muddy footpath up the steep climb, which can be traveled only on foot because vehicles would set off the mines the Serbs had planted. They were city people in city shoes, and they pushed the sick and elderly along with them in wheelbarrows.

As Djakovica suffered, other Serbs were at work nearby purging a wide area they regarded as a rebel highway.

In a rare account by a Serb, a captured soldier described to NATO interrogators how his infantry battalion was sent without explanation to Pec.

On March 27, the soldier said, his commander gathered about 100 men outside an elementary school and outlined their mission: expelling Albanians from their homes. The time had come, he said, to drive the Albanians out of Serbia, according to an American official familiar with the account.

The troops were to move through the city house by house, he said, ordering residents to dress in a few minutes, pack one small bag and leave in the direction of Decani, a city to the south. The soldiers looted jewelry, torched homes. At day’s end, many were driving new cars.

An artillery and armoured unit deployed to the nearby village of Ljubenic used rougher tactics. The soldier said a friend in the unit had told him they had killed 80 men while expelling the women, children and elderly.

In another of the region’s villages, Bela Crkva (Bellacrkva in Albanian), on March 25, soldiers and special policemen torched the homes and farm buildings and killed at least 62 people, most of them gunned down with automatic weapons in a stream bend.

"They just started shooting," Zheniqi, a survivor, said in an interview. "The dead bodies behind me pushed me over a cliff and into the stream. I was lucky because all the dead bodies fell on top of me."

It was one of a series of mass killings over the next few days along a seven-mile stretch of villages in the rolling hills, including Celina, Pirane, Krush-e-Vogel (called Mala Krusa in Serbian) and Krush-e-Mahde (Velika Krusa), where Bekim Duraku remembered, life was so "beautiful, if someone offered to take me to the United States, I wouldn’t have gone."

On March 26, the third day of the NATO bombing, the idyllic life ended in one of the best-documented of the mass killings, including an amateur videotape of the bodies. Serbian forces stormed through the village shooting down people in several areas, burning some bodies, digging a mass grave with a backhoe for others and leaving some lying in piles on the ground.

Part III

Villages: Expelling Refugees for a Relief Crisis

The violent emptying of the Djakovica region had a specific military purpose: cutting off the Kosovo Liberation Army supply lines. The Serbs followed it up by planting more mines, strengthening their forces along the border and mounting raids into Albania.

But in a long stretch of villages, towns and cities across Kosovo—places either close to the border or on main transportation routes—there were similar, if less intensely concentrated, outbursts of killing and burning in those same days with another aim: driving out the majority Albanian population.

How it worked is readily discerned by comparing the refugee figures kept at the Albanian, Macedonian and Montenegrin borders with a map of Kosovo. What the comparison shows is how areas close to the border were cleared first, often by wild bursts of killings that served as an example. This cleared transportation routes that facilitated the hounding out of people from other villages, who gathered in the main town of a region, and from the cities.

Sweeping his hands over a map in broad arcs across the major roadways, Fron Nazi, an Albanian-American scholar heading up a major human rights study and in touch with both refugees and the rebels, demonstrated how the Serbian strategy was apparent: first to empty the population centers and control that scorched earth, then to isolate the rebel fighters in the forests where they could be contained, squeezed and even starved out.

Forcing the refugees over the borders, NATO intelligence experts believe, served another purpose: overwhelming NATO troops stationed in Macedonia with an unmanageable relief crisis, calculating that the task of feeding, housing and caring for hundreds of thousands of refugees would consume the alliance’s energies and divert it from preparing a military campaign.

"It was the first use of a weapon like this in modern warfare," a NATO intelligence officer said. "It was like sending the cattle against the Indians."

The refugees accounts in their thousands bear a striking sameness as they tell of Serbian gunmen bursting into their homes, threatening to kill if the Albanians do not give up jewelry, of seeing relatives or neighbors killed. Almost every Albanian interviewed begins by telling the exact time the Serbs arrived. But after days of hiding or plodding along in refugee columns, they often could not remember what day it was.

In many accounts, it is possible to discern a division of labor among the Serbian attackers.

Typically the Yugoslav Army, usually the Pristina Corps of the Third Army, surrounded an area, shelling it with tanks, artillery or or Katyusha rockets. Then the police, local Serbs who were sometimes reservists, and the paramilitaries moved in for the close-in dirty work, going block by block, house by house, pounding on doors, demanding money, and often shooting people on the spot.

After the door-to-door terror, the military moved in to herd the people out, either on foot or tractor, or sometimes on trains and buses, the refugee accounts agree.

The Pristina Corps, in close conjunction with the blue-uniformed Serbian Interior Ministry troops, cleared transit routes. As the flow of refugees accelerated, regular soldiers in green camouflage were deployed at key intersections to control movement.

By all accounts, it was a tightly ordered, coordinated campaign, from the artillery that shelled villages, to the masked gunmen who killed, looted and spread terror, to the armored cars and lines of troops who chased people hiding in the woods to corral them in larger central towns for eventual expulsion. In some cases, human rights workers interviewing refugees say, different groups of gunmen were distinguished by different colored armbands or headbands.

Even the wild-appearing masked irregulars—Arkan’s Tigers, the White Eagles and others—were under tight control, NATO experts said, and reported to the intelligence arm of the Serbian Interior Ministry.

"They were in there with Belgrade’s blessing," a NATO intelligence official said. "What they would be allowed to do is up to the local commander."

The level of violence varied widely, depending on the whim of the local Serbian official in charge, or even individual gunmen. An international official visited a woman of about 50 in a hospital with both of her nipples hacked off.

"All she wanted was to tell her brother in Srbica what happened," he said, referring to a town in north-central Kosovo. "How could I tell her Srbica doesn’t exist any more."

Some people were clearly targeted, particularly men age 15 to 50, suspected or potential rebel fighters, and those who worked for or rented space to the observer teams from the Office of Cooperation and Security in Europe. One key political activist who was a bridge between Kosovar factions, Fehmi Agani, was pulled off a train outside Pristina by the Serbian police and killed. There were reports by human rights groups that doctors had been singled out.

Evidence on the incidence of rape is less complete. President Clinton and other Western leaders often charge that there has been organized rape. But while it is clear that there have been rapes, accounts that are available do not resolve whether they were systematic. Rape was not mentioned in the indictment by the war crimes tribunal.

But for all the signs of a logic behind the purge of Kosovo, many of the individual episodes—including the gunning down of women and children— seem inexplicable in military terms, except that the very unpredictability of the savagery added the powerful fear that drove the exodus.

"That’s what so terrifying—there are no rules," said an official in close touch with the international war crimes investigation in The Hague. "It’s so random. One set of people might be spared, and the people next door do the same thing and are all killed. There was a man who gave the police 10 marks and they let go, and another who gave them 250, so they thought he must have more and killed him."

By the time, three weeks into the campaign, that the Serbs came to drive the ethnic Albanians out of the north-central city of Mitrovica, said Jacques Franquin, a United Nations official, it was enough for them to gun down an old woman and a teen-age girl in one neighborhood for everyone around to quietly board buses and be directed out of town through traffic control points.

Part IV

Pristina: ‘In Every House They Broke the Doors’

"We waited two months, hoping something would happen." Luljeta Jarina

In Pristina, the knock on Bajram Kelmendi’s door came at 1 o’clock in the morning of the night NATO started bombing.