Tale of horror: 'If I Could Not Talk, Nobody Would Know'

"Do you have children?"
"Yes," the Serb paramilitary replied.
"Please think about our children," pleaded Elshani.
"It doesn't interest me." Another paramilitary said, "Let's start."

By Peter Finn Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, April 18, 1999; Page
A1

TIRANA, Albania - In an empty farm shed in the southern Kosova village of
Velika Krusa, Selami Elshani asked one of the Serbian paramilitaries standing
in front of him and 14 other ethnic Albanian men if he had children. "Yes,"
the Serb replied. "Please think about our children," pleaded Elshani. The
paramilitary, carrying an automatic rifle and wearing a light green uniform
with white epaulets and "Policija" written in white letters on his back, shook
his head and said, "It doesn't interest me." Another paramilitary said, "Let's
start." Within moments, 14 of the 15 men were dead, all except Elshani. The
Serbs threw straw on the pile of bullet-riddled corpses, doused them with
gasoline and set them on fire. Three weeks later, in Tirana's Central
University Hospital, Elshani eased himself into a sitting position using his
elbows to avoid leaning on his heavily bandaged hands. When unbandaged,
his face, once angular and bronzed, appeared destroyed: lips reduced to
pus and scabs; bloody sores bub bling from his singed hair to under his chin;
cheeks dried white and black; bandages, streaked red by blood and yellow
by iodine, wrapping his forehead. Elshani grimaced as he rose from the bed.
But he was determined. He had a story to tell: how 14 men were executed
in cold blood. How their blood trickled down his face as he dared not
breathe. How he smelled the gasoline when a paramilitary brought it into the
room. How he burned. And how he survived. "God saved me to come out
and tell," said Elshani, 37. In a bed where seepage from his wounds streaked
the sheets with blood, in a cinder-block hospital where the pink and green
walls were rotting and peeling, in a city of refugees and garbage and dust,
Elshani was perhaps the most fortunate and the most cursed of the
displaced. "If I could not talk, nobody would know," he said. "Those men.
Nobody would know." On March 25, the day after NATO started bombing
Yugoslavia, about 50 people from the same extended family gathered in the
house of Elshani's uncle. Elshani, his wife, his parents and his two boys,
ages 4 and 8, had been living in Velika Krusa since the previous July when
they were burned out of their home village of Reti, near the town of
Rakovica, during a summer offensive by Yugoslav forces. There were 10
fighting-age men in the house the night after the bombs began to fall, and
they decided to flee to a nearby riverbank, fearing that any Serbian assault
on the village would target them. "We had to leave," said Elshani, "because
we knew the Serbs wanted the men." When the 10 men reached the river
about 10 p.m. they found about 200 other men hiding there as well as
dozens of women and children. It was cold and the children were crying. No
one had brought any food. By 3:30 a.m., the villagers were surrounded by
Yugoslav forces, silhouetted in the distance. Through the night, random
gunfire pierced the darkness. In the morning light, the villagers were ordered
to emerge with their hands above their heads. The women were taken to
the village mosque, and the men were lined up in six rows on either side of a
road running through Velika Krusa. One by one, they were searched and
stripped of money, identity papers and car keys. When the search was over,
the 200 men were ordered into an open area beside a farmhouse. They lay
on the ground, face down, with their hands behind their heads. Out on the
street, the men had been searched by Interior Ministry troops or special
police forces, but in the courtyard they were guarded by about 20 Serbian
paramilitaries. "The normal police were calm," said Elshani, "but the
paramilitaries were screaming. They said we were terrorists." Elshani said he
recognized one of the Serbs as a civilian from the village of Velika Hoca,
near Elshani's home. For five hours, the paramilitaries moved among the
ethnic Albanians, hitting them with wood. Elshani's right hand was broken.
Five or six men were taken away individually, but Elshani said he never
heard gunshots or screaming. "I don't know what happened to them," he
said. "We never saw them again." After five hours, the men were ordered to
stand and were asked who was not from Velika Krusa. Fifteen men, including
Elshani, stepped forward. "I thought they would know I was from Reti," he
said. They were marched 50 yards to a shed that had housed farm animals
but was empty except for straw and muck. They were forced into a corner.
Elshani knew four of the 14 others: Ylber Thaci, 36; his brother, Isa, 35;
and Gezim Berisha, 36, were all from Reti. Fatmir Kabashi, 43, from the
village of Zociste, was married to Elshani's cousin. Pressed into the corner,
the men begged for their lives. "We asked them to set us free," said Elshani,
who was standing at the front of the men. "We said, 'We have done
nothing.' I said, 'Mister, is there any possibility to let us go. We are not
terrorists.' "In the end, they said, 'Go ask Bill Clinton,'" said Elshani. "That's
when we knew we would die." Five men lined up in front of them with
Kalashnikov automatic rifles. They fired a couple of rounds and Elshani fell to
the ground. He wasn't hit. He just fell. A burst of gunfire erupted and bodies
fell on top of him. Blood from the victims streamed down Elshani's face. He
lay face up, his eyes closed, with one of the victims lying almost completely
on top of him. "I felt his blood trickle on my face," he said. The paramilitaries
continued to fire into the corpses and Elshani was lightly grazed on the
shoulder. The Serbs then covered the bodies with straw, soaked it in
gasoline and lit it. "I was mad with fear," said Elshani. The body on top
protected him some, but the heat became intense. Elshani didn't know,
however, if the Serbs were still around, and if crawling out meant certain
death. "I had to come out of the fire or die burned alive," he said. "It felt
like an hour in the flames even though it was a very short time. It was
horror for me. "I pushed the body aside and opened the straw with my
hands and that's when my face and hands were burned." Elshani rolled out
screaming, oblivious now to his fear of the Serbs. His clothes were on fire.
He pulled them off, stripping flesh from his hands. He ran screaming from the
room and out into the yard where he found some water. "That helped me
find my senses," he said. Out on the street, he said, there were about 20
corpses. He recognized two of his cousins, Ramadan Ramadani, 36, and his
brother, Afrim, 35. He didn't know the others. "I looked at them carefully,"
he said. "I saw some people with half of their heads gone away." Elshani ran
to his uncle's house, where he found his father, uncle and two other
relatives, all elderly men. They started in fright, and no one seemed to
recognize him. "I said, 'It's me, it's me,'" said Elshani, "and they started to
cry." >From March 26 to April 1, the men hid Elshani in the basement,
treating his burns with yogurt. "I was conscious. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't
move my hands. Terrible pain," he said. On April 1, an ethnic Albanian came
to the house and said everyone was leaving. Elshani was hidden under
blankets on the back of a tractor carrying elderly men. They made it across
the border without being searched. At an Albanian military hospital in Kukes,
doctors cleaned Elshani's hands and face but told him he had to get to
Tirana for treatment. There was no ambulance to take him, so one of
Elshani's relatives paid a local taxi driver his last 300 marks to take the two
of them to the Albanian capital. Here, Elshani has had three skin grafts, and
two more surgeries are planned. But doctors said they cannot offer him
plastic reconstructive surgery, which they believe he will need. After nearly
a week at the hospital, Elshani saw his wife walk through the door. The
relative who brought Elshani to Tirana found her and Elshani's sons at a
refugee camp in the southern Albanian city of Fier. The family had fled into
the hills for four days on March 26 and then joined a convoy of refugees
going to Albania. "They told me he was a little burned," said Mahije Elshani,
33, who now lives in her husband's hospital room, tending his bandages and
delicately spooning food into his mouth. "I asked him, 'Do you hear me?' He
said, 'Yes.' And I fainted." She fainted twice more that day. A stream of
visitors, mostly relatives, comes to see Elshani every day. And this week,
officials from the war crimes tribunal at The Hague also came by to take a
statement from Elshani. They refused to discuss the case, but Elshani said
they told him they hope to bring those who killed the 14 men to justice.
Two people have not come to see Elshani - his sons, Leotrim, 8, and Nderim,
4, who are being sheltered by an Albanian family. "I can't have the kids see
me," said Elshani. "They can't see me."

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company