http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/article/0,,9004-2002067214,00.htmlSUNDAY FEBRUARY 10 2002
Milosevic faces survivors of atrocity as justice day dawns
MARIE COLVIN, BELA CRKVA, KOSOVO
A DIFFERENT kind of hero will appear at the Hague when the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic begins this Tuesday.
Sabri Popaj would rather talk about how he grows the best peppers in Kosovo than the two teenage sons the Serbs shot dead along with 82 other men, women and children from his village. He had no chance to defend his family, but he preserved evidence that gives him hope for justice.
Popaj is not one to glorify his role. Yet when he takes the witness stand at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to describe the night of the massacre, he will also be telling his own story, that of a man who refused to break in the face of unimaginable terror and pain.
As Milosevic finally faces justice, it is worth remembering the enormity of the crimes committed during the decade of war he brought to the Balkans as leader of the Serbs.
He is charged with crimes against humanity and violation of the laws or customs of war. But the legal language does not begin to describe the suffering inflicted, or the pain that still haunts the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia. The survivors are also his victims.
Popaj is a survivor. After the war, the 43-year-old farmer returned childless to Bela Crkva, once a village of terracotta roofs in southern Kosovo where his family has farmed for generations.
I first met him in the burnt out ruins of his house in June 1999, days after Nato troops liberated Kosovo. He was emaciated, sitting by a cradle painted with blue flowers that seemed to be the only unscorched object in the village.
The Serbs had torched every house. His wife, sunk in grief, had gone to Canada and he did not know if she would return. “There is no life here,” he said.
Out of his pocket he pulled a handwritten map of the bodies he had buried. The massacre at Bela Crkva is a crucial part of the case against Milosevic because it is one of the most brutal, and thanks to Popaj, best documented of war crimes.
The story of Bela Crkva is a tale from the darkest depths of inhumanity. As Popaj plans to testify, Serbian tanks cut off the village at about 3am on March 25, 1999. Popaj’s wife and two sons fled with other villagers along the River Belaja.
He wanted to save some of their cows and sheep, and Kosovar Albanians thought that the women and children would be safer without their men; even Serbs, they said, would not open fire on the defenceless. They were proved wrong.
Popaj found the Zhuniqi and Spahiu families struggling to cross the river. He carried two-year-old Dibran Zhuniqi, and handed him to his mother, Lumniya. It was his last contact with his neighbours.
Shortly after 9am, Popaj watched from his hiding place as Serbian police machinegunned the families huddled on the riverbank. “I only saw two faces. The two men shooting were facing me as they fired machineguns into the families, and the others, maybe 10, had their backs away from me, as if they were protecting the killers,” Popaj said last week. All were in the blue uniforms of the Serbian police.
The Hague investigators showed him photographs; he has identified two as men he saw that night.
What Popaj could not see was that Lumniya had thrown herself over Dibran, the little boy he had carried across the river. Dibran was alive. Another villager found him seven hours later, drawn by the cries of “mummy, mummy”. He was clinging to her breast.
The Serbs trapped the rest of the villagers at a railway bridge and separated the men from the women and children. Both Popaj’s sons – Shendet, 17, and Agon, 13 — were forced into a field with the men. Agon was torn from his mother; she pleaded that he was a child, but he was big for his age, a farm boy who wanted to be a vet.
The women and children were ordered to Zrze, a nearby village. The Serbs forced the men to strip, took their money, jewellery and documents, and ordered them to dress again. The first to die was Nisim Popaj, Sabri’s brother, a 34-year-old doctor. Then all the men were ordered into the river and machinegunned. Sixty-five died; six survived.
Two days later, Popaj returned to the killing field. He placed a soda bottle with the name and details in the pocket of each of the 65 dead men and boys. Every corpse was wrapped in a blanket and plastic sheeting and buried. When the Hague investigators arrived after the war, he helped them excavate.
“That’s when I had the worst feeling,” Popaj says now. “When I was burying my sons, I was numb. But when the investigators opened the coverings on my sons many months later and took photos, I saw their wounds again. They were both shot in a line of bullets from their heads to their chests.”
The Hague trial will be harrowing. To convict Milosevic, the prosecution needs to show that the Serbian police were under the command of a leadership that had a systematic plan to kill Kosovar Albanians and terrorise the rest into fleeing. Murder, deportation, forcible transfer and persecution must be proven.
Under the precedent set in the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leaders after the second world war, the Hague prosecutors do not have to prove that Milosevic gave a direct order to the men in the field of Bela Crkva. But they must demonstrate that the killers were in his chain of command and that he had responsibility or reason to know that his subordinates would commit such acts, or that he took no reasonable measures to stop or punish them.
Just a few miles down the road from Bela Crkva, there is ample evidence that the slaughter was no aberration. A day after Popaj’s boys were killed, witnesses say another Serbian police unit murdered 105 men and boys in Mala Krusa, a hamlet that was home to 75 families, some of them Serbs.
The Hague judges will hear that the Serbian forces followed the same procedures. According to witnesses, Serbian tanks frightened the villagers from their homes, then looted and burnt them. Serbian police hunted down the villagers and separated the men from the women and children.
In Mala Krusa, the Serbs tried to cover up their crime. Mehmet Krasniqi, one of the few survivors, has told investigators how the Serbs herded the men and boys into the ground floor of an unoccupied house, opened fire with machineguns through the windows, and then set fire to the bodies.
Again, it was Serbian police in blue uniforms who did the killing, joined by local Serbs. Krasniqi’s testimony is damning. “Two bodies were on top of me. One man had no arm and another was bleeding from the mouth,” he said.
“There was screaming, screaming, and the dust from the walls where the bullets hit. I said to the man behind me with no arm, ‘Moharem, I will help you if they don’t come in to cut us up.’
“Then the Serbs threw something over us — it burnt my ear — and the fire started. I breathed through my jacket, it was wet with blood and I could take three breaths.”
He climbed out through a window, somehow unseen by the Serbs, and hid in his uncle’s basement nearby.
Krasniqi says the Serbs blew up the building after burning the bodies, then bulldozed the remains. None of the dead men of Mala Krusa is likely to be found. Their only memorial is the list of 101 of their names in the Hague indictment.
Each village is dealing differently with its wounds. One of the most poignant is Izbica, where the Hague indictment says the Serbs executed 165 men. They were buried by villagers, but when satellite photos of their graves were shown at a Nato news conference Serbian bulldozers dug them up and trucks carted them away.
Today, the graves have been recreated and are visited daily, even though they are empty.
In Bela Crkva, Popaj donated land for a martyrs’ cemetery. He visits once a week. Dibran, the boy he carried across the river, lives with his aunt and sometimes cries about “so much blood”.
Popaj has tried to move on. His wife returned from Canada, and they have had two more children, Shendita, 18 months, and Shendit, four months, named in honour of his dead son. He is rebuilding his house and in the spring will plant his fields with peppers, watermelon and corn.
He admits that he would not have had the new children had his two sons survived. Their photographs are on his wall, and he drinks raki, the powerful local liquor, to sleep at night.
Fedayia, his wife, is a study in despair. Rocking Shendit’s cradle with her foot, last week she said the pain never goes away. “The new babies are not replacements for the sons I lost,” she said.
The people of Kosovo want the lower-level Serbs to go to trial, the “mini-Milosevics,” as one farmer put it. The fate of Milosevic’s foot soldiers, however, will be left to a domestic judicial system that has yet to become firmly established. For now, Kosovars will closely follow the trial of Milosevic.
Few feel the life imprisonment he faces if convicted is enough. “I would make sure it took me five years to kill him,” said Popaj. “Even then the wound would not heal.”The charges
Kosovo: Crimes against humanity and mass deportations from 13 sites across Kosovo, including Bela Crkva, between January and June 1999
Croatia: Crimes against humanity, extermination, murder, torture and imprisonment in Western Slavonia and Krajina regions between August 1991 and June 1992
Bosnia: Genocide and complicity in genocide, extermination, mass killings, deportation and torture between March 1992 and December 1995
Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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