Serb, Albanian families risk all saving each other (Chicago Tribune)By Vincent J. Schodolski Tribune Staff Writer July 4, 1999
DECAN, Kosova -- Dragica Bakic mixes some stale bread with water in a blue plastic tub and carries it to the garden behind her house at 1 Monastery Street to feed the three small white sheep that rush eagerly toward her.
The stoic woman of 47 normally whispers in conspiratorial tones as if she fears someone will hear her. She manages a smile as she watches the sheep prance amid the pear and walnut trees.
The sheep and the chickens she also coddles are among the few things that make Dragica Bakic smile these days.
Just months ago, the Serbian woman and her 46-year-old husband, Miomir, risked their lives to bring food, medicine and hope to Raza Isniqi and her family, ethnic Albanian neighbors who stayed in this small western Kosova town despite the best efforts of Serb soldiers and paramilitary units to drive local Albanians from their homes.
Now the fortunes of war have changed. The menacing Serb soldiers and police who glared at the Bakics for helping the Isniqi family are gone. In their place is the Kosova Liberation Army, the guerrilla force seeking independence for the southern Yugoslav province, and NATO troops charged with maintaining security for Serbs and ethnic Albanians.
The Bakics fear that irate Kosovar Albanians, returning from refugee camps to burned homes and looted businesses, will seek revenge on any Serbs they encounter, even if they were not responsible for any of the war's evils.
So the Bakics seek help from the same Albanian neighbors they aided when Serb forces swaggered through the streets of Decani.
"I never did anything wrong," said Dragica. "What I hope is that the people who did not do anything wrong during the war can now live together after the war," she said uncertainly. "Who knows?"
The mass movement of hundreds of thousands of refugees back to the ransacked homes in towns like Decani is just getting under way. The scale and breadth of the repatriation is sweeping. But whether it will work and someday allow the NATO alliance to extricate U.S. and other Western troops from Kosova hinges on whether Serbs and ethnic Albanians can replicate the small acts of kindness and compassion delivered in the darkest days of the war by decent and honest people like the Bakics and Isniqis.
From most indications, the repatriation won't be easy. Ethnic Albanian refugees returning from crowded and fetid camps in Albania and Macedonia are angry. The homes they left are often defaced, destroyed or barely standing. Many want vengeance.
If they strike out at the Bakics, though, they would be blindly punishing those who sympathize with their plight and who have literally felt their pain.
"They (KLA members) have the right to be with their people and to be in uniform," said Miomir about the new political realities. He and Dragica say they have discussed going to stay with his family outside of Kosova for a time but have yet to make a decision.A place of refuge
The Serbian couple's neat little house at 1 Monastery Street is still standing; onions, beans and cabbage still grow in their back garden and fragrant lilacs, orange tiger lilies and red roses still bloom in their front yard. But the Bakics don't live there anymore.
Fearful of ethnic Albanian vengeance, the couple first took refuge with the Isniqis, who were happy to return the kindness the Serbian couple extended to them when the Serbs occupied this town. But worried about their security and the safety of their old Albanian friends, the Bakics moved within the stone walls of the Serbian Orthodox Decani Monastery, a medieval structure built like a fortress.
Lodged behind the white-washed walls of the living quarters, the Bakics can look out across the rolling green lawn at the 644-year-old church, its pale pink walls and blue cupola set starkly against the tall pines and poplars that surround it in this lush gorge of the River Bistrica.
The scholarly monks inside the 14th Century compound provide shelter for the Serbs who remain in Decani, just as monks took care of local ethnic Albanians when the Serb forces held sway.
"We want them all (Serbs and Albanians) to understand that this is their house and we are their friends," said Abbot Theodosy, the head of the monastery, which was founded on a spot said to have been selected in the 13th Century by St. Sava, founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
Theodosy, a tall man with piercing blue eyes, large hands and a long beard just starting to gray, spent part of the war driving the monastery's white Mercedes van ferrying Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Albanians and Gypsies from hot spots of the Kosova war to safety behind the monastery's walls. "We wish to show an example of tolerance," he said.
But animosity and revenge rage as the population of Decani slowly returns.
Each day Dragica makes her way down the road from the monastery to her home. In a way, it is a trek through history, from the monastery, a repository of the Serbian heritage in Kosova that is at the core of the war, to the present, the KLA and ubiquitous NATO soldiers trying to maintain an uneasy peace.
A unit of Italian peacekeepers man a checkpoint directly in front of the Bakics' ransacked home.
"It's a good thing the (NATO) peace forces have come," Dragica said. "They should have come sooner. We would have had fewer casualties if they did."
Heaps of clothing are strewn everywhere, and cans, empty bottles and the contents of cupboards are scattered across the floor in the three rooms of the small house.
The yearlong struggle for survival waged by the Bakics and their ethnic Albanian friends was a glimmer of human decency amidst a maelstrom of mindless hatred. Their story provides a lesson for others who must learn to live together in a place transformed first by war and now by the introduction of tens of thousands of foreign soldiers, a presence that is likely to last for many years.
A town dominated by ethnic Albanians but long home to a Serb minority, Decani for the last 13 months has been terrorized in turns by Serbian paramilitary forces seeking dominance in a land they consider sacred to them and by ethnic Albanian fighters determined to win independence for this province where they are in the majority.Years of peace
While most of the city's prewar population of 60,000 people fled during the summer of 1998, some 350 determined individuals -- Serbs and Albanians -- remained in the hope of preserving their homes and the way of life they shared before a firestorm of nationalism swept through Kosova 10 years ago.
With enmity directed first against ethnic Albanians like the Isniqis and later against Serbs like the Bakics, both groups felt the sharp sting of ethnic hatred. But in their effort to survive and persevere, they found they could do so only by helping each other.
Miomir Bakic came to Decani from outside Kosova as a young man nearly 30 years ago. Here he met Dragica, who was born in Kosova. Together they have lived in this town 27 years.
Both found work with the Yugoslav government, she as a sanitary inspector, he as a tax inspector. The two never had children and settled into a quiet, routine life during the decades-long rule of Yugoslavia's powerful postwar leader Josip Broz, better known as Marshal Tito.
Under the ethnic balancing act that enabled Tito to preside over a relatively stable communist country in the 1970s, the Bakics had a predictable, relatively comfortable life. The combination of a well-oiled political machine and the stability provided by a then-functioning command economy provided the basics. Life was not luxurious, but they had what they needed.
The couple eventually settled into the small house at 1 Monastery Street, conveniently located around the corner from a building housing a restaurant and hotel on Decani's main thoroughfare, Marshal Tito Street.
Now it is a different place. In the three weeks since Serb forces agreed to leave Kosova and Albanians began to return, someone trashed their house while they were away. Two icons of St. Michael the Archangel remain intact, one hanging in the room where Dragica used to sleep and the other near the bed of her husband in the next room. Both show the archangel, a popular protector of Serbian Orthodox homes, with an avenging sword in one hand and the scales of justice in the other.
While they do not know for sure who ransacked their house, the Bakics suspect it was the work of the KLA because they discovered the mess the morning after they moved into the monastery on June 21.
When Dragica found what had happened, she went to the local KLA commander, Abdul Moshkoli, and complained. He assured her that it was not the work of his men, but she remains unconvinced.
"There are a lot of people dressed like the KLA, so who knows," she said.Blame traced to Milosevic
Sitting amidst the rubble in the room where she tossed and turned at night during the months of fighting in the town and later during the NATO bombing, Dragica recalled the days before the election of Slobodan Milosevic as president of Yugoslavia and the latest rise of Serbian nationalism.
"During the old times I had good relations with my neighbors, the Albanians," she said. "Nationality did not matter. What matters are good people."
She and her husband blame Milosevic and his policies for the death and destruction in Kosova.
"If he was not in power, none of this would have happened," she said.
The war initially came to Decani in May of 1998, she recounted, when the first outside Serbian forces arrived in the town. These were not police or soldiers that the people of Decani knew, but tough strangers, paramilitary forces who came to deal with the KLA in particular and the ethnic Albanian population in general.
Shortly after their arrival, in the spring and early summer of that year, the ethnic Albanians started to leave Decani, first for nearby villages where they felt safer among a purely ethnic Albanian population. Later, when the Serb forces expanded their attacks across the Decani area, they headed for refugee camps in Albania and Montenegro. Within a few weeks, almost the entire Albanian and Serb population was gone.Reaching out to help
"I felt bad seeing the Albanians go," said Miomir Bakic. "I could not help all the Albanians, but I could help a few."
Among those few Albanians the Bakics were able to help was Jusuf Gracaferi, a retired construction engineer who lives in a single-story home at the end of a narrow lane just a block from 1 Monastery Street.
"He was afraid to go out shopping," said Dragica, quickly adding, "Just as we are now."
As the Serb campaign in Decani stretched through summer into autumn and winter and then into another spring, Dragica and Miomir spent many nights huddled in their darkened house, blackout curtains hanging in the window, moving around only by the light of their television set.
Miomir watched the news, but Dragica shunned it, saying she did not believe what the Serbian broadcasts were saying. Sometimes they watched movies; they are especially fond of American gangster films.
During the height of the NATO bombing, Miomir recalled, the state-run television showed many Serbian films about the Nazi bombings during World War II.
"I don't know for sure why they were showing those films," he said. "Maybe they needed something to keep morale high."
After nights when Serb forces burned and shelled ethnic Albanian homes, Dragica and Miomir would get up and leave their house to bring Gracaferi food, medicine and anything else he needed to get through the months when he was often too afraid to leave his house.
They did the same thing for other friends, including the Isniqis.
"They were afraid of the paramilitary or the police," Dragica said. "That was the time when they (Serb forces) started burning their houses."
Being a Serb in Decani in those days of 1998 and early 1999 allowed the Bakics freedom of movement and access to local gossip among Serbs about what was going on.
Armed with what they heard around town, they would tip off their Albanian friends about the arrival of new paramilitary units and warn them when word of a new offensive surfaced.
Together, or separately, they would make their way up the road leading to the Gracaferi house, or around the corner to High School Street, where the Isniqis lived, to offer what help they could.
"He was a very, very good man," Raza Isniqi said of Miomir, recalling the long months when their Serb friend and his wife risked their own security to help their neighbors.
And so things went until the middle of June, nearly 12 weeks after NATO began its bombing campaign in Serbia.
On Wednesday, June 16, the tables turned for Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Decani. That day, just as the last Serb forces left the area, the KLA moved into the center of town, taking over that restaurant-hotel near the Bakic home and another house a few blocks away.
According to KLA Cmdr. Moshkoli, the first thing his forces did after deploying was to raise the Albanian flag and check on the well-being of the ethnic Albanian population.
At that moment, the Bakics went from being the protectors to being the protected.
"We remained in our house for the whole time," said Miomir Bakic, discussing his reversal of fortune. "We felt afraid, my wife and I. There was no law and order."Climate of fear
As the Italian contingent of the NATO forces began to deploy more widely, the Bakics started to venture out during the day, but they remained fearful of staying home alone at night. So they turned to their ethnic Albanian friends for help.
For the next three nights, they moved between houses of the Albanians whom they had protected, coming finally to the doorstep of the Isniqis.
"We were afraid to be alone, honestly," Dragica said as she helped prepare lunch at the monastery. "I did not want to pay the price for something wrong that other people did."
On June 18 at around 9 p.m., the Bakics made their way through the darkened streets of Decani, around the corner onto High School Street and into the warm welcome of Raza Isniqi.
"They offered us dinner, but we had already eaten," said Miomir. So the two families spent the next few hours drinking coffee and talking about the situation in the town.
In the morning, Dragica and Miomir thanked the Isniqis for their hospitality and, despite pleas from their hosts to stay, went home.
The Bakics spent two days alone in their house. Sometimes the Italian NATO units deployed near their home at night, sometimes they went elsewhere. Finally, on June 21, with the KLA still dominant in their neighborhood, Dragica and Miomir made their way up the hill and asked Abbot Theodosy to protect them.
Weeks later, they remain there along with about 20 other Serbs and a dozen or more Gypsy families, people who fear the KLA because they cooperated with the Serb forces when they ruled in Decani.
The Bakics do not know what their future holds. They want to stay in the town they have lived in for more than a quarter-century, but they are afraid and uncertain.
Day after day, the NATO forces grow in numbers throughout Kosova. Convoys of troops, tanks and other armored vehicles clog the narrow roads in and around Decani and the nearby cities of Pec and Prizren.
Many people, including Abbot Theodosy, welcome the increased strength of NATO in Kosova, and Albanians and Serbs admit that the Western presence provides the best hope for the future of the province.
"This is not an Albanian or a Serb country," said the abbot. "This is a place where they (must) live together."
Abbot Theodosy accepts NATO now as a kind of temporal counterpart to the spiritual influence and control the monastery has tried to provide both sides in this conflict for the last year.
"Surely NATO is the only force that can bring peace and law to Kosova," he said. "It is the only authority with the power to do this. So far the Serbs and Albanians can't do this on their own because there are these evil seeds among them."
The monastery and NATO can help, but the rest is up to people of goodwill, like the Bakics and the Isniqis, and even they have their doubts.
"I hope they come back," Dragica said of the Albanians who fled Decani. But she is not sure about whether the good will that helped her and her Albanian friends survive the war will endure the tenuous peace.
"After all that has happened," she said, "I will never have a comfortable life here, or a comfortable house to live in here."
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