SHOOT FIRST, LIVE LONGER. Returning Yugoslav soldiers give their accounts of brutality, courage and despair in the failed war to save Kosovo for Serbia.
(...)NOT SORRY ENOUGH
When questioned the Serbs still in Kosovo distance themselves from the atrocities that took place during the conflict, but returning Albanians are angered by their version of events.
By Fred Abrahams in Pec
The 13th century Patriarch of Pec (Peje), one of the centres of the Serbian Orthodox Church, is an icon-laden jewel at the entrance of the lush and dramatic Rugovo gorge in western Kosovo.
But inside its stone walls sits a depressing collection of greying monks and forty bedraggled, desperate Serbs waiting for a ticket out, all protected by Italian NATO troops.
"The Italians are helping us locate and bury the dead," says Father Jovan, an English-speaking monk who came to the Patriarch three weeks ago from Montenegro.
He interrupts his chat with a visitor to accept a bag of face masks and rubber gloves from a soldier in full combat gear. More than thirty local Serbs have been buried since he came, he says. And another thirty from the area are missing and feared dead.
The gloom and desperation amidst the physical beauty speaks volumes about the current state of the church, and the status of Kosovo's remaining Serbian population. After ten years of Milosevic's extreme nationalist policies, tolerated or supported by most Serbs in the area, they find themselves disoriented, without hope, and terribly afraid.
In early July the church publicly condemned the Milosevic government for the atrocities perpetrated by Serbs in Kosovo over the past three months. And church leaders express regret for the war crimes that were committed.
But the apologies and sense of responsibility do not run deep. "Parts of Pec were bombed by NATO," says Father Jovan, referring to the utterly burned out shopping district in the centre of the town.
The black scars streaking upward from the windows of the central mosque clearly show that it and all of the surrounding shops were burned from the inside rather than by bombs.
And the systematic expulsion of Pec's Albanian population? "For this you must understand the history," Father Jovan says. "Many Albanians from Albania came here after World War Two. And then they had a lot of children. That is their way."
Such is the most moderate view among local Serbs. Yes, bad things happened. But you must understand the context and our suffering.
The equivocating apologies do not go down well with the Albanian population in the Pec municipality that has returned almost to its previous numbers. For them, after experiencing such brutality over the past three months, all Serbs are guilty.
"I buried my family members and I held the bones of my relatives. I couldn't even find the bones of my uncle," said Veibe Gashi, whose fourteen family members were executed and burned by local paramilitaries on May 14 in the village of Cusk (Qyshk). "So what right do they have to stay here? Those with blood on their hands must go. And that is all of them. They are all the same - without a God."
Stories of mass executions abound in this part of Kosovo, and bodies of Albanians continue to be found every day. But even those who lost no family members feel intense bitterness at the Serbian population who they believe participated in the brutal ethnic cleansing campaign.
For the Kelmendi family, the role of local Serbs stares at them from the dining room. Having lived in a beautiful two-story house in an ethnically mixed neighbourhood in Pec, they asked their Serbian neighbor to watch their home when they were forcibly expelled in March on the Muslim holiday of Bajram. Relations with their neighbour had always been cordial, so the widowed mother next door agreed to oblige.
When the Kelmendis returned from three months as refugees in Montenegro they found their home in ashes. With no place to stay, they moved into their neighbour's house, which she had abandoned on the day Serbian troops withdrew from Pec. There they found the less valuable of their own possessions: a table, a chest and some dishes and silverware.
Everything else, a neighbour who stayed in Pec told them, had been carted away in two trucks by the Serbian neighbour who had promised to watch over their home. Now they sit in her house eating meals at their own table with their own forks and knives. "They all played a role," says one of the Kelmendi sons, as he looks out at the crumpled hull of his former home.
But exactly who played "a role" may not be so easy to determine. Most of the true criminals left Kosovo with the Serbian troops along with their newly won war bounty. Left behind now are the old and poor, some of them Serbian refugees from Croatia, who have no money to leave and no place to go. The empty hopelessness on the faces of those in the Patriarch is plain to see.
Rumours swirl among the Albanians and especially the local KLA that war criminals remain. The most likely location, they say, is Gorazdevac, the last Serbian village in western Kosovo.
Approximately 300 Serbs remain, surrounded by Italian tanks and heavily armed soldiers. Every Thursday a bus, escorted by NATO forces, takes Serbian villagers from Gorazdevac to Rozaje, an hour north in Montenegro. But many wish to remain in the village.
Some have even come back, although international agencies question whether their return was on their own volition. It is in Milosevic's political interest, they say, to keep these individual reminders of his defeat in Kosovo as far away from Serbia proper as possible. And their presence in Kosovo is an important political pawn, which is what these people have been for him since 1989.
As in Bosnia, refugee agencies like the UNHCR are faced with the troubling dilemma of providing protection for the local Serbian population or organising their transfer out of the region. To establish a system with little or no long-term feasibility, or to indirectly assist in the process of ethnic segregation?
The larger question is whether Serbs and Albanians can ever live together again. "It is unbelievable what they did to Albanians," says the Kelmendi son. "But look what they also did to themselves."Fred Abrahams is a senior researcher covering Kosovo for Human Rights Watch.
SHOOT FIRST, LIVE LONGER
Returning Yugoslav soldiers give their accounts of brutality, courage and despair in the failed war to save Kosovo.
By an IWPR correspondent in Kraljevo
Dragan's great-grandfather fought the Germans in World War I. His grandfather faced both Nazis and Communists during World War II. In 1991 his army reservist father was ordered into a war against the Croats, among whom he counted many friends.
His father came back in a wheelchair, home to a war-disability pension worth about 30 marks a month. Then it was Dragan's turn, this time into a war against Kosovar Albanian guerillas and NATO's air forces. That conflict came to its own end last month, but 24-year old Dragan's struggle did not stop with it.
Instead he became one of the group of angry army reservists who used their armoured vehicles to blockade the central Serbian town of Kraljevo this month. They were protesting at the state's refusal to pay them for the weeks they were away from their homes, families and regular jobs, but the causes of their frustration ran deeper than just lack of cash.
"In my army unit in Kosovo there were 20 people, mostly workers and peasants," says Dragan. "We did not fire a single bullet, then five of my friends died from a NATO cluster bomb and two from Albanian snipers.
"We withdrew from Kosovo, bid farewell by the curses of the Serbian civilians who we were supposed to protect, but left like mangy dogs. We left as whores. Back here we were greeted by Milosevic's TV. They told us we had won! Who exactly did we win against?"
According to official figures, disputed by many locals, Kraljevo, population 50,000, lost 41 of its men killed in action during the conflict, with 90 more wounded. Leskovac, an even smaller town in Eastern Serbia, lost 57 killed and more than 100 injured.
The true casualty totals may never be known, as both army and government are vague about figures. When the fighting ended in June, General Nebojsa Pavkovic, who commanded the army in Kosovo until the retreat, said just 161 of his men had died there.
The dead were the first to return to Kraljevo, then the wounded, followed by the tanks of the retreating Yugoslav Army, and finally by the refugees, by tractor or on foot, escaping the vengeance of the Kosovo Liberation Army. No one who took this route came back satisfied, not even the officers who were given medals on the way. But the reservists had special cause for anger. They left ruins behind in Kosovo; back home they found ruins to greet them.
This is why Dragan curses his fate. Since the moment he left Kosovo, he says, he has had just one wish: "To go as far away from Serbia as possible and have children in some other world, where I could guarantee that they will not have to repeat my destiny."
Darko, an 18-year-old city child and computer fan, found himself in the Kosovo village of Kosare, near the Yugoslav-Albanian border.
"Once a shell fell half a metre from where I was standing," he remembers. "I looked at the shell and waited for her to explode. When I saw that she was not going to blow up, I leant down and kissed it. 'Thank you Miss,' I said, 'you know that I am not a bad boy...'"
He says the fighting turned people into beasts, even those who would normally hardly hurt a fly. The deaths of friends lead them to take awful revenge on the Kosovars. The only rule, said Darko, was 'shoot first - live longer'.
During fierce battles with KLA guerillas, he and his comrades in arms vowed that they would never leave the wounded behind for the KLA. "Sometime around midnight, a NATO cluster bomb hit us," he recalled.
"(His friends) Sasa and Dragan were instantly killed. I felt sharp pains in my stomach and in my back. I thought I would die. I begged my friends to kill me rather than to leave me behind. They carried me for three kilometers through the mountains, and deep snowdrifts. They saved my stupid life in which I have nothing to show, except these five wounds on my body."
Many believe that more soldiers were killed by the KLA than NATO bombs. A junior officer from the western Serbian town of Uzice believes the KLA snipers were more dangerous than the American B52 bombers.
"With the help of such air power, Serbian pilots could have destroyed half of Western Europe," he says. "Instead the US only managed to destroy fifteen tanks, a couple of bridges and some factories - which they are now required to rebuild for the Albanians!"
The majority of army reservists say they freely went to Kosovo, but are not keen to talk about their work there. Quizzed about ethnic cleansing and the mass murder of Albanian civilians, they react angrily. "The war was happening there," snaps Zoran L, a 30-year-old teacher from Kraljevo, "but not the one that CNN and the BBC showed, or the one Milosevic's TV and newspapers sang about.
"I am a father of two young children and a couple of times, I rescued Albanian mothers and their children from burning houses," he says. Pressed to identify the arsonist behind the burning, Zoran takes a line repeated by many Serbian veterans of the conflict.
"In Kosovo, as nowhere else in the world, there is an unwritten law of blood revenge. When an Albanian or a Serb kills someone, the family of the victim must avenge his death. We have witnessed Albanian and Serbian blood revenges and have been victims of them too...
"I did not dare stop a Serb who avenging the death of his father at the hands of an Albanian. That Serb had the right according to his own "law". We were only burying the dead and praying to God that we would not be hit by bombs or snipers."
One of his friends, based on the Yugoslav-Albanian border during the conflict, explains how his unit came across a seriously wounded Albanian in a burned out house. He was given medical attention and discharged ten days later from their camp.
"We found him dead the next morning. His fellow Albanians killed him and carved the word 'KLA' on his forehead with a knife. Albanians hate us so much that they will kill their own people if they are saved by Serbs."
Rade D. another army reservist from Uzice spent two months in southern Kosovo, around the town of Pec. In peacetime he is a farmer, without significant army experience, but he was still ordered to join soldiers in dangerous zone-by-zone sweeps for enemy forces.
Since he returned he has been unable to sleep, and wonders about the mental effects of post-traumatic stress, sometimes called 'Vietnam syndrome' in reference to the many US soldiers who were psychologically damaged by their combat experiences during that war.
"Albanian snipers attacked us from the roofs and two of our men were killed," he recalled. "Then we started shelling the houses. The houses were burning, Albanian women and children were running on the road, men, we could see, were running towards the forest.
"We started to follow them and we caught three. We asked them who was firing and they were pretending that they did not understand. We tied them up and took them to the command for interrogation, but local (Kosovo) Serbs intercepted our patrol and in front of us they killed all three.
"Then we set out again on the sweep and we almost ended up shooting a group of paramilitaries from Serbia, who just follow their own rules. This wasn't a war, it was a madhouse, where every madman thought he was a general."
The paramilitaries showed little mercy towards their captives, and paid little heed to the reservists. "Once we wanted to free a group of Albanians, men," Rade says. "The paramilitaries came and said they recognised two members of the KLA. They were swearing at us, calling us 'stupid Tito partisans'. They took the Albanians and disappeared off to an unknown destination."
Some paramilitaries disliked the experience. Boban, 32, a veteran of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, signed up as a volunteer. "I went to Kosovo not because I love Milosevic, or hate the Albanians, but to use my military experience to help Kosovo Serbs defend their homes.
"But while we were defending their villages, they were next door looting Albanian houses!" he says. "I cannot believe that the TV set of some Albanian meant more to these Serbs than their own lives!"
He found the Kosovar Albanians just as hard to understand. "The KLA killed more of their own people than we did. They were killing them just because they were working in Serbian factories and were in some way seen as loyal to the Serbian regime."
Another reservist from Kraljevo saw six friends killed, and 20 wounded. "When we were going into action we would shell the houses. Once we hit a Serbian house by mistake," he says. "We did not know the terrain. The local Serbs were too busy taking their revenge on their neighbours or looking to steal a nice car from somewhere to be our guides.
"And what now? The family of my friend who died in battle receives state benefit worth only 25 German marks. I am afraid that the whole state and Milosevic together is not worth more!"The contributor is a journalist in Serbia whose name has been witheld.
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