Kosovo Wells Emerging as Mass Graves
By VALERIE REITMAN, Times Staff WriterYSK, Yugoslavia--Dozens of villagers gathered outside the Memaj family's home in this remote hamlet in Kosovo, watching as several masked men clustered around the well, trying to dredge up what lay below.
Their worst fear: that the well might be the watery grave of as many as a dozen men.
So many corpses have been dumped into wells in Kosovo that the wells are emerging as a major health and reconstruction problem, says the United Nations, which is working to establish a government in the Serbian province. Private wells provide a good deal of the water supply in rural Kosovo. In the Djakovica area in the southwest, for example, the wells in 39 of 44 villages have been contaminated with either human or animal bodies, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Serbian forces apparently stuffed so many bodies of ethnic Albanians into wells during their campaign of terror last spring that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is treating them as mass graves in their own right.
The Memajs had been waiting for local authorities to help them tackle the job they'd started three weeks earlier, when they pulled three dead cows and a dog out of the well and then the body of 39-year-old Arif Mazrekaj. Mirrors indicated that several objects--possibly bodies--remained, and bullet shells nearby fueled fears.
Serbian forces had yanked Mazrekaj, along with more than 70 other men, from a column of refugees attempting to flee Kosovo on March 30. Perhaps some of the others, including the dead man's son--whose jacket and ID card also had been fished out--would be found at the bottom of the well too.
Similar scenes have been occurring all over rural Kosovo, as returning ethnic Albanian refugees have come home to find their wells contaminated with bodies. Many have been waiting weeks for help in cleaning them out.
Just a few days before the well dredging at Qysk, the mutilated corpses of two teenage boys--one with his ears cut off, the other with his skull smashed--were pulled out of a well in the town of Dedaj. When word of the discovery got out, more than 100 people from the surrounding countryside, their relatives still missing since the war, came to view the corpses, towing wagons behind tractors in case they needed to bring home a body to bury.
War crimes investigator Ben Hogan was on hand in Qysk. "It is all part of the [Serbs'] ethnic cleansing, the scorched-earth policy of trying to render the place uninhabitable," Hogan said. Human rights workers and war crimes investigators speculate that Serbs dumped the animals atop the humans to hide their crimes. In Dedaj, the locals found sponges floating in the wells, perhaps to staunch the horrific odor of decaying bodies. Once they pulled the sponges off, the smell of death polluted the entire valley, villagers say. The corpses keep surfacing. Every day, the international aid group Doctors Without Borders receives numerous requests for body bags.
In the town of Demjane, near the Albanian border, the bodies of brothers Ymer Pnishi, 63, and Zyber Pnishi, 60, were found along with a middle-aged retarded woman whose name local villagers did not know. Near Kamenica, in the eastern part of the province, the bodies of seven women, who are believed to have been raped, were found in early July, according to the Council for the Defense of Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization in Pec.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops, their hands full with trying to keep law and order, have not been of much help, leaving the aid groups to step in. Members of the Memaj family said that when they contacted the Italian troops patrolling the region, one soldier told them: "There are no humans there. It's a crocodile."
(One soldier did assist when the body was pulled out. A spokesman for the Italian-led brigade says that "there are so many things in so many places." As of the end of last month, the brigade already had found 748 bodies, including those at 31 confirmed mass grave sites.)
Doctors Without Borders logistics specialist Luc Castell says he has never seen anything on the scale of the bodies he's seen in wells in Kosovo, despite tours in hot spots such as Sudan, Liberia, Cambodia, Haiti and Ivory Coast.
One recent morning, Castell brought the group's water pump to Qysk, where he began helping the Memaj brothers and local villagers clean out the Memaj well. They set up a pulley, and a man was lowered into the well to secure an object below: Up came the remains of a dog.
The villagers, who had gathered not far from the waist-high wall around the well, retreated as a nauseous odor struck. The women from surrounding towns who had come to see whether their relatives were buried in the well were invited by the Memaj women to sit on the porch while the work proceeded. One of the two houses in the extended family's compound had been destroyed by fire, so that only its walls remained. The other, where they are living, was heavily damaged.
Olimbije Shabanaj, 38, and Ajshe Zukaj, 34, waited anxiously to see if the bodies of their fathers would emerge from the well. Fatime Mazrekaj, 65, was there too, trying to determine the fate of her 70-year-old husband. The men were among 66 still missing from the refugee column that fled the nearby towns of Beleg, Decani and Isniq on March 30.
The Memajs didn't have the heart to tell the wife of the one man they had found in their well that they also had found his 16-year-old son's identification.
"She has no other sons," the women said.
As the women talked, the odor became particularly fierce, and they put handkerchiefs across their faces: Another dog had just been fished out of the well. The smell became nearly insufferable each time an animal was pulled out.
The women dreaded seeing their relatives emerge, but at the same time they were desperate for closure.
"I would like to find him alive--I wait all night for him to knock on my door," Zukaj said of her father. "But I also want to find his bones and bury him properly if he's dead, because it's also hard not knowing what happened to him. I've saved my last dime to buy him a casket." By 4:30 p.m., the two Memaj brothers thought they had dredged up everything from the well. Altogether, there were seven dogs and what looked like a pig, in addition to the cows, the dog and the man's body they had found three weeks earlier. But no other human remains were discovered.
"You cannot pay for that relief," said Demush Memaj.
Castell, the Doctors Without Borders logistician, explained to Memaj that it would be possible to chlorinate the well and render the water drinkable. But like most Kosovars who have found bodies in wells, Memaj never wants to use the well again. He said he wanted it treated and covered as soon as possible. Castell poured about a pound of chlorine into the well.
The Memajs will continue to go into town to get water for the foreseeable future because new wells are expensive to dig: $1,000 or more, depending on the depth.
The women who had come to watch were relieved. They faced the prospect of other, similar dredgings, but that seemed a small price to pay.
Said Shabanaj: "It's good not to find anybody in a well because wherever [the missing bodies] are, it's better than being in a well."Copyright Los Angeles Times
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