http://chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/article/0,2669,ART-33975,FF.htmlNightmare strikes at dawn
By Colin McMahon and Charles M. Madigan
Tribune Staff Writers
September 5, 1999BELA CRKVA, Yugoslavia -- At 3 a.m., some of the men of Bela Crkva were still up, because they knew what might happen. Almost everyone else was awakened by the unmistakable sound of clanking tank treads in soft earth.
The Serbs were on the move.
Serb forces had set up headquarters around this village of 3,800 people in western Kosovo, a small town built in the center of flat farm fields where the locals grew wheat, vegetables and long, green peppers that ran from mild to jalapeno hot.
The Serb presence here was part of one small movement in a vast Serbian military campaign that would sweep across Kosovo, driving nearly three-quarters of a million people, most of them Kosovar Albanians, to refuge in Albania and Macedonia.
Just as they had in a hundred other towns in Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia, the guns set most everyone on the run. People poured into fields. Some headed just a couple of hundred yards out to seek cover in a shallow creekbed that runs through Bela Crkva toward Rugova.
Some headed toward Zrze, a mile southwest.
Sabre Popaj, 43, was one of the last to leave Bela Crkva.
He had hoped to stay and protect the family's livestock, but as the sound of gunfire got closer, he gave up.
Armed men -- the villagers said they were Serb police officers -- had moved into the fields in two groups of about six or seven. Each group took a side of the creek and moved methodically forward. They were not familiar local faces, witnesses said, because the police had been rotating their forces every two weeks or so.
Popaj said he ran low along the banks of a creekbed away from the Serbs.
He heard children crying and followed the sounds, eventually finding 13 members of the Junici family huddling by the water's edge. He told the family to flee across the creek; the Serbs were closing in.
The creek was just 6 feet across, but the water was thigh-high and bitter cold.
Popaj said he lifted up the children and helped the others ford the stream. They tried to warm themselves on the other side, spreading out a blanket and giving bottles of milk to the little ones.
Popaj scanned the fields and saw more police on the way.
He said he turned to the family, two old men, three women and eight children.
"They saw us," Popaj said.
"We've got to escape."
But the women said no.
"They told me it was impossible. 'We have our children here,' they told me. 'We can't do it,' " he said.
Why would the police want to do anything to them, they asked. They were civilians, women, children and old men.
"Go on ahead," they told me. They said they would be fine, he recalled.
Popaj ran.
About 200 yards away, he found a depression in the field just deep enough for a hiding place.
Within minutes he heard gunfire.Latest round of violence
Violence, revenge and murder are as common to the history of this tortured region as the brooding clouds that seem to linger ominously over nations where monasteries, mosques and cathedral spires symbolize forces that spawn as much spite as spirit.
The attack on Bela Crkva (pronounced bell-lah serk-va) at dawn on March 25 was just one more round in the continuing cycle of Balkan atrocity. This bout actually dated to the late 1980s, when a Communist Party functionary named Slobodan Milosevic transcended his roots as a gas industry bureaucrat and used ancient Balkan hatreds to fuel his political career as Yugoslavia was crumbling, along with the rest of the communist world.
Traveling to Kosovo, where Serbs had lost an infamous 14th Century battle to the Turks, Milosevic stood on ground sacred in Serb history and vowed never again to allow the Serbian nation to suffer defeat at the hands of outsiders.
That blunt appeal to Serbian nationalism unleashed a torrent of violence across Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia throughout the 1990s. It also revived the old dream of a Greater Serbia dominated by Belgrade.
The Serb push into Kosovo, partly in response to brutal Albanian attacks on the Serb minority in Kosovo over the last few years, was simply an ugly piece of a even uglier big picture.
Relations between the Serbs of Kosovo and ethnic Albanians had been tense for years.
By March 1999, though, the tension had exploded into spasms of violence on both sides as Belgrade pushed to crush the Albanian call for independence and build Serb strength in Kosovo.
The Albanians of Bela Crkva were keenly aware of the patterns of Serbian behavior during the bitter war that had raged in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995.
That struggle had left tens of thousands of people dead as Serbian forces mixed terror, murder and intimidation in a campaign to force non-Serbs out of the region.
Military units would surround and secure a village, often using a classic pincers movement in which troops would move around the outskirts of a town and then work their way toward its boundaries.
Shelling would set the population in motion.
Then interior ministry police or paramilitary thugs -- "Rambos gone wrong," one observer called them, little more than criminals and balaclava-clad renegades in makeshift uniforms who had a penchant for bedecking themselves in the jewelry of the dead -- would move into town to finish the work.
That same pattern, this time sparked by NATO's air war, was falling into place around Bela Crkva at dawn on March 25. The Serb forces surrounded the town and unleashed light shelling to get the population on the move.
To prepare for the coming onslaught, some families had sent their children away to villages where the Serbs had little presence. Some young men of military age fled to the mountains. Many families packed clothes, food and blankets, ready to grab should they have to flee.
There is literally nowhere to hide around Bela Crkva, which sits on an open plain.
In the Balkan March, the high grasses that might have provided some cover had not yet started to grow. The fields were muddy and shrouded in fog as a damp spring day dawned.
Some families escaped to the fields to wait it out in the early-morning cool and darkness. Many of the men stayed behind and watched.
First they saw the tanks descend on the town.
Then, to their relief, the vehicles turned away and clanked off toward the north. A few hours later, close to 6 a.m., the tanks and other armored vehicles rolled back toward the town.
Lulyeta Kryezine's parents stayed.
Her father, confined to a wheelchair, had no choice. Her mother, committed to her father, felt she had no choice either.
They were easy targets.
"They killed both my mother and father, shot them in their home," Kryezine said. "They killed them both and burned them."
Villagers on the runFrom his hiding place, Sabre Popaj had heard the gunfire crackle from the creekbed he had just left. He dared not return to find out what had happened. Later, he learned that all but one member of the family, a 2-year-old boy, had been shot to death. The child, covered in blood, was left screaming in a pile of 12 bodies, including that of his mother.
Across the countryside, the people of Bela Crkva were fleeing in groups as small as six and as large as 100. The villagers had roots deep in this part of Kosovo. Many had the same last names -- Popaj or Junici -- but didn't even know how they were related. They didn't think it mattered that much. They were simple people. But now they were caught up in something complex and brutal, and the worst was yet to come.
Popaj said he saw more than 200 other villagers gathered downstream by a railroad trestle. The track, out of use for more than a year, runs alongside the creek, then crosses it over a stone bridge. Beneath the bridge, the banks of the creek flatten and spread out. Rocks and bits of shale mix with the dirt.
From the bridge, the villagers could see flames and smoke from Bela Crkva. The Serbs were moving through the town, looting and burning houses. They could see the flour mill where Serb snipers had set up shop on the top of a silo. They could see the neighboring villages of Zrze and Rugova.
They could also see the Serb forces.
Gani Fetoshi, 40, and Skender Popaj, 71, were at the bridge that morning.
Fetoshi was leading a large brood, his children, his brothers and sisters, their many children.
They had hid at a couple of spots closer to home, ducking down along the creek. The children were crying. Parents covered their children's mouths to muffle their sobs.
As the Serbs moved, so did Fetoshi's group. They stopped at the bridge where, cold, tired, scared and confused, they debated what to do.
Some feared the snipers on the grain silo more than they feared the approaching police.
"We told them the best idea was to run away toward Zrze," said Fetoshi, a truck driver who saw part of his family's home and auto repair shop seized by Serb police and turned into a local base.
"Some of the people did not agree. 'Why should we run away?' they said. 'We are not guilty. They won't do anything to us.'"
"So we left," Fetoshi said, "about 30 of us from the family and maybe 50 others."
Skender Popaj had fled with his brother, his wife and two other pensioners. He debated staying, but the sight of the police coming forced him to move on.
"When we got near the bridge, it seemed the police had surrounded us," Popaj said. "We were lying down, hiding, trying not to get shot.
"Some people were heading for Zrze. I got my wife, my brother and the others and said, 'Let's go.' I wasn't there long. Maybe five minutes."
The railroad track runs on top of a small hill, about 10 feet higher than the surface of the plains. Popaj and the others hugged the base of the hill, stealing looks back at the trestle.
He wept as he described what he had seen.
"I saw the women separated from the men. I saw them start to strip the men . . . I was so lucky . . . I think it was just my day to be lucky. God was looking out for me."
Serb forces ordered the women to leave, he said. They searched the men, taking their documents and valuables.
Then they lined them up and shot them. By the time it was over, 36 were dead.Displacement and murder
The Serbs were practicing "ethnic cleansing" in Bela Crkva. It is a phrase with a sanitized sound but a brutal meaning: terror, displacement and murder.
As violence broke out across Yugoslavia beginning in 1991, of all the political forces at work in the collapsing Balkans, Serbian troops and paramilitaries turned to the practice most frequently. Bela Crkva was only the latest in a long list of targets that stretched back to the beginning of the conflict.
Ethnic cleansing was developed as an efficient way to use a small military force to move an entire population out of a region, United Nations investigators reported in 1993.
To the rest of the world, ethnic cleansing so reeked of atrocity that it spawned the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1993, the first investigative and legal body aimed at punishing war criminals since Allied victors put the defeated Japanese and Germans on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity after World War II.
All parties to the Balkan conflicts, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Albanians, have used variations of the practice to achieve their own ends.
During a campaign called Operation Storm in 1995, the Croatian army carried out indiscriminate shelling of civilians, conducted summary executions and staged its own ethnic cleansing campaign that forced 100,000 Serbs out of Croatia in four days.
Even after the war in Kosovo ended, Albanians were able to use murder, abduction, terror -- or threats of terror -- to force some 165,000 Serbs who had stayed behind to leave the province.
But from Belgrade's perspective, ethnic cleansing was military strategy.
In Kosovo, it was viewed as a fitting response to the brutal attacks of the newly born Kosovo Liberation Army against minority Serbs earlier in the 1990s, atrocities on the other side of an old Balkan formula that had elevated on all sides a bloodlust thinly disguised as military behavior.
Balkan history has created many victims of war but few innocents among the warriors.Massacre at the trestle
Three men -- Sefer Popaj, 41, Sefer Junici, 62, and Defrem Junici, 28 -- were among eight men who survived the massacre at the train trestle. Independently, each of the three told the same story.
As the two groups of Serb forces converged from each side of the creek sometime around 9 a.m., they waved residents hiding in the fields toward them, instructing everyone to gather at the bridge.
The villagers approached slowly, their hands up.
Some of them waved white scarves or handkerchiefs as they surrendered to the police.
When everyone was together, the Serbs sent away the women and small children.
The Serb forces swore at the Albanian men, demanding to know who among them was part of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The Serbs were still angry about a KLA attack 10 days before on a police station in Zrze, even though no Serbs were seriously wounded and the station suffered little damage. More enraging, though, were the NATO attacks, including the bombing a day earlier of the army barracks at nearby Djakovica.
The Serbs screamed at the Albanians, according to survivors.
"You see what NATO did last night, you m-----------? You know how many Serbs NATO has killed? Why don't you ask NATO to help you now? Look what NATO has done for you."
The men were ordered to empty their pockets of documents and valuables, then undress to ensure they were not hiding anything.
They were told to lie down with their hands on their heads.
Some individuals were pulled out of line to be questioned. Defrem Junici said he heard them being punched or kicked or hit with rifle butts.
"Whoever is from the KLA come forward,, the Serbs demanded. "If you don't tell us who they are, all of you will be killed."
The Serbs singled out Sabre Popaj's son, 14-year-old Agon, who had been ripped from his mother's arms before the women were sent away.
A couple of Serbs slapped and punched the boy, screaming at him to turn in any KLA members, to tell where they had hidden their weapons.
The boy's uncle, 35-year-old Nisim Popaj, stepped up.
He was a respected man in the village, a doctor from one of the most established families in Bela Crkva.
He asked the police to leave the boy alone, to ask their questions of him.
"In the name of God, don't do this to us," Nesim Popaj told the Serbs, the witnesses said. "We are not guilty."
An officer approached him.
With his left hand he pushed the doctor in the chest, sending him backward. With his right hand he fired a blast from his assault rifle, killing the doctor.
Then the police killed the boy.
Sefer Popaj said the apparent leader of the Serb squad spoke with someone via a walkie-talkie strapped to his shoulder, after the boy was killed. Then the Serbs had told the men to get up and get dressed.
But as they were dressing, the police ordered them to make two lines in front of the creek. They were told to turn and face the squad.
"We were thinking they were going to kill us, but we were praying that they would not," Sefer Popaj said. "I just remember that they started to shoot and everyone started to fall down. The men were yelling and screaming, men giving up their souls."
Sefer Popaj, in the middle of the first line, was shot in the calf and the arm. Face down, he lay as still as he could.
"I heard one of the Serbs say, 'Whoever is still moving, shoot him. Look around . . .' I was waiting for them to shoot me in the head or in the heart," he said.
"It seemed like two minutes, three. I was lying next to a wounded man who was taking his last breath. It was very hard.
"Then they started to shoot a second time."
Defrem Junici was face down in the dirt too.
"When the Serbs told us to turn and face them, I said, "It's over," he said. "They started firing and I raised up the collar of my jacket and turned my back on them. I saw all the villagers starting to fall.
"Someone fell on my leg, knocking me down. I got shot in the head, here, behind the right ear, and shot in the shoulder. I looked down and saw my arm covered with blood.
"When they stopped shooting, I thought they would leave. But I heard someone say, 'Go and check who is still alive and kill him.'
"They started checking every body. They started to walk on bodies and when someone grunted, they shot him. I heard a Serb say to one, 'Are you still alive, you m-----------? Here is a bullet for you.'
"There was a man still alive lying right next to me. I was waiting for them to come and check on me and kill me. I was praying to God that if they come and find me that they kill me and not just wound me even more.
"After that, I lost consciousness," Defrem Junici said. "I don't remember anything."
Sefer Junici fell into the creek when the shooting started.
"I don't know how it happened, I just collapsed," he said. "I don't remember how I got there. I don't remember hearing the shots or people screaming. I just remember the sound of bullets striking the water."
Junici lay face down in the frigid water, holding his breath, holding onto hope. The current took him downstream about 30 yards, no doubt saving his life.
Within an hour, Sefer Popaj, Sefer Junici, Defrem Junici and the others left the riverbank.
Sefer Popaj and a few others went back to Bela Crkva, hiding in an attic on Sabre Popaj's property even as Serb forces moved through the town firing their weapons and setting homes alight with blasts from flame-throwers.
Defrem Junici went to Zrze, where his brother, a paramedic, gave him enough care to stop the bleeding.
Sefer Junici, who was not wounded, passed the site of the first riverside massacre, where the 12 lay dead. There he and others found the surviving 2-year-old boy covered in blood, screaming and crying over his mother's body.
They cleaned up the child, changed his clothes, fed him what they could find and took him to Bela Crkva. Unsure where the boy would be safest, they deposited him on the main floor of the house where Sefer Popaj and others were hiding in the attic.
Fear paralyzed everyone.
"We heard someone come in that evening, bring in a baby and leave,, Sefer Popaj said.
"We were scared. The baby was trying to climb the steps but we couldn't let him in. Who left the baby? The police? What if they came back?
"Finally we left, and we left the child there."
That night in Zrze, the massacre's survivors found the child's uncle.
He returned to Bela Crkva to rescue the toddler. The child, whose immediate family was killed, and the uncle are now in Germany.
The ransacking of Bela Crkva continued all day. Villagers say there is not a single family compound that escaped damage. Many houses are damaged beyond repair.
A crime sceneWhat happened to the innocents in Bela Crkva on March 25 has taken on immense importance.
It is at the heart of the war tribunal's indictment of Slobodan Milosevic on charges of crimes against humanity, allegations that could send him to prison for life should he ever face trial and conviction.
Today, there are no armored vehicles on the little hill where the Serbs set up a headquarters before the assault, but their tracks remain. So, too, do spent shells, a trash heap and a bunker the police left behind.
Kosovo has become a land of trash heaps rotting in the sun or burning by the side of the road. Garbage collects on riverbanks and under bridges.
It is a region become crime scene.
On the July day the survivors buried the dead, no place smelled more of death than Bela Crkva.
The funeral began nearby in Zrze at an old agricultural cooperative building that was a makeshift morgue for war crimes investigators. Over the previous two weeks, they had dug up the remains of the Bela Crkva victims.
"The conditions here could not have been any worse," said John Bunn, a Scotland Yard chief detective who led the war crimes tribunal forensic team. "This is a very experienced team here that has been tested to the limit."
Bunn, a giant man who towered over most of the villagers, went out of his way to comfort the survivors. He said their investigations confirmed that all the victims were shot.
Bunn acknowledged that the way the bodies were disposed of and the time that passed between the crime and the unearthing hampered the investigation.
In the wake of discoveries of mass graves and the filing of war crimes charges in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, some Serb forces had taken to incinerating bodies. That makes cause of death more difficult to verify and might allow perpetrators to claim their targets were not murder victims but unfortunate victims of war.
"It made it more difficult, yes, but not impossible," he said. "By the time we are finished we will have created a very, very credible evidentiary package that would withstand vigorous cross-examination should anyone be brought to trial."
Bunn paused, then amended himself.
"I should say, when anyone is brought to trial," Bunn said. "Let's try to be positive."
On the day of the funeral, the corpses were placed on wooden planks and lined up for transport to Bela Crkva.
The black body bags had been tagged twice.
One marking was inserted into a plastic sleeve, like a shipping label. It was in a code of the investigators. The other was a name scratched on a white piece of paper.
"CAD/4/SR,, read one body bag. "Behlul Popaj."
The vehicles waiting to haul the corpses to the new graveyard formed a long line on the side of the road, delivery trucks and flatbeds and tractors with wagons hitched to the back.
About half of the town's residents had returned to Bela Crkva since NATO forces entered Kosovo. Nearly all attended the funeral, joined by thousands of other mourners from neighboring villages.
They gathered in the yard of the local school on a bright, hot day.
The town's male elders lined up along a shaded fence, greeting mourners. Children clutched photographs of the dead. Women huddled in small groups, at times wailing in grief, struggling to comfort one another.
"Don't cry, don't cry," a woman counseled. "You don't need to cry now because Kosovo is free."
Unarmed members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were on hand; everyone looked to them for instruction on where to stand.
Nineteen trucks with the dead had lined up outside. They eventually led the procession from the school, through the village, past a bombed-out mosque for a prayer and then, up a hill.
The day before, scores of men from Bela Crkva and neighboring villages dug 64 graves in a new cemetery. The work was hot and hard, the pace almost desperately fast at the beginning, slowing as the heat took its toll.
When the trucks arrived with the bodies, the men worked fast to bury the decomposing corpses.
Sabre Popaj grabbed a shovel from someone to pack down the dirt on his son's grave.
Gani Fetoshi knelt down to scoop up the earth and toss it in great big handfuls onto a relative's body.
Like most of the villagers, Sabre Popaj and Gani Fetoshi are thin and lithe, with powerful hands and arms.
"There are moments when I'm not here," said Sefer Junici, who walked away from the massacre. "I kind of lose myself. I go back to that place in my mind and I'm lost. I'm trying to forget."
Defrem Junici knows how hard that is. He is almost back to full strength physically, despite the bullet wound in his head and one in his shoulder.
"I had some traumas, but I'm doing better," said the father of two, including a daughter born in May.
"It's hard to forget the things that happened here."
Will the victims of Bela Crkva ever find justice?
Officials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague readily admit they do not have the resources to reach down and identify individual triggermen. Instead, the remains of the dead, many with gunshot wounds to the head, will play their small, though significant role, in the case against Milosevic.
If Milosevic ever comes to trial -- nowhere near a certainty as long as he is in power, and in doubt even if he leaves office -- the prosecutors will show that on March 25, clearly identified Serbian forces responding to commands from on high killed "approximately 65" Kosovar Albanians in a little village beside a stream, then pushed on to commit other atrocities elsewhere.
Witnesses will present forensic evidence to show how these victims died and testify about similarities in the remains and the conditions the bodies were in when they were found.
The names will be entered into the record as they appear on the indictment: Begaj, Abdullah, 25; Berisha, Murat, 60; Gashi, Fadil, 46; Morina, Musa, 65; then on to 22 victims named Popaj, five women with the family name of Spahiu, and 23 identified victims with the family name Junici.
The oldest victims are 77. One of the dead Junicis was just 4 years old.
Then the prosecutors will tell as much of the story as they could piece together of what happened at Bela Crkva on the morning of March 25 as the tanks were on the move, a morning fog was settling on the fields, and another chapter was being created in a long, sad Balkan saga.Next: Bela Crkva and the Milosevic indictment.
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