Kosovars agonize over the missingBy Tom Hundley
Tribune Foreign Correspondent
October 7, 1999KORENICA, Yugoslavia--All that remains of the dead from Korenica are the shoes.
The four mass graves where they were hastily buried are now empty holes in the ground. The incongruous positioning of several pairs of shoes around the edges of the holes gives the momentary impression that perhaps the dead climbed out and ran away.
Across Kosovo, about 7,000 ethnic Albanians are missing and presumed dead, according to official estimates. Finding them, identifying them and reburying them is grim work, in many ways emblematic of this forsaken land's agony as it attempts to rebuild from the ashes.
No one knows where the dead of Korenica have gone; among the living there are few witnesses who saw them leave. Villagers who returned to Korenica after Serbian forces withdrew in June have pieced together part of the story, but they despair of ever learning how it will end.
The story of Korenica's destruction fits a familiar pattern. Early on the morning of April 27, five weeks into the NATO bombing campaign, Serbian paramilitaries and police surrounded the ethnic Albanian village. They began going house to house, ordering residents to pack up and leave within 15 minutes.
There were summary executions. Nikolle Prendi, 70, was bedridden when the Serbs came to his house. He recalled how the men in their camouflage uniforms made him crawl, how they kicked him with their thick boots but ultimately spared his life. Later that morning, he found his brother in the family orchard, dead with a bullet through the back of his head.
The frightened villagers loaded their belongings into tractor-drawn farm wagons. A convoy was formed. As it began moving down the road toward the Albanian border, the Serbs were setting fire to the village.
The convoy had traveled only about 2 miles when it was stopped by another band of paramilitaries. They pulled off all of the men of military age and forced them to lie face down on the ground. The paramilitaries fired their guns inches from the heads of the helpless men and forced them to shout "Long live Serbia."
They then ordered the convoy to move on, but kept the men behind. That was the last Zoje Prendi, Nikolle Prendi's sister-in-law, would see of her five sons, ages 37, 27, 26, 24 and 21.
All told, 75 people from Korenica were killed or disappeared during the war. Only 13 have been accounted for. The charred, decomposing remains of nine were found in the burned-out homes where they had been murdered. Four more were found in a common grave by a Swedish forensics team.
Forty-one men were taken from the convoy; none of them have been found. The four mass graves in the village cemetery appear to have held about 20 to 30 bodies.
According to residents, Serbs ordered Gypsies from the nearby town of Djakovica to bury the victims who were killed in the village. Two or three weeks later, a smaller group of Gypsies was sent back to dig up the graves with a bulldozer and load the corpses onto a truck. Where the truck took the corpses, no one knows.
Some suspect the bodies from Korenica and dozens of other surrounding villages were taken to one of several large manufacturing plants in Djakovica where they were somehow destroyed. So far, there is no evidence of this.
Another theory is that hundreds, perhaps thousands of corpses were taken to the huge mining complex at Trepca, in northern Kosovo, where they were dumped into abandoned pits.
"At this point, there's no hard evidence to support that, but it remains under investigation," said Kelly Moore, a spokeswoman for the International War Crimes Tribunal, which has sent investigators to the Trepca site several times.
Many believe that the missing 7,000 have been reburied in mass graves deep in the forest. War crimes investigators have already exhumed 150 mass graves, and they suspect there are hundreds more. It could take years to find them all. By then, it will be much harder to establish the identities of the dead and the circumstances of their deaths.
When Serbian forces withdrew from Kosovo in mid-June, they took with them some 2,000 ethnic Albanian prisoners. Zoje Prendi clings to the hope that her five sons are among them.
This is a hope shared by many who have missing family members, but it is a slender one. Most of those taken from Kosovo were men who had been previously jailed on security charges.
Serb authorities have released the names of 1,929 of them to the Red Cross. Prendi's sons were not on the list.
"We can't rule out the possibility that there are more prisoners," said Daloni Carlisle, a Red Cross spokeswoman in Pristina.
But she cautioned against rumors, persistent among the Albanians, that thousands of the missing are being held in secret Serbian prisons.
"There are parallels to Srebrenica," she said, referring to the site of the 1995 massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina in which Serbian forces slaughtered more than 5,000 Muslim men and then destroyed many of the bodies.
"Only recently have the women of Srebrenica come to accept that their men are dead. The process took four years," she said. "We're likely to see something like that here."
The main cities and towns in Kosovo are rebuilding with a vengeance. Pristina, the provincial capital, has seen its prewar population of 220,000 nearly double as peasants flood in from the countryside and exiles return from abroad.
Djakovica and Pec, both laid to waste by the Serbs, are beehives of reconstruction activity.
It is the small farming villages like Korenica that languish.
These were the hardest-hit by the Serbs' murderous rage at NATO airstrikes, and the task of rebuilding them is complicated by the absence of men.
The large house where Zoje Prendi, her sons and their families lived was spared by Serb forces, who used it as a barracks. Prendi has moved back in with her two daughters-in-law and their five children.
Neighbors and relatives have helped the family replace the kitchen appliances and washing machine looted by the Serbs. International aid agencies have provided flour, sugar and cooking oil.
Prendi's brother, who lives in Korenica, helps with some of the farm chores, but he has his own large family to worry about. Nikolle Prendi, the brother-in-law, also helps, but he is old and frail.
"What is left of my life?" frets Zoje Prendi. She is 60. She has the palest of blue eyes and a face pinched in permanent sorrow. "We have no men and we have no tools to work the fields. We have no schools for our children. I look around at our village and I see that our lives have been reduced to zero."
Before the war, 800 people lived in Korenica. Perhaps 500 have returned.
"So many have disappeared, so many are afraid to come back, we know our village will never return to what it was before the war," said Pal Prela, Zoje Prendi's brother. Three years younger, he shares the strong, handsome features of his sister.
"My sister has lost five sons. She is not that strong. No one is. I think that none of us here is very far from madness," he said. He began to cry silently.
Under a shade tree that is just now beginning to shed its leaves, Zoje Prendi is telling the youngest of her grandchildren that his father and uncles are somewhere in Serbia and will come back someday.
"They believe," said Prela. "No one speaks differently."
No one goes near the gaping holes in the village cemetery. No one disturbs the shoes of the dead.
senden