ARCHIVE: Under NATO bombs Albanians are leaving Kosovo,
March - May 1999

[...]

Milosevic: And, uh practically what was tried to be imposed in Rambouillet was not autonomy at all - that was independence. And I really don't believe if you show it to any honest American that there is one single honest American that will tell you if they were in the place of our delegation would sign it. We are talking on autonomy, we are talking on quality, on equal approach to interest of all national community, NOT on independence of Albanian separation movement which had by that agreement, so called agreement. Practically the right to organize new state within Serbia. They have their state, that is Albania that is their national state. In Serbia they are national minority they are living everywhere in Serbia and I want to add to you something very important. In Serbia there are 26 different national minorities.

There was never any problem with any of national minorities in Serbia, including Albanians, the problems were only with separation movement of Albanians in Kosovo and we were making a big difference between separation movement in Kosovo and Albanian people which is honest, and good ??? (Unintelligible) which was equal people in Yugoslavia.

Even the separation movement was not using the arms before you came. Before your representative came to tell them, to supply them, and to make the alliance with those killers, rapists, kidnappers and drug dealers who are collected from the underground around Europe to be organized as so-called Kosovo liberation army which never existed.

That was a kind of Hollywood you know uh, just to explain that they are having some kind of military force and so on. They were never able to attack any sort of police or military unit they were able to kill somebody only from the ambush and they were clear terrorists. What else they could do they were killing people from the ambush they were putting bombs under cars or in front of markets they are taking hostages, civilians, workers from the open mine near Pristina for example. We never saw those hostages. We're afraid that all of them are killed. We don't know their destiny, where they were at the end.

So there was no one single act of them which couldn't be clearly defined as terrorist act.

And uh, I was real surprised that NATO downgraded its dignity making alliance with those killers and drug dealers and uh, I think that uh, that kind of alliance cannot help the future.

[...]

Dr. Hatchett: The American people, every day, see on their television all of these heart-wrenching scenes of Albanian refugees. The United Nations says now that there are over five hundred and 32-thousand that have left Kosovo. And they appear to be in a very traumatized type of condition. Is it your policy to expel all Albanians from Kosovo?

President Milosevic: There was never policy of this country and my policy to expel any citizen of Yugoslavia from any part of this country. I must tell you when there was a war in Croatia, we protected all Croats in Serbia. We protected when there was a war in Bosnia we protected all Muslims in Serbia. We preserved all the multi-ethnic States within former Yugoslavia that is Yugoslavia the republic of Yugoslavia today with 26 different national communities. And many visitors including high level visitors visiting our country we're always saying that we are example good example of positive treatment of good treatment of national minorities. And we always have in mind that test for any democracy is treatment of minority not treatment of majority and that's the practice thatâs the policy in Yugoslavia.

And to answer your question about Albania refugees, you are right, there are lot of refugees but they are a result of bombing and they are not only Albanians.

Everybody's running away because of bombing. Serbs, Turks, Gypsy, Muslims, of course, Albanians their number is biggest. Everybody's running. Deers are running, birds are running everybody's running away because of bombing. Bees are running everybody's running away and who can who can really ask to understand that civilian population cannot play the role of heroes staying in their places when bombs are getting down. That is not possible.

And uh, you know that before 24th of March when they started damn bombing they started their dirty aggression against this country there was no one single refugee. When they started bombing, refugees appears of course as a result of bombing and everybody knows it. Uh, but uh, connected with that bombing you're not throwing only bombs from your aircraft, you are throwing small piece of paper with the messages of NATO explaining that to our people.

3. Text of Milosevic interview with UPI

BELGRADE, April 30 (UPI) - Here is the transcript of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's interview Thursday with UPI's Arnaud de Borchgrave:

Q: What do you hope to get out of this?

Milosevic: I find it hard to believe what is happening. America is a great country and Americans great people. But your leaders are not strategic thinkers. Short-term quick fixes, yes. They said let's bomb Yugoslavia and then figure out what to do next. Some said Milosevic would give up Kosovo after a few days of aggression from the air. To set out to destroy a country for a pretext no one can buy is simply unbelievable. I don't expect to get anything out of this because I did not start it. You may recall there were no refugees before March 24 when the NATO aggression started. But the Clinton administration did expect to get something out of this terrible decision. I understand you had two general goals. One dealing with Europe, the other with the Balkans.

First is to prove U.S. leadership in Europe and the second to re-establish U.S. leadership in NATO in the post-Cold War era. Regretfully, we were targeted as a guinea pig to achieve those goals. Simply because

of our weaknesses and of the internal problems we faced. But, as you know, you will find in at least 100 countries around the world different ethnic separatist movements. If you decide to support separatist movements it is very hard to believe any country can survive. There are 4,000 ethnic groups in the world and only 185 members of the United Nations. In Yugoslavia, we have 26 different ethnic groups. Any one of them could cause trouble if agitated from the outside. Which is what happened in Kosovo. In Belgrade, we have 100,000 Yugoslav Albanians. And never a problem with them.

Walk from our Parliament building and you will see many shops with their Albanian names. Not one window smashed here in all those years of violence in Kosovo. Our people never considered them responsible for the behavior of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army terrorists. In Kosovo, Albanian Kosovars were bigger victims of the KLA than Kosovar Serbs. When we looked at the figures the number of Albanians killed by them was twice as large as Serbs dead. They simply terrorized Albanians to join their underground and impose their idea of an ethnically pure state. That movement is Nazi in its character because of their publicly declared goals of a racially pure state. Where can you find such a state in the world today? It is precisely the opposite of what is happening in the world. Ethnically mixed states is the trend in the new global village. The Kosovar terrorists were trying to reverse a global phenomenon.

Q: Which you then attempted to do in Kosovo after March 24?

Milosevic: Absolutely not. That is the big lie which, repeated often enough, becomes conventional wisdom.

Q: You are denying that your armed forces drove people out of their homes and torched entire villages?

Q: Satellite recon shows entire villages torched?

Milosevic: Individual houses, yes. But not whole villages as we saw on TV in Vietnam when American forces torched villages suspected of hiding Viet Cong.

Q: Just in the past 10 years, the Soviet Union has become 15 independent republics. Four former republics of Yugoslavia have declared their independence. Scotland and Wales are moving toward self-rule. As we approach the next millennium, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the nation-state is too big for small problems - and too small for big problems. Devolution is going on everywhere. Why not in Kosovo? What is so important there?

Milosevic: To us, Kosovo is critically important because it is the heart of country (sic) and an integral part of our long history. It is also home to a quarter of million Serbs whose forebears have lived there for centuries. It is also home to some 5,000 Christian churches. A Swiss expert categorized 1,800 of them as historical monuments that are the heritage of world civilization and that list was sent to President Clinton.

[...]

Note: Transcript Continues

The New York Times; May 5, 1999

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- Serbs and a few Albanians are trickling back to Pristina, Kosovo's capital. The sunny daytime streets, with a few pedestrians and shoppers, now display a poor imitation of ordinary life, so long as one doesn't focus too hard on the empty, looted Albanian districts, the bomb damage and the nearly total lack of children in the town.

A few cafes have reopened, from about 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and there is coffee, for a price, when there is the electricity to make it. Mostly there's running water, too, and the central city has had little bombing for a month now.

There are lines for bread and for what little meat or milk is sometimes available, and almost no cooking oil or sugar. And there seems to be no gasoline for private sale.

As NATO escalates its air campaign, the sound of NATO warplanes and the thud of their munitions echoes day and night, even if intermittently, and in the evenings and long dark hours, there is sometimes the sound of gunfire.

So there is no shortage of fear and wariness. Some Albanian families have remained in their apartments, refusing to go outside for nearly six weeks now, while the elderly or some sympathetic Serb neighbors do their shopping, or have made them Serb nameplates for their apartment doors.

Other Albanians, mostly the elderly, move freely through the town, but seem to flinch when a Yugoslav soldier or policeman appears, or even when a stranger approaches.

And some Albanians are continuing to leave. At a downtown bus stop, a small knot of Albanians waited, carefully watching as strangers approached to talk. They seemed to shrink back, but told quietly that this was an American journalist, a middle-aged woman in a purple sweater said she was finally fleeing Pristina, to try to get to Macedonia.

Asked what pushed her now to leave, her eyes darted about, to see who might be listening. "You know everything already, everything," she whispered. "What shall I tell you? It's been terrible."

Her whole family had left, she said, and now she would try to find them in Macedonia. "But I have no idea where they are," she said. A few others tried to hush her.

Would she and other Albanians come back to Kosovo? "Yes, if things change," she said. "But not like this. Now there are too many people listening," she said, turning away.

In a line of Albanians waiting for bread, outside a former grocery shop with its windows broken but its metal grilles still intact, a few older men were willing to talk softly.

They'd been waiting a half-hour for bread. There are no rationing coupons, they said. "You don't need coupons, just money," said one man bitterly. All their families had already left. "Just the old people stay," one man said.

Asked if life was becoming any more normal, he said urgently, also gazing around: "Go to Podujevo and Pec and Prizren and see what it looks like. Here it's different."

And while the purging of Kosovar Albanians may be continuing elsewhere in Kosovo, the worst depredations seem to be over, here, for now, according to some Serbs and Albanians interviewed here. In the first two weeks after the bombing started on March 24, radical Serbs with guns, masked paramilitaries and at least some police rampaged through the city, burning and looting and ordering Albanians to leave.

People in Pristina suggest the first wave of refugees was ordered or threatened into leaving soon after the bombing began, after the observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe withdrew and foreign journalists were pushed out of the city.

The second wave left because of the bombing downtown on the night of April 6 to 7, with everyone who owned a car taking off and as many as 5,000 people at a time at the bus and train stations.

The third wave left in a generalized panic, because everyone else seemed to be leaving.

It is almost impossible to put good numbers on the exodus, since there was no good estimate of how many Albanians lived in Pristina.

But those who remained, one Albanian said Tuesday, "were the old, the sick and the people so afraid they did not even want to open their doors."

Thousands of Serbs, left, too, and those who stayed sent their wives and children north out of Kosovo.

A large number of Serbs always lived in Pristina, Kosovo's capital. The situation is calmer now, residents of varying ethnic groups say. The authorities, who are trying to advertise the return of sanity, if not normality, are now saying that 350 Serb civilians, policemen and soldiers have been arrested for crimes against civilians, like looting and arson.

And they say that the army and police have mostly cleared off the paramilitaries, most of whom were radical Serbs who had learned their trade in Bosnia and applied it here.

But the Serbs and the Albanians who remain keep their distance from each other. At a meat shop, the butcher raised the metal grill over the door to let in one person at a time. While he served Albanians, any Serb seemed to be allowed to cut to the head of the line.

While the outskirts of Pristina have been hit repeatedly and very hard by NATO, especially army barracks and warehouses, gasoline and fuel depots and the civilian and military airports, the damage in the central city is concentrated, but limited.

The central city Government office building is wrecked, as is the main post office and telephone exchange. That knocked out most telephones and the cell-phone network, further cutting off Pristina.

Some bombs or missiles went astray, destroying houses behind the telephone exchange, killing at least 10 people, and a row of shops and restaurants. One huge bomb, apparently intended for a fuel storage depot, blew a 50-foot crater into the city's central cemetery, blasting gravestones and sending bones flying.

While most of the remains have been returned with ceremony to the earth, shards of bone and chunks of smashed coffins still litter the ground. At the gravesite of the Brankovic family, the tombstone is propped up from behind by a tree limb and a wooden cross. Dojcin Brankovic had died in 1991, and the stone erected then had a place for his widow, Zlatinka, with her name and birth year, 1917, already etched. She died from the bomb that missed the telephone exchange, her family gravesite broken by the bomb that missed the fuel depot.

Walking around the back of the blasted telephone exchange, an Albanian man agreed to talk. Shefki Islami, 60, said he had remained in Pristina. "No one ever came to my house and pushed me out," he said, then stopped and added carefully: "But if they come you should leave."

Asked about the city now, he said: "To be honest, it's a little bit better. It's calmer now, over the last few days. Before that, it was very tense." Noticing a lingering Serb, he said, "That's enough now," and walked away.

An unshaven but elegant old man emerged from a lane behind a burned car and agreed to talk through a Serbian interpreter. Ali Reja, 77, is a pensioner, long retired from his job as an editor with the Rilindija state publishing house. His wife, Iqbala, was sick, he said, and he was off to try to find her some milk, but he also was happy to show a stranger the aftermath of the explosion.

He pointed to automobile fenders still hanging in the trees, to the thick ropes of tangled copper wire that hung over a brick wall like dreadlocks, to a chrome wheel and melted tire that had embedded themselves on a roof and to an engine that landed on one blasted car from another 30 yards away.

Reja considers himself a "loyal Albanian," who had fought for Yugoslavia and profited within it. "I was born three times," he said. "Once from my mother, the second time in World War II, when I was a partisan fighter, and my third birthday is April 7, when I survived this bomb."

He took a reporter into his garage, where he bemoaned that his books stored there had caught fire, and then talked a bit more freely. "What the Serbs have done here will change things forever," he said. "But one day the war will stop, and then the Albanian question will be settled." After all, he noted, even the French and Germans get along these days. "We are no exception," he said. "We cannot be excused from living together."

Asked how many Albanians would return, he shrugged. "Who could know? No one in the Balkans knows."

Pressed for details about events here, Reja stopped then, saying abruptly: "Are you satisfied? What else can I tell you but I thank you." He walked back out into the sun, onto the lane littered with burned car parts and copper wiring. "And if you're not satisfied," he said smiling politely, distant again, "I also thank you."

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

The New York Times, May 9, 1999

by STEVEN ERLANGER

VELIKA DOBRANJA, Yugoslavia -- The Llugiqi family is hunkering down, hoping that the storm that has convulsed Kosovo has passed and that they are not simply in its eerie eye.

The Llugiqis, like the rest of this ethnic Albanian village of about 2,500 people, have not left their homes. Nor has anyone here been asked or ordered to go.

"You hear different stories, and what is true you never know," said Mehmet Llugiqi, 36. "No one has bothered us here. But we don't know what will happen tomorrow. If someone comes and says to leave, I guess we would have to do it."

This is a purely Albanian village set in the Kosovo plains about four miles west of Lipljan, a majority-Serb town about 15 miles south of Pristina. Given the village's proximity to Serbs, a number of the Albanians here speak Serbian, and the Kosovo Liberation Army was never much of a presence. So the Yugoslav Army and militarized police have largely left Velika Dobranja to its own devices.

There is anxiety here, but thus far, at least, no brutality or panicked flight. But there has been no electricity or fuel for weeks now, either for travel or for the tractors. There are severe shortages of food, money and medicine. Even with no ethnic purging, the village is an emergency in embryo.

But the war has not left the Llugiqis untouched. Three weeks ago, a misdirected NATO missile presumably aimed at Pristina's airport, Slatina, landed on the house of another brother, Rahman Llugiqi. Six people were wounded, including three of his children, and his 6-year-old daughter, Arta, died.

Rahman, 36, like many Albanian men, is not demonstrative. Asked about Arta, he rubbed his face and looked away. "My mother is alive," he finally said. "The worst thing that has ever happened to her is when the child died."

He and his two brothers have repaired the roof and walls of his house, and the wounded children are home from the Pristina hospital, where Serbian officials took them.

But the sound of the NATO planes, throbbing overhead through a cloudy sky, is enough to set the little ones wailing. The airport, which is military as well as civilian, has been bombed a lot. Deridi, a 12-year-old, said he got frightened by planes, but then went silent.

"When there are older people in the yard, he is outside with us," said his uncle, Rahmin Llugiqi, 30. "But otherwise he stays in the house."

Rahman said: "You hear the planes day and night now, and all the kids are afraid. You never know where the bomb will hit." He bent to pick at some grass, then said quietly, "We have that experience."

Minire Llugiqi, 31, Arta's mother, said they get milk from two cows, but have no chickens and no eggs. They have run out of salt and potatoes, and they will soon run short of flour for bread. She is dressed in a head scarf and a sweater embroidered with a huge cat's face. Asked if there is enough meat, she laughed. "We haven't seen meat for more than three months," she said.

Rahmin, who used to work for the Albanian service of Radio Belgrade, said: "There is food in Lipljan, but the problem is money. It's the old story: those with money are fine, and those without are not."

His sister, Irea, said: "It's very difficult now. We need anything. We can find nothing. There is nothing here. And if we can find something, there is no money."

Nor has there been any aid from the state or from relief organizations, which left Kosovo because of the war. Even the International Committee for the Red Cross, which has received permission to return to Kosovo, is still negotiating security arrangements with Belgrade, as if security could be guaranteed by anyone.

With the war and the shortage of gasoline and diesel, it is almost impossible to farm, Mehmet said, or even to travel regularly to work. He worked in the local coal mine, but it closed in March, about a week before the bombing started on March 24, and gets no salary now.

Rahman worked as a salesman for a wholesaler in Sitnica, about eight miles away, that delivered goods to small shops. But the business failed a few years ago. He gets some benefits, and his mother gets a pension, which is still coming, he said, then laughs. "It's 160 dinars a month" -- about $11.

"There's bread, and somehow enough to eat," he said, insisting, "The kids are fine."

Rahman still cuts a figure with a handsome, tanned face and a snappy leather jacket. But he says he rarely leaves the village now. With no fuel, people are traveling by donkey cart, and there is always a discussion at any police checkpoint. "They have their job," he said. "They stop us, but we have no problem with them."

For all their stoicism, the Llugiqis feel like prisoners of the war. They cannot go out, but they are also afraid to do so, and have no idea where to go.

"I feel safe enough here," Rahmin said. "But no one knows what will happen. We've heard from television that terrible things have happened, but we haven't seen it ourselves."

Rahman said, "I will not change my opinion about the Serbs -- we have to live together." Asked what the Serbs think about the Albanians, he said: "I don't know what they think. But I know we must live together."

Mehmet said, "We live together and we have to live together." Anyway, he said, "Where would we go? We're from here, and we have to stay here."

Rahman thanked his visitors for coming and checking up on the family. "Of course people here are frightened," he said quietly. "Anyone who has been bitten by a snake is going to be afraid of a lizard."

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

The New York Times, May 12, 1999

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- She's seen too much, Meli said. She wants a rest. She wants it to be over. She wants to leave, like her friends, and go to Macedonia. But she wants to stay, because her mother wants to stay, and it's her home and why should she leave it? And it seems to be getting better, she says, in Pristina, anyway.

Meli is an ethnic Albanian, 21 years old, and she has remained here in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, throughout the nearly seven weeks of warfare between NATO and the Serbs, and between the Serbs and the Albanians.

She is funny and brave, and she is frightened all the time.

She has seen an Albanian shot down by the police in front of her eyes. She has seen Serbian paramilitary fighters, with uniforms and guns and masks over their heads, ordering Albanians to leave their homes and threatening to shoot them if they did not go.

She has had a NATO missile land near her apartment downtown, while she was sleeping, breaking all the windows and scaring her half-mad. She has watched her shop looted and nearly all of her friends depart, pushed by the Serbs and pulled by panic, to become refugees in another country.

She spoke two times with a reporter, in English, with no Serb present, and in the end, still unsure about her future, asked that only her nickname be used, and the names of her family and friends not be used at all.

Despite everything, she says, she feels sorry for the Serbs. "They don't know what's happening to them," she said. "They don't know what's really happening here, and they don't know why they're getting bombed."

It's perfectly understandable that the Serbs will defend their country and their hold over Kosovo. "Of course they will defend the country," she said. "That's normal for every nation. But they also have to know why they're being bombed."

And why does she think the Serbs are being bombed?

She stopped, smiled once, and said very slowly, "Because people are being killed here." How many? "I don't know," she said. "I don't think we'll ever know."

But she also feels sorry as well for the insurgent fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army. "They're too weak to fight the Serbs or to protect us," she said. "They overestimated their strength and got a lot of people into trouble."

There is tragedy enough for everyone, she says. "I feel sorry for the Serbs who've been bombed and died and I feel sorry for my own people. But maybe now there will be a conclusion, a settlement for good. That would be great."

Meli always feared what would happen if the West intervened with force, saying it gave a license to the Serbs to take revenge on the majority Albanians here.

"I didn't expect this to happen; I didn't want NATO to bomb, but it happened," she said. "I knew if they started to bomb it would be very bad for the people here, and I was really afraid of the paramilitaries and the crazy Serbs, because they knew just what they wanted to do and they did it. I think it was all written down."

For the first month, she stayed in her downtown apartment, rarely going out, listening for a knock on the door that didn't come.

Meli's mother, brother and grandmother live in the Suncani Breg (Sunny Hill) area of Pristina, a development of Soviet-style apartment houses, where she was first met waiting in a long line for bread. Meli lives with them now, too, having abandoned her apartment. In part, it was because of the missile attack, she said, and in part because she heard from a neighbor that soldiers were clearing the building to live there themselves, part of their tactics of dispersal.

Unlike Dragodan, a much wealthier Albanian area of Pristina on an opposite hill, Suncani Breg has been largely untouched by arsonists and looters. The Serbs rampaged through Dragodan, where Washington put an American cultural center, now completely trashed, with plastic American flags littering the ground. The bigger and gaudier the house, it seemed, the bigger the fire. The streets there are blocked with broken masonry and burned cars, and no one seems to live in Dragodan anymore, except for a few very elderly Albanian men.

While many Albanians were pushed or fled from Suncani Breg, it was largely spared the rage of the Serbs, and many Albanians still live here who have not gone or been ordered to go.

Of those who fled, "maybe half left from fear, and half got knocks on the door," Meli said. "It's hard to know. People panic, and they panic everybody else."

Meli is a small entrepreneur, with two shops, a coffee shop and a pharmacy. One day, she said, the police came and confiscated the entire contents of the pharmacy. Asked if they had issued her a receipt, as they are supposed to do, for post-war payment, she laughed.

"No, there was no receipt. Are you kidding? They just said thank you and left."

With most of her friends gone, Meli spends a lot of her time with three girlfriends. They play a card game called Remi and drink a lot of tea and smoke cigarettes when they can find some. They talk incessantly about what's happening and what may happen.

"We talk about it every day, all the time, and yet we're sick of it," she said. "We're most afraid that we'll go crazy. We ask each other, 'Are we the same as before?' And of course we tell each other, 'Yes, exactly the same."'

Meli and her friends have decided that despite all the death, of Serbs as well as Albanians, Western intervention will be good if it ends well, with a lasting settlement that provides security and dignity for ordinary Albanians.

"I can't say America loves the Albanians; it has its interests," she said. "But having 19 countries on your side makes me feel better. You feel that you're not alone, that almost all the world supports you. That's very important."

Does she favor an independent Kosovo? "You know, I don't care if it's this or that," Meli said. "I just want all this to end, and to feel good again, to feel good in my place and my house with my friends and family."

She stopped, imagining that odd prospect. "You know," she said, "I don't have a house in Mexico or America somewhere -- only here."

She wants a settlement that brings foreigners here "with some force behind them." She is indifferent about who the foreigners are. "But I'll feel much better if a guy with a gun is in front of my house protecting me," she said. "I'll feel safe and won't feel I have to see another Albanian guy shot dead in front of my house."

Meli talks a lot about getting out -- just for a week or two, to rest and relax. She dreams of that, she said. "I'd like to leave, to go to Macedonia. I wouldn't go far, just stay by the border, and come back as soon as it's over. I need a rest," she said, laughing.

But her mother still won't leave, and her grandmother, and Meli and her friends fear it's too late to go now, with the Macedonians closing down the border.

And then she says, "But it's good here, it's OK now. I feel good. If it continues like this I'll be happy," she said. "Maybe because it's the capital, but it's better here."

Will it continue like this? "I don't know, I don't know," she said rapidly, darting her eyes about. "I'm afraid if the Serbs are going to lose, they'll go crazy again. I'm really afraid, afraid all the time. Everybody's afraid. Nobody knows. But I really think it's going to be OK now."

Does she dream? She laughs uproariously. "Of course, and in color, too!" About what? "I dream and I think a lot, about what I'd most like to happen here. It has to be settled. We can't go on like this for 30 years, like the Israelis, to have 30 years of war -- that's a really long time. To sit and talk after 30 years of war -- I mean, come on, that's ridiculous! If they want to fight this war until the end, it will be horrible. I want to get out."

She's tired all the time, she says. She's sleeping less. "I'm more nervous. I can't stay in one place. I like to be together with my friends -- I don't want to be waiting alone in one place." For the knock on the door? "Yes, yes, for the knock. I'm sick of waiting, sick of the news, but that's all we talk about."

"When all this is over," she says, like a threnody, and later again, "When this is all finished."

"When this is all over I'm going to school to study politics," she says once, and laughs. "Maybe I'll be famous one day."

"When this is all finished," she says later, "I'm going to take a camera and go all over Kosovo and document what has happened. I'll be a journalist for myself, and make an album."

"When it's all over," she said again, still later, "I just want to go off for a few weeks to a beach. Somewhere there is no bombing and no Serbs. Just go out and have some fun."

"When it's over," she said later, laughing again, "I'm really worried that my friends will come back and the guys will look at us, playing cards and drinking tea, and think, 'What's wrong with them? They're crazy!"'

"When it's all over," she said, finally, looking down into her coffee, drawing circles with her finger on the table, "I just want to stop feeling afraid."

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

The Los Angeles Times, Monday, May 17, 1999

DISPATCH FROM KOSOVO

7. In One Village, Albanian Men Are Everywhere

by PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer

SVETLJE, Yugoslavia--Something strange is going on in this Kosovo Albanian village in what was once a hard-line guerrilla stronghold, where NATO accuses Serbs of committing genocide.

An estimated 15,000 displaced ethnic Albanians live in and around Svetlje, in northern Kosovo, and hundreds of young men are everywhere, strolling along the dirt roads or lying on the grass on a spring day.

So many fighting-age men in a region where the Kosovo Liberation Army fought some of its fiercest battles against Serbian forces are a challenge to the black-and-white versions of what is happening here.

By their own accounts, the men are not living in a concentration camp, nor being forced to labor for the police or army, nor serving as human shields for Serbs.

Instead, they are waiting with their families for permission to follow thousands who have risked going back home to nearby villages because they do not want to give up and leave Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

"We wanted to stay here where we were born," Skender Velia, 39, said through a translator. "Those who wanted to go through Macedonia and on to Europe have already left. We did not want to follow."

A foreign journalist spent two hours in Svetlje over the weekend, his second visit in less than a week, without a police or military escort or a Serbian official to monitor what was seen or said.

The closest Serbian security forces were two policemen sitting at a checkpoint half a mile up the dirt road, who weren't pleased to see so many refugees moving back into the Podujevo area.

Just as NATO accuses Yugoslav forces of using ethnic Albanian refugees as "human shields," the Serbs say KLA fighters hide among ethnic Albanian civilians to carry out "terrorist attacks."

But Velia and other ethnic Albanians interviewed in Svetlje said they haven't had any problems with Serbian police since the police allowed them to come back.

"For the month that we've been here, the police have come only to sell cigarettes, but there hasn't been any harassment," Velia said.

That isn't what North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Javier Solana believes is happening in Kosovo.

Solana told BBC television Sunday that he expected much more evidence of "ethnic cleansing" in the province to emerge once the war is over. "You don't see males in their 30s to 60s," he said.

And on CBS-TV's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said that as many as 100,000 ethnic Albanian men of fighting age have vanished in Kosovo and may have been killed by Serbian forces.

The claims and counterclaims are only part of the tangled web that threatens to trap NATO after nearly two months of bombing intended to make peace here.

Kosovo Albanians continue to flee Yugoslavia, often with detailed accounts of atrocities by Serbian security forces or paramilitaries.

Yet thousands of other ethnic Albanians are coming out of hiding in forests and in the mountains, hungry and frightened, and either going back home or waiting for police permission to do so.

While Serbian police seize the identity documents of Kosovo Albanians crossing the border into Albania or Macedonia, government officials in Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital, issue new identity cards to ethnic Albanians still here.

The Kosovo Democratic Initiative, an ethnic Albanian political party opposed to the KLA's fight for independence, is distributing relief aid, offering membership cards and gathering the names of Serbs accused of committing atrocities.

"As an Albanian, I am convinced that the Serbian government and security forces are not committing any kind of genocide," Fatmir Seholi, the party's spokesman, said in an interview Sunday.

"But in a war, even innocent people die," Seholi said. "In every war, there are those who want to profit. Here there is a minority of people who wanted to steal, but that's not genocide. These are only crimes."

As an Albanian, Seholi also knows the risks of questioning claims that Yugoslavia's leaders, police and military are committing crimes against humanity in Kosovo.

His father, Malic Seholi, was killed Jan. 9, 1997, apparently for being too cooperative with Serbian authorities. The KLA later claimed responsibility for the slaying in a statement published in Bujku, a local Albanian-language newspaper, his son said.

There are pressures to toe the party line in villages like Svetlje too, where a man who overheard Velia speaking with a Serbian correspondent for Agence France-Presse told him to stop.

"Don't talk to the Serbs," the man said angrily in Albanian. "They are to blame for everything that is happening."

Velia, his wife, Hajiri, their three children and his mother, Farita, 56, were among as many as 100,000 Kosovo Albanians who fled the northern city of Podujevo in the early days of NATO's air war.

Some said Serbs drove them from their homes, while others said they were simply scared and left on their own. But they all ended up moving from one village to another, trying to escape fighting between KLA guerrillas and Serbian security forces.

Now they must live with another danger--the NATO bombs that fall ever closer to Svetlje as the alliance intensifies its attacks on Yugoslav forces across Kosovo.

Last week, a bomb exploded just 200 yards from the five-room school that currently houses about 60 refugees. The explosion killed an ethnic Albanian man named Bashota, who was about 22 years old and from nearby Lapastica, Velia said.

When the foreign visitor asked Velia whether he thought NATO's bombing was helping or hurting, he shifted at the wooden desk where he was sitting in one of the school's classrooms.

"My blood is the same as yours," he said. "I just want the situation stabilized. People are not very interested in what is going on with big [political] discussions here and there. They are just interested in going home."

Despite the mass exodus of Kosovo Albanians during the NATO bombing, several hundred thousand remain in the province, many of them still hiding without proper food, medicine and shelter.

After waves of looting, arson, killings and other attacks turned many of Kosovo's cities into virtual ghost towns, the government took steps to restore order, and ethnic Albanians began to move back, often under police protection.

Of an estimated 100,000 people living in Pristina, roughly 80,000 are ethnic Albanians and a quarter of those are displaced people from the Podujevo area living with relatives, friends or in abandoned homes, Seholi said.

An additional 32,000 ethnic Albanians are living in and around Podujevo itself, he added.

A total of 120,000 ethnic Albanians are waiting to return to their homes in four areas--near Podujevo, Pristina, Stimlje and Prizren--while another 350,000 have proper homes, Seholi estimated.

Home for Zajda Hasani, 76, and 10 others in her family is a classroom and an adjoining storage room, where the shelves are stacked with books by writers such as Twain and Tolstoy.

"I have no problems at all," Hasani said between long draws on a cigarette. "I'm relaxed."

In Svetlje, the biggest problem is getting enough to eat. None of the foreign relief agencies delivering food to refugees outside Kosovo has been able to come to feed those ethnic Albanians left behind.

Agencies such as the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees are negotiating with Yugoslav authorities about security guarantees and other matters as a prelude to resuming work in Kosovo.

On Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross sent a four-truck convoy carrying medicine, food and other relief, the first shipment since NATO launched the air war March 24.

It wasn't nearly enough to feed the tens of thousands who are going hungry. The last aid Velia's family received was from the Yugoslav Red Cross, which gave them 4¸ pounds of flour and some yeast a month ago.

Like many of the children in Svetlje, Velia's 7-month-old daughter, Erinisa, is sick. The baby has received four injections but needs six more.

Her mother has to line up with other refugees at the edge of Podujevo for police permission to enter the town and visit the hospital.

The refugees have started a small, roadside market in Svetlje that sells pasta, coffee, onions, rubber sandals, cigarettes and a few other assorted items. But in the absence of any jobs, few people can afford to buy much.

"The entire day, we just sit here or walk and wander around," Velia said. Although no one in Svetlje has been forced to work for the police or military, "Who knows what may happen tomorrow?" he added.

Just a few minutes' walk away, there was a horrible reminder of just how uncertain the future is.

It was a human skull, partly charred by fire. It lay in the grass outside a one-story building where refugees once were sheltered in about half a dozen rooms that were previously municipal offices.

The floors were covered with hay, where families slept, and the clothes and other belongings they left behind were scattered everywhere.

A single, burned corpse lay in the middle of one room, not proof of genocide, but a hint of the dark mystery that is Kosovo.

THE TIMES (UK) May 18 1999

8. Berisha scorns 'incompetent' KLA guerrillas

FROM TOM WALKER IN TIRANA

SALI BERISHA, the former Albanian president, has depicted the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as an incompetent collection of rival gangs, poorly equipped and trained, and riven by feuding. He claimed that the socialist-led Government of Albania was profiting from arms racketeering in northern Albania at the KLA's expense and he urged that the guerrillas be reorganised with the help of Nato and the Albanian Army.

Mr Berisha, whose power has been greatly diminished during the past two years, refused to recognise the KLA's new government for Kosovo, and instead urged Albanians to back the pacifist Ibrahim Rugova, whose influence is also waning rapidly.

KLA officials in Tirana were angered by his comments and said that he was bent on dividing the guerrilla group with the help of his old ally, the Swiss-based physician and Kosovan dissident Bujar Bukoshi. The KLA said that like Mr Rugova, both Mr Berisha and Mr Bukoshi were so far removed from those fighting the war that they had lost the respect of most Kosovo Albanians.

Western diplomats in Tirana typified Mr Berisha as a troublemaker, and one senior source questioned the West's continued backing of Mr Rugova, whose credibility has been severely dented by his meetings with President Milosevic of Yugoslavia.

Nato sources said they believed that Mr Rugova may make his first visit to refugee camps this week, possibly in conjunction with Tony Blair's trip to northern Albania, scheduled for today. The diplomats said it could be Mr Rugova's last chance for a political revival. Mr Berisha admitted ruefully that he was unlikely to meet Mr Blair.

"The KLA should fight for national dignity," he said. "They will not free Kosovo - Nato will do that - but dignity is vital. But what is our Government doing? Thousands of young soldiers are coming from all over the West and are having two weeks' training with really unskilled people. The Albanian Government, which is more interested in trafficking, is the root of all their problems."

Mr Berisha, a former cardiologist, said Nato should plan a full-scale invasion of Yugoslavia. "I am for entering from all sides, and freeing the country from the Milosevic regime," he said.

LA Times, Thursday, May 20, 1999

DISPATCH FROM KOSOVO

9. Serbian Nuns With Guns Put Most of Their Faith in a Higher Power

By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer

DEVIC, Yugoslavia--In the heart of guerrilla territory, beneath circling NATO bombers, nine Serbian nuns are holding out against the war with little more than their faith--and a few guns--to protect them.

All but two of the sisters are too old to fire a weapon with much certainty, and only a couple of soldiers are posted a mile up the dirt road to help protect them from rebels, so the nuns are uneasy.

"The older ones cannot bear arms," Sister Anastasia, the mother superior, said through a translator Wednesday while noise from a NATO jet rasped high overhead.

"Our weapon is our prayer and our strong will to survive, and to stay where we are while being ready to die," she said. "People do not understand this. Those with weapons are the ones who flee when there is danger. Even if we fought, what could nine women do against thousands of them?"

The 14th century Devic monastery is surrounded by the forests of central Kosovo's Drenica Valley, about 30 miles west of Pristina, the provincial capital.

The Kosovo Liberation Army's all-out war for independence from Yugoslavia began in the Drenica region in February 1998, and no area of Kosovo has suffered more than that surrounding the serene Devic monastery. Yet few outside observers have reached the region since NATO began its air campaign.

Yugoslav security forces tried to crush the separatist rebels by driving Kosovo Albanians from their homes and burning their villages, a tactic that only stirred up more anger and delivered eager recruits to the KLA.

When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization added the air war on top of Kosovo's civil war in an attempt to force peace, the Yugoslav offensive swept through almost every village and city in Kosovo.

The onslaught against the rebels of the KLA also made refugees out of several hundred thousand Kosovo Albanians, many of them from villages under guerrilla influence.

Yugoslav security forces insist that they kill only guerrilla fighters, but foreign investigators are gathering evidence of alleged war crimes from refugees who fled Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic.

Although some ethnic Albanians still manage to live in Drenica, it's a ghostly place where many homes were burned months ago and arsonists destroyed many more in recent weeks.

Drenica is a valley out of the 23rd Psalm, living in the shadow of death, where peace will face its worst enemies when it finally comes. It is difficult--though not impossible--to imagine how Kosovo's Serbs and ethnic Albanians could get along here now.

Exactly how "is a hard question," Sister Anastasia said, and then paused to think how she might answer it. "If there is a possibility for common life, it can be achieved only if things are worked out between us."

Outside mediators haven't helped during Kosovo's long history and have made matters worse many times before because "there is no impartial side," the sister said.

She blames the ethnic Albanians for their own horrors because, in her eyes, they sided with NATO against the Serbs. She is convinced that together they have formed an enemy alliance fighting to break Kosovo away from Serbia.

"I do not believe that NATO is interested in the good of Albanians," Sister Anastasia said. "There are so many good Albanian people who have been victims of this tragedy. "But they provoked it. They wanted their own state. Their fault is that they allowed themselves to be weapons in the hands of others."

Like most Serbs, Sister Anastasia does not believe charges by the ethnic Albanians and NATO that the police, army and paramilitary forces have committed widespread atrocities in Kosovo.

Yet she acknowledges, if only obliquely, that some have sinned in Kosovo, whether Serbs or Albanians. "Sometimes in war it's hard to control everyone, especially those who have lost fathers, brothers and sons," Sister Anastasia said.

The monastery was not spared during World War II, when ethnic Albanians allied with Nazi Germany destroyed it, the nun said.

It was rebuilt in 1947, but Sister Anastasia believes that the KLA is determined to destroy it again. Guerrillas fired on the monastery last year in May, June and October, she said, and attacked the nuns' nearby agricultural center in December.

A rocket-propelled grenade blasted a hole in the tile roof, and shrapnel chipped pieces out of the marble crosses in the cemetery.

The civil war prevented the nuns from farming about 1,200 acres of wheat last summer, and with NATO warplanes bombing in the area almost every day, much of the land may be left to the weeds again.

The nuns would have been safer if they had abandoned the monastery long ago, but they see themselves as spiritual defenders of Serbian claims to a cultural heartland that ethnic Albanians claim just as strongly as their own.

"They would like to destroy the monastery and take the fertile land that it possesses," said Father Radivoj Panic, the monastery's spiritual leader, who does not live in the area.

"But most of all, they would like to destroy its history," Sister Anastasia said.

Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved

This article attempts to counter-spin Mr. Watson's article, probably to please AP's editorial stance.--BCW

10. Kosovars Are Refugees in Own Land

By CANDICE HUGHES
.c The Associated Press

SAJKOVAC, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians are refugees within their own land, driven from their homes by Serb forces and herded into village enclaves.

There are no fences around a camp in Sajkovac, but that's what it is. No one feels free to leave. Police and soldiers are a constant presence.

U.N. officials aren't sure where Kosovo's ethnic Albanians have gone. They said hundreds of thousands have fled into neighboring Macedonia or Albania. But what about the rest? Much of Kosovo is eerily empty.

U.N. officials suspect hundreds of thousands of people are on the move inside Kosovo. And a U.N. team sent here to assess the humanitarian situation has encountered a number of small groups looking for somewhere to go.

When they found Sajkovac, 13 miles northeast of Kosovo's capital, Pristina, and the neighboring village of Svetle on Friday, another piece of the puzzle that is Kosovo fell into place.

The two villages were packed with thousands of people. It was the largest group of ethnic Albanians the U.N. team had seen in three days of travel throughout the war-battered province. The contrast was startling.

It's not clear how many other villages in Kosovo have become makeshift holding camps like this one. Foreign Ministry officials accompanying the team said they had no information; local officials said the same.

Another mystery is why hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians were allowed to go to Albania and Macedonia while others have been turned back at the border or herded from place to place inside Kosovo.

A number of the refugees in Sajkovac and Svetle are from the nearby town Podujevo, a stronghold of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Much of Podujevo is now a battle-scarred ghost town. Land-mine warnings are posted on the riverbank.

Refugees and local officials said Serb police cleared out Podujevo, an ethnic Albanian town.

Their accounts suggest classic counterinsurgency tactics: clearing out villages to deprive rebel forces of their support bases, real or suspected, and to isolate them from a potential pool of recruits.

Many of the refugees in Sajkovac and Svetle are young men of fighting age.

Refugees in Sajkovac and Svetle are sleeping in barns and sheds and garages -- anywhere they can find shelter.

In one courtyard, women sat on the floor of an outbuilding where they said 30 people slept at night. A baby cried in its mother's arms; another lay in a cradle on the floor.

``We live like dogs,'' said an old man with a lined, sunburned face.

Another man said more people are arriving every day.

AP-NY-05-22-99 1708EDT

Copyright 1999 The Associated Press.

Note: I added two headlines which are bracketed [...] in the text. -- BCW

London Review of Books, Volume 21, Number 11, Cover date 27 May 1999

11. WHAT'S THE STORY?

(Audrey Gillan tries to find the evidence for mass atrocities in Kosovo)

Ferteze Nimari had lost two of her brothers and her husband was forced to bury all the dead in one grave. Later, packed into a stiflingbus with sixty fellow Kosovars, the couple held onto each other as he clutched a strap suspended from the ceiling. The bus stopped in the Stankovac I refugee camp in Macedonia and they told their story. 'The tank came to our village of Sllovi. The Serb neighbours said not to worry - it was just there to observe us. But by lunchtime the next day a teenage girl lay dead in the street. Then another 15 people were killed. They told us to run into the woods and they started shooting us.'

I asked them so many questions about what they had seen. 'What happened when your brothers were shot?' 'How many people did you bury?' 'How do you feel now?' When they said the Serbs had forced an old woman into a tent and burned her alive I looked at them doubtfully and asked how they knew she had been alive. Someone from her family had seen it happen, they said.

The Nimaris had arrived at what they thought was a safe haven, but I pursued them, and I did so unsparingly. I got on the bus when the driver opened the doors for air. They had stood for hours on that malodorous bus. I felt sorry for them: but not so sorry that I stopped the questions. They had yet to step down to the misery of the camp the British press has taken to calling 'Brazda'. All they had was a bottle of water passed to them through an open window - and my questions. Ferteze, eight months pregnant, caught me glancing at the watch on her wrist when Remzi, her husband, said all the women in the village had been robbed of their jewellery.

Earlier that day, Ron Redmond, the baseball-capped spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, stood at the Blace border crossing from Kosovo into Macedonia and said there were new reports of mass rapes and killings from three villages in the Lipljan area: Sllovi, Hallac Evogel and Ribari Evogel. He spoke to the press of bodies being desecrated, eyes being shot out. The way he talked it sounded as if there had been at least a hundred murders and dozens of rapes. When I pressed him on the rapes, asking him to be more precise, he reduced it a bit and said he had heard that five or six teenage girls had been raped and murdered. He had not spoken to any witnesses. 'We have no way of verifying these reports of rape,' he conceded. 'These are among the first that we have heard of at this border.'

Other UNHCR officials later told stories of women being tied to the walls of their houses and burned, 24 bodies buried in Kosovo Polje. Another report, again from Sllovi, put the dead at a hundred. Mr and Mrs Nimari were adamant that it was 16. Truth can be scarce at the Blace border and in the camps dotted around Macedonia, but you are not allowed to say that during a war like this, where it may be that bad things are being done on both sides, just as you are not allowed to doubt atrocity. It's as if Nato and its entourage were trying to make up for the witlessness of the past: trying to show that whatever we do, we won't be turning a blind eye. But the simple-minded reporter in me wants to ask a question: is there any real evidence for what is being said?

In Macedonia, listening to the stories and the UNHCR accounts, you would find it hard to tell what was hearsay and what was fact. When you looked at the people clinging onto the carrier bags that now held the remnants of their lives, it seemed evident that terrible things had happened to them, that people had been forced to flee their homes and drag themselves to a non-life in another country. Each person arriving at the camps had experienced some kind of trauma, and most are still living it. Many have seen death and other horrors. It is just that there is little to suggest that they have seen it in the ways, and on the scale, that people want to say they have. Most of those who have seen killing have seen one or two shot and the bodies of others. Eye-witnesses to multiple atrocities are very rare and the simple - and not at all simple - truth is that it can often be hard to establish the veracity of the information. One afternoon, the people in charge said there were refugees arriving who talked of sixty or more being killed in one village, fifty in another, but I could not find one eye-witness who actually saw these things happening.

Now, they may have happened. But what we have is a situation where Western journalists accept details without question. Almost every day, the world's media, jostling for stories in Macedonia, strain to find figures that may well not exist. In the absence of any testimony, many just report what some agency or other has told them. I stood by as a reporter from BBC World reeled off what Ron Redmond had said, using the words 'hundreds', 'rape' and 'murder' in the same breath. By way of qualification (a fairly meaningless one in the circumstances), he added that the stories had yet to be substantiated. Why, then, had he reported them so keenly in the first place?

I found myself wanting to discover the evidence. I was also impatient to find a 'good' story - i.e. a mass atrocity. As each new bus trundled over the border, I told my interpreter to shout through the windows asking if anyone was from the three villages Redmond had mentioned. Did they know anyone, had they seen anything? We went along twenty buses before we found Mr and Mrs Nimari. A transit camp had been set up in the no man's land between the river and the frontier road at Blace. This was where the tens of thousands were trapped in fetid misery before Macedonian officials dispersed them one night to the newly-built camps.

Now the place is used to give a night's rest to some of the great many who wait patiently at this border for entry to a country that doesn't want them and to which they really don't want to go. Every 20 minutes, the Macedonian police let around two hundred people clamber down a dirt path to be processed before being admitted into the camp. As they stood in line, I asked whether anyone was from those villages and whether they'd seen anything they wanted to talk about. No one was and no one did. Or at least they didn't want to tell us about it.

It seemed that the Nimaris were the only people from Sllovi. I was moved by their fear and passion to believe everything they said. Remzi told me he'd buried the dead in a grave in the woods at Lugi i Demes. It will take the verifiers from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague to put our agitated, agitating minds at rest.

The officers from ICTY, the verifiers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and researchers from Human Rights Watch are compiling reports of war crimes, which will be used at a later date for any trial at The Hague. Speaking to these people, I found them to be wary of using the hyperbole favoured by reporters and by the UNHCR. They say they have yet to see evidence of atrocities on the scale that they witnessed while working in Bosnia. When I went to see Benedicte Giaever, the co-ordinator for OSCE's field office in Skopje, I saw that she was angered by the behaviour of the media. I squirmed when she said she had heard of a female journalist getting onto a bus to question some refugees. She said almost every journalist who came to see her asked one thing: could she give them a rape victim to interview. She spoke of one woman being 'hunted down' by journalists and having to have her tent moved to shelter her from their intrusions: she had had a breakdown.

I wanted at the same time to test the validity of the truths being offered us and to behave decently in the face of what could not be known for sure, and I knew it wasn't possible to do both. Yet I could see that much of this rough treatment of female refugees was a direct consequence of Robin Cook telling the world that there was evidence of rape camps inside Kosovo. 'Young women are being separated from the refugee columns,' he said, 'and forced to undergo systematic rape in an army camp. We have evidence from many refugees who have managed to escape that others were taken to rape camps.'

I know of several tabloid reporters who were despatched to Macedonia and Albania with the sole purpose of finding a rape victim. Talking to each other in the bar of Skopje's Hotel Continental we rehearsed the question which has now become notorious: 'Is there anyone here who's been raped and speaks English?' We were aware of the implications of some of our more despicable behaviour. We knew that one woman, raped by Serbian soldiers then forced to leave her country, was traumatised all over again by a journalist looking for a good story.

The things you come to know as a journalist do not march in single file. Facts are often renegade. But among the rape victims arriving in Macedonia nobody spoke of anything like the camps the British Foreign Secretary referred to. Benedicte Giaever told me there had been rape, but not systematic and not on a grand scale. The same was true of the killing. 'We don't have big numbers,' she said. 'What we have are consistent small numbers - two here, five there, ten here, seven there.'

Unlike the media and the UNHCR, the OSCE works in a slow, methodical way, waiting a few days till the refugees have settled in before they begin to ask questions. 'These people have just arrived and I would say they are still under a lot of stress and tension,' Giaever says. 'In that situation, 5 people can easily turn into 75. It's not that they want to lie but often they are confused. It's not to say it didn't happen. But a story could have moved around from village to village and everyone from that village tells it as if it happened to them.'

Another senior OSCE source spoke even more clearly than any of us were inclined to do. He told me he suspected that the Kosovo Liberation Army had been persuading people to talk in bigger numbers, to crank up the horror so that Nato might be persuaded to send ground troops in faster. Robin Cook's rape camp was the same thing, he said: an attempt to get the British public behind the bombing. And wasn't all this a lesson in how propaganda works in modern war?

When I came back to London, I went to see the KLA's spokesman and recruiting officer in Golders Green. Dr Pleurat Sejdiu, sitting beside the KLA flag and busts of the Albanian national hero Skenderbeg, said there were indeed rape camps, and that the evidence of mass atrocities was to be found among the refugees in Albania, not in Macedonia. He is in daily contact with the KLA frontline command by satellite phone and has been told of rape camps in Gjakova, Rahovec, Suhareka, Prizren and Skenderaj. 'We know there are concentration camps and women are kept and raped there,' he said. 'I don't think we will get the evidence until we go in with the ground troops. There are a lot of stories confirming it. There are mass executions and mass graves are appearing now. We have reports from our special units moving around Kosovo. And the pertinent question is: where are the young men who have been taken from the refugee columns? I think everything will be proved when Nato troops go in.'

[Professional NGO Observers]

In Skopje I had been to see Ben Ward, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, in the flat he is renting (he had found the Hotel Continental too expensive and the behaviour of the reporters too disconcerting): he pored over maps of Kosovo and pointed to villages where he knows incidents have taken place. His information comes from eye-witnesses and is corroborated by the testimony of others. He has noted a very definite scorched-earth policy. But while his latest report details killings and the mutilation of corpses in the villages of Bajnica and Cakaj, he doesn't think there is evidence of mass executions. 'It is very rare for people not to know someone who knows about people being killed. But there doesn't appear to be anything to support allegations of mass killings,' he said. 'It is generally paramilitaries who are responsible. It doesn't seem organised. There appear to be individual acts of sadism rather than anything else. There seems not to be any policy or instruction, but that isn't to say that people have not been given the latitude to kill. However, I don't think at this stage we have anything that adds up to the systematic killing of civilians.' Ward believes that those who stayed longer in Kosovo have been subjected to more violence, that many have been terrorised because they have stayed so long. Many have fled terror but some of those Ward spoke to said they were fleeing the Nato bombs. 'The Serbs didn't touch us until Nato attacked,' a Kosovar told him.

One morning I made a two-year-old girl hysterical. I had asked her parents to show me the wound the child suffered when the bullet that killed her grandmother entered her shoulder. I was getting desperate for some kind of truth to hold onto. They pulled up Marigona Azemi's dress and her pink T-shirt and pointed to a worn bandage. She squealed and said it was the 'licia' who shot her, unable to get her small tongue round the Albanian word milicia. Like the majority of those killed or wounded or abused by the Serbs, Marigona was attacked by paramilitaries, a vicious, marauding band. Seven people in her village of Lovc - including her grandmother Nexhmije - were killed. Some villagers claimed that a local teacher and his cousin were skinned alive before they were burned, others said they were burned alive. No one actually saw this but the rest of what they had to say tallied when they told their stories independently. The Azemi family had been trying to escape on its tractor when the paramilitaries opened fire: what they did was sadistic and it was a horrendous tale, but it couldn't be turned into a story of mass atrocity. Some people tell me that evil is evil; that there's no point in quantifying it. Does that mean I am to accept Robin Cook's unchecked facts because they align with my hunches?

I feel bad for having made Marigona cry in order to prove to myself that there was truth in her story. (For days, I went to her - pathetically - with dolls and hair bobbles and sweets and orange juice.) But that is not all I feel. Watching the television images and listening to the newscasters thunder about further reports of Serb massacres and of genocide, I feel uneasy about saying that they have very little to go on. Yet almost every newspaper journalist I spoke to privately in Macedonia felt the same way. The story being seen at home is different from the one that appeared to be happening on the ground.

Maybe the truth here is not one thing: but I don't want to be an accomplice to a lie. I don't want to bellow for my life or for theirs, yet there's something not right in this easy way with detail. It is a surreal place, Macedonia, and it was this aspect to which a friend drew my attention when I got home. Nobody much wants to return to Jean Cocteau, but there was something soothing in the words my friend quoted.

'History is a combination of reality and lies,' he said. 'The reality of history becomes a lie. The reality of the fable becomes the truth.'

Audrey Gillan is a reporter on the Guardian, for whom she went to Macedonia.

Note: The arrival of 7000 Albanian men on May 23^rd in Albania was not widely reported and NATO continued to allege that as many as 200,000 Albanian males of miltary age were "missing" This succession of arrivals continued each day in the following week. --BCW

12. UPI, May 23, 1999;

By United Press International

The exodus of ethnic Albanian men from Kosovo continued on the 61^st day of NATO's campaign in Yugoslavia, with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimating at least 7,000 arrivals in Macedonia and 500 in Albania.

A UNHCR spokesman in Blace, Macedonia, Ron Redman, told United Press International that a single train loaded with some 5,000 people and several buses arrived at the border point today.

Macedonia is fast running out of space for the war victims.

Like those who crossed the border Saturday, ethnic Albanian men arriving today said Serb forces had separated them from their families and shipped them off to prisons in the interior of Kosovo.

The refugees, hungry and exhausted, could not explain why they were set free. ``Many of the men fell into each other's arms sobbing when they crossed the border,'' said an agency spokeswoman in Geneva.

Another day of power outages left much of Serbia in darkness today after NATO targeted a thermal power plant and transmission lines. Water was also scarce due to low pressure.

Yugoslav TV reported emergency power was being restored to hospitals, waterworks, bakeries and public transport. Authorities appealed to the public to use electricity sparingly.

The report said NATO planes bombed a military airfield in Batajnica and a civil airport in Surcin. A site near Rakovica, believed to contain a weapons depot, was hit again.

Other targets were a radio transmitter in Vrbas, a railway station in Sabac and sites south of Novi Sad.

A number of civilian target came under attack in Kosovo, according to the media center in Pristina. Villages near Kosovo Polje, Prizren, Gnjilane, Istok and Urosevac were also bombed.

NATO says it flew more than 650 missions on the 60th night of bombing, including 222 strike sorties, hitting at least nine armored vehicles, 10 artillery positions, tanks and other military vehicles.

Spokesmen in Brussels also confirmed the alliance had mistakenly hit a border post at Glava, in the Kosare area, despite the fact that it had fallen into Kosovo Liberation Army hands.

``There's going to be some places where our intelligence is not as good as others,'' admitted spokesman Jamie Shea. Among 700 operations a night, he said, ``there's going to be one or two mistakes along the road.''

In an editorial in the New York times today, U.S. President Bill Clinton said NATO's campaign in Yugoslavia is working and pointed to growing dissension within President Slobodan Milosevic's government. Meanwhile, he said, the Kosovo Liberation Army is growing stronger.

He blamed Milosevic for a 10-year campaign to build a greater Serbia by ``singling out whole peoples for destruction because of their ethnicity and faith'' and said the United States would help ``a democratic Serbia that respects the rights of its people and its neighbors'' reclaim its rightful place in Europe.

U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright and British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, interviewed on U.S. television today, both said ground troops being sent to the Balkans would enter Kosovo only to bring the refugees back home, and after Milosevic has withdrawn his troops.

Meanwhile, the commander of the air campaign against Yugoslavia criticized NATO's strategy today.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Short, interviewed in Vicenza, Italy, told the Philadelphia Inquirer the limited campaign is unlikely to crack Belgrade's resolve.

Short said outrage over the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy and other civilian buildings has nearly put an end to airstrikes on Belgrade.

Other commanders interviewed at the Italian air base said they had serious doubts about the current strategy of targeting only Yugoslav troops and equipment within Kosovo.

In another development, senior intelligence officials told Newsweek magazine that President Clinton issued a highly classified document last week authorizing the CIA to secretly train Kosovar rebels in sabotage and on conducting a cyber war against Milosevic.

The White House declined to comment.

--

Copyright 1999 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

13. The Sunday Times May 16 1999WAR IN EUROPE

John Follain in Rome and Edin Hamzic report on the vice trail from Kosovo

After her husband and young son were murdered by Serbian paramilitaries, Alina fled Kosovo in terror. Nothing, she thought, could be worse than staying in her war-torn homeland. But danger lurked on the other side of the border. Alina, 27, escaped the Serbs only to become a prisoner in Italy, forced into prostitution by her Albanian captors.

Criminal investigators fear Alina's experience could be repeated thousands of times as the exodus of refugees from Kosovo into Albania continues. The United Nations has warned that vulnerable Kosovan women are being forced into prostitution in the European Union by ruthless criminal gangs with long experience of smuggling women and children across borders into EU states.

"Human traffickers are a serious threat, especially in Albania," said Sadako Ogata, the UN high commissioner for refugees. The situation is now so bad that it needs to be "forcefully addressed" by the international community, she believes.

Alina, who lived in Pristina until her husband and son were killed in front of her by masked members of a Serbian militia within days of the Nato airstrikes starting, is one of the first known Kosovan refugees forced into prostitution by Albanian mafia gangs. In early April she was approached by a man in Kukes, at an Albanian refugee camp she had fled to. He said he would find work and a home for her in Italy.

The Albanian drove her to the coast, from where she was smuggled in a speedboat across the Adriatic at night, with other illegal immigrants. She landed somewhere on the coast of southern Italy, to be met by four Albanian men.

They took her to Triggiano, a village south of the port of Bari. There, she later told Italian police, she was confined to a 16 sq metre airless room in a decrepit house with three other young women - Shpresa, 25, from Drenica in Kosovo, and two Albanians. The women had to share two torn mattresses and were fed only tinned food and bread.

Her four guards, who shared the bedroom next door, let her out under escort only at night. "I was already mourning the loss of my husband and my son, and now I was forced to sell my body," Alina said. "The Albanians told me, 'Do this or we will beat you; do this or we will kill you.' "

"This" meant dressing in a miniskirt, fishnet stockings and high heels, packing a few condoms into her handbag and parading the seafront motorway south of Bari, or plying her enforced trade in small towns nearby. The four captives earned 1.5m lire (about Ł500) each a night - none of which they were allowed to keep.

Alina's ordeal finally ended 10 days ago, when police raided the house. Two of the Albanians escaped arrest by fleeing over the rooftops. The two others, who turned out to be from the Albanian port of Durres, were caught and charged with abetting illegal immigration and prostitution, kidnapping and enslavement, and face several years in jail.

The next day, with a magistrate's approval, Alina headed back to Albania by ferry. Others, however, are sure to take her place. Italian relief workers at refugee camps in Vlore on the Albanian coast have reported visits by men who then leave the camp with young women. In one case, a 16-year-old was taken away from a camp set up by volunteers from Italy's Piemonte region.

The man who took her had a Kalashnikov slung across his back and told relief workers he was a policeman. "There are 2,000 Kosovan refugees in our camp," said Father Giovanni Mercurio, who manages the Rezervat E Shteti centre in Vlore. "For a month now police have been taking girls away and we are not told their destination. But we can't do anything about it."

Relief agencies have reported their concerns to the Italian interior ministry, but a government spokesman said there was little the authorities could do. "The girls are free, the refugee camps are not prisons. They are at liberty to do what they want and that can include being hired by Albanian criminals. The best way to stop that happening," he said, "is to have European countries take in refugees and care for them."

Last year, however, a Sunday Times investigation revealed that girls as young as 14 were being kidnapped or bought from their families in Albania to be sold for Ł800 each into the white slave trade in Britain. Thousands of women like Alina have been smuggled into Italy by sea and then transported overland to London, Hamburg and other western European cities.

In Durres, The Sunday Times was told that the price had since risen to Ł1,300. "Albanian mafia gangs are very vicious," a recent Home Office report emphasised. "They make the Italian mafia look like crowd-control officers at a local whist drive."

New York Post, May 30, 1999

By Maggie O'Kane

BELGRADE - As two yellow parakeets in his Belgrade kitchen peck gently in their grubby cage, Milan Petrovic - known as "the cleaner" - explains the rules a Serbian "ethnic cleanser" must follow in Kosovo.

"We're not allowed to kill them - no beating and no mutilation allowed," he says of the 10 days he spent in Kosovo driving thousands of families from their homes.

"We give most of them 24 hours to get out. The rich ones - and they're all criminals you know - with satellite TVs and big houses, were tougher to move.

"But if you push hard enough, they all go in the end. They're cowards, those Albanians. They run like rabbits."

Milan Petrovic is 50 and has only two teeth left in his bottom jaw.

He usually drives a truck for a living, but when the war started he signed up.

A day later, he was on his way to join about 2,000 other volunteers gathered in the southern city of Nis, the staging post for Kosovo.

"We came from all over the country. One guy turned up who was 72. They told him he was too old, that the limit was 65," Petrovic says.

Before they left for the village of Silovo to start driving families from their homes, they received their orders: "No killings, no beatings, and if they don't have the papers, give them 24 hours to get out."

Petrovic is a family man. He fishes in the pocket of his black slacks for a few dinars for his eldest daughter, who is going out with her friend, as his disinterested ex-wife wanders around the kitchen.

He says he feels sorry for the Albanian children he kicked out, but says if they belonged to Albanians, they didn't have the right to be in Kosovo.

"I had to follow my orders, and anyway, I knew there would always be someone to meet those women and children."

At first he insists, "There was no raping - a Serb soldier wouldn't be interested in raping an Albanian woman. It would be against our nature.

"Don't get me wrong, there were some pretty ones and even if we did want to, we didn't, because the army didn't allow it."

His daughter, Daniela, 17, pipes up, "Albanian women smell bad because they eat a lot of lamb fat and you can smell it on their skin."

But Petrovic concedes there were occasional lapses among the volunteer cleaners.

"One in a hundred, I'd say, did raping or killing and that kind of thing, not more. About six guys in my unit got a bit out of hand one night and started killing Albanians.

"But they only killed three or four of them before they started taking stuff out of their houses. The next day our army came and took the six of them away."

His days of cleaning had a rhythm.

"Six or seven of us would go from door to door. We'd get one of the Albanians who lived in the village to help us out. He'd have to tell us who was who, how long they'd been there, and where the terrorists were. That made things a lot easier."

He says the job of the cleaner requires some of the skills of a psychologist. It's easy to tell the innocent Albanians from the terrorists by the expression in their eyes. The terrorists, he says, are scared.

"First we say: 'Have you any weapons?' And then we look at their faces and know the answer. If they're telling the truth, only one of us goes into the house and looks around. If they're not, we take them.

"The people who aren't terrorists, but don't have a right to be here, are cleaned out in 24 hours."

Petrovic swings his Zippo lighter between thumb and forefinger and announces he's going back to Kosovo tomorrow to do some more cleaning.

"The western media told a lot of lies about what we did in Kosovo," he says, smoothing out the wrinkles on his checked tablecloth. "We respected human rights."

Scripps Howard (Veteran international reporter Maggie O'Kane writes for The Guardian in London and has twice been named journalist of the year by the British Press Association for her human-rights reporting.)

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The truth belongs to us all. Feel free to download, copy and redistribute. First posted: February 27, 2003 Last revised: May 31, 2004