Fire

KOSOVO’S VALLEY OF DEATH 1998

It wasn’t much of a town, Prekaz, just a dozen or so farmhouses strung along a dirt road that ran between some low brown hills. In the distance were the mountains of Albania, and all around were the dead winter fields of Kosovo. The houses had red tile roofs, thick whitewashed walls, and traditional courtyards—a defensive layout that probably hadn’t changed much in the past eight hundred years. The pastures began at the road and stretched up to the crests of the hills before ending in ugly swatches of scrub oak. It was the kind of scrub oak that would whip you in the face if you tried to run through it. It was the kind of scrub oak that you could disappear into.

Before dawn on March 5, 1998, hundreds of Serb special police took up positions on the hilltops around Prekaz. There were mortar emplacements, tanks, heavy artillery, 20-mm cannon, and dozens of armored personnel carriers mounted with heavy machine guns. It was the first premeditated military assault by a European government against its own citizens since Nicolae Ceauşescu unleashed his Romanian security police in 1989—and that was basically the last spasm of a dying government. Before that you’d have to go back to the Nazis. Kosovo, a province of Serbia, is only two hundred miles from Italy; tourists come to ski in the winter. There hadn’t been a war here since 1945. And now one of its towns was about to get scraped off the map.

The attack started with an artillery barrage against one household and quickly escalated to a ground assault against the entire village. Police in greasepaint and black uniforms poured out of armored cars and moved down the sodden brown hills, firing automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. Mortar shells dropped into the houses and lit them on fire. Albanian separatist guerrillas were said to be holed up in the town, and the Serbs weren’t taking any chances: They weren’t going to let the bastards surrender, and they weren’t going to let them hide. If necessary, everyone would die.

Women and children took shelter until they realized it was only a matter of time before they were killed, and then they took their chances and ran through the gunfire into the woods. The men weren’t so lucky. Some fought back, and others just hid; either way, they died. They died as their houses collapsed on them; they died as automatic-weapons fire ripped through the cinder-block walls; they died on their doorsteps as they tried to surrender.

“The soldiers shouted for us to come out one by one or they would kill us,” the daughter of a man named Šerif Jašari later told human rights workers. “When my cousin Ćazim came out with his hands up, they killed him on the steps. We ran and had just gone through the first cordon when the soldiers caught my cousin Nazmi, who was helping his mother, Bahtije, along. They grabbed him, tore off the woman’s dress we had given him to wear, and ordered him to lie down on the ground and then to get up. He had to do this many times. Then they fired into his head and back, and I saw his body jerking from the bullets.”

The next person the Serbs shot was the girl’s seventeen-year-old brother, Riad, hitting him twice. He fell to the ground, and his sister and mother took him by the arms and started dragging him into the woods. “We went through the second cordon posted in the street outside the house. Armed soldiers in green uniforms with yellow and black markings and the same colors smeared on their faces,” Jašari’s daughter said. “We hid in the bushes, and up on the hill we met some people we knew, and they drove my brother Riad to a safe place. When Bećir’s wife, Sala, arrived, she said they had shot Bećir in the leg and that he had told her to go with the children. A few days later we heard Bećir was dead.”

Bećir Jašari was a member of a wealthy Albanian family that was said to be involved in an Albanian independence movement in Kosovo. Kosovo is about 90 percent ethnic Albanian but remains part of the Serb-dominated former Republic of Yugoslavia, which stripped it of its autonomy in 1989.

Tensions in the area had been rising steadily since November, when three masked Albanian guerrillas appeared at the funeral of a man killed in a crossfire between Serb police and guerrillas. “The Kosovo Liberation Army is the only force which is fighting for the liberation and national unity of Kosovo!” one of them shouted, and the mourners—twenty thousand strong—responded, “U-Ç-K!” the Albanian initials for the Kosovo Liberation Army. The opposition movement in Kosovo was headed by a longtime pacifist named Ibrahim Rugova, but it also had an armed wing ready to take the fight into the hills.

Almost immediately after their appearance at the funeral, the KLA began ambushing police cars and sniping at the checkpoints. Then a car chase and shoot-out in late February resulted in the deaths of four policemen and five KLA members. Another badly wounded KLA fighter reportedly dragged himself to the home of Ahmet Ahmeti in a nearby village called Likošane. Like the Jašaris, the Ahmetis were a wealthy family rumored to have links to the KLA.

On February 28 the Serbs struck back. Attack helicopters blasted towns with gun and rocket fire, and policemen in black uniforms dragged people out of their houses and shot them on their doorsteps. Twenty-six were killed. Witnesses said the Ahmeti men over the age of fifteen were separated from the women and children, savagely beaten, and then executed in their courtyard with shotgun blasts to their heads. One had his eyeballs dug out. Journalists who later visited the house reported that the ground was littered with teeth and hair and that a human jawbone hung from a nearby bush.

There was a brief lull while people buried their dead, and then the police moved in on Prekaz, which lay only a few hundred yards from an old munitions factory that had been converted into a barracks for the Serb special police. On the morning of March 5 the police stepped outside their front gate and attacked. Some snipers didn’t even bother leaving the compound. Fifty-five people died in Prekaz, including thirty from the Jašari family alone.

One of the few Jašaris who survived was an eleven-year-old girl named Besarte, who had hidden under a heavy slab on which her mother used to make bread. She remembers shells crashing into the house for hours and her uncle Adem singing folk songs “so the family wouldn’t lose its faith in life.” When the bombardment finally stopped, the bodies of her entire family lay twisted around her. Twenty-four hours later—after another night of siege—several policemen stormed into the house to check for survivors. One stopped in front of Besarte, who played dead, but he put his hand to her chest and felt a heartbeat, so he picked her up and took her to the munitions factory. She arrived spattered with blood, screaming that she wanted to stay with her sisters.

I arrived in Kosovo two weeks after the massacre, on a frigid March night. I drove in with an old friend named Harald Doornbos, a Dutch journalist who had been based in Sarajevo since 1992. For obvious reasons, the Serbs weren’t granting entrance visas to journalists, but Herald knew a dirt road border crossing into Montenegro where the guards—being Montenegrin—couldn’t have cared less what the Serbs wanted. From Montenegro we could easily cross into Kosovo.

We got up early the next morning to try to drive into Drenica, the rural stronghold of the KLA. We crossed a desolate brown plain and plunged into the hill country, the little towns flicking by in our car windows and the mountains on the Albanian border looming in the distance. Guns were coming in over those mountains; Albania was awash in weapons, and the KLA was completely dependent upon help from across the border. The Serb military reportedly had shoot-on-sight orders for anyone in the high peaks, and soldiers regularly ambushed Albanians moving weapons into Kosovo over mountain tracks.

There were said to be KLA training camps inside Albania; in response, the Serbs have massed a tremendous number of heavy weapons at the Albanian border—far more than are needed to stop arms smuggling. The fear is that the Serb Army will cross into Albania to stamp out the camps and that the situation will escalate into an all-out war between Yugoslavia and Albania. Such a conflagration could drag in Greece and Turkey and—in a worst-case scenario—divide the United Nations. Another scenario has it that war in Kosovo might trigger a similar war in Macedonia, which has its own restive Albanian population, and that Greece and Bulgaria could jump in to grab Macedonian land that they have old claims to. More than three hundred American troops are stationed in Macedonia to contain exactly that kind of domino effect, but they are scheduled to be withdrawn this summer.

The towns we passed were dead and empty-looking, and house after house stood half built, abandoned by Albanians who could no longer afford to finish them, because they’d lost their jobs in Serb-controlled businesses. After half an hour we turned down a dirt road and drove until we dead-ended at a railroad tunnel near a river. We stopped, grabbed our notebooks, and walked through the tunnel and into an empty brown valley surrounded by brush-covered hills.

We were worried about KLA snipers—stupidly, both of us were dressed in black, like the Serb secret police—but we were even more worried about Serb snipers. This was the heart of Drenica, an area the police can seal off but not control, an area the KLA can hide in but not defend. It was a no-man’s-land where you could get shot at or you could get invited in for tea, depending on who spotted you first.

We walked for an hour and finally came upon a dozen ethnic Albanians repairing the road. Since the Serb police controlled the highways, there seemed to be a lot of repair work being done on the spider web of dirt roads that connect the villages in Drenica. The men escorted us into one of their houses and sent someone ahead to ask the KLA commander at the next village if we could continue. We sat on the floor, drinking Turkish coffee and watching an American cop show on satellite television; after an hour the man came back and said apologetically that the answer was no, we could not continue. The KLA was not prepared to greet us.

When we stepped outside, we could hear the Serbs shelling some villages a few miles away. The sound rumbled over the hills like a summer rainstorm. As we studied the faces of the farmers around us—rough, unshaven faces of men who had known nothing but hard work their whole lives—it was impossible to tell if they understood what real war would mean. It was impossible to tell if they understood that tragedies like this happen every day, all over the world; that in all probability, no one was going to intervene on their behalf; and that the Serb authorities, like most governments, would stop at almost nothing to retain power.

In 1389, as the myth goes, Prince Lazar of Serbia was visited by St. Ilija in the form of a falcon. It was on the eve of a great battle with the Turks, and Lazar had gathered around him, on the plains of Kosovo, much of the Balkan military elite: Bosnian warlords, Albanian noblemen, and Hungarian horsemen with shamanic bones sewn onto their uniforms. Lazar was understandably nervous—the Turks had wiped out an entire Serb army eighteen years earlier—and wondered if it might not be better to retreat and fight again another day. St. Ilija gave Lazar the choice between a kingdom on earth and a kingdom in heaven; Lazar, wisely choosing the kingdom in heaven, went on to meet his death at the hands of the Turks.

The battle became known as the Battle of Kosovo Polje—the Blackbird Field—and it occupies a particularly fevered part of the Serb psyche. It was on Kosovo Polje that a Serb leader first chose death over subjugation; it was on Kosovo Polje that the guiding maxim of the Serb people, “Only unity saves the Serbs,” was first acted out in all its bloody glory.

Nearly six hundred years after the battle, Slobodan Milošević, the man responsible for igniting the entire Balkan conflict, would stand on the ancient battlefield and whip a crowd of angry Serbs into a nationalist frenzy. “Yugoslavia does not exist without Kosovo!” he yelled, instantly catapulting himself to the top of the political heap. “Yugoslavia would disintegrate without Kosovo!”

Kosovo is not the birthplace of the Serb people, however. The original Serbs migrated southward from Saxony and what is now the Czech Republic in the sixth century A.D. and didn’t settle permanently in Kosovo for another six hundred years. The high-water mark of the Serb empire came in the 1330s, when a brutal nobleman named Stefan Dušan defeated his own father in battle, had him strangled, and then went on to extend his empire throughout Kosovo and into Greece. He built numerous Orthodox monasteries and churches and eventually had himself crowned emperor of the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Albanians.

The empire didn’t survive his own death, though; within decades the Turks defeated the Serbs at Kosovo Polje, and three hundred years after that the Turks put down another uprising so ruthlessly that most Serbs fled Kosovo. The void they left behind was filled by the Albanians, who drifted back down out of the mountains with their wild, hill people ways.

Traditional Albanian society was based on a clan system and was further divided into brotherhoods and bajraks. The bajrak system identified a local leader, called a bajrakar, who could be counted on to provide a certain number of men for military duty. In another era Adem Jašari and Ahmet Ahmeti might well have been considered bajrakars. That organization has fallen into disuse, but the clans—basically used to determine allegiances during a blood feud—seem to have survived.

Feuds in this part of the world inevitably break out over offenses to a man’s honor, which include calling him a liar, insulting his female relatives, violating his hospitality, or stealing his weapons. Tradition dictates that these transgressions be avenged by killing any man in the offender’s family, which creates another round of violence. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, one in five adult male deaths was the result of a blood feud, and in Albania today, it is said, a tradition still exists whereby you must kill one man for every bullet in the body of your dead kin.

Seen in the context of the code of male honor, the Serb police have violated just about every blood feud rule in existence, including the killing of women—a provocation above all others. It’s no wonder they have such a hard time maintaining control of Kosovo.

The Kosovars were granted autonomy at the end of World War II, but then aspiring President Milošević had the autonomy revoked in 1989, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the recent war in Bosnia and Croatia, failed to address the issue of Kosovo’s status. Inevitably, an independence movement was born, funded by a voluntary 3 percent income tax given by the Albanian diaspora and supported by groups in Albania proper.

The first armed clashes in Kosovo were reported during the summer of 1995, and within two years the KLA was strong enough to force a column of Serb armored vehicles to retreat from Drenica. After that the Serbs began a slow buildup of police and heavy weapons in Kosovo and on the Albanian border, culminating in the attack on Prekaz.

If anything, the massacres have radicalized the youth of Kosovo. The Serbs have already spent an estimated six billion dollars controlling the province. In some ways, they couldn’t have engineered a worse domestic problem if they’d tried; in some ways, they fell right into the KLA trap.

The next morning dawned cold and gray, with a mean little wind blowing trash down the streets; the cafés in town were completely empty. We packed the car and drove out of the city by a different route, hoping to drive into Drenica over some dirt roads that skirted the Serb checkpoints outside Prekaz. We wanted to see the villages that were getting shelled. The Serb government had bowed to international pressure and agreed to resolve the dispute through diplomacy, but meanwhile it was hammering the villages with rocket and artillery fire.

We had no problems at the first checkpoint—just the usual guns in our faces. But at the second one a police officer in an army jump-suit stormed over and ordered us out of the car. He was young, clean-shaven, and handsome in the way that Serb men often are: black hair, light skin, pale blue eyes. “You journalists are all spies!” he screamed at Harald. “You always make Serbs look bad! If I had my way, I’d tear the skin right off your faces!” He ripped the passports out of Harald’s hands and studied them while unloading a steady stream of hate. The guards were all standing around us with their machine guns leveled at our bellies. Finally the head cop came over and handed my passport back to me. “We know where you live,” he said darkly. “Write the truth or we’ll find you and kill you.”

As checkpoints go, it could have been worse—far worse. Albanian translators have been arrested and beaten at checkpoints, and the day before the attack on Prekaz, Harald and three other journalists were punched, dragged into a bunker, and questioned for an hour. When the police saw that Harald lived in Sarajevo, they accused him of being a Muslim—the predominant Albanian religion—and Harald had to prove he wasn’t by making the sign of the cross. Then the cops started going through Harald’s notebooks, demanding a translation of every word that was written down.

At one point, a cop spotted the name Frenki Simatović in Harald’s notebook, then turned to his friend and said, “Look, he even has the name of our boss in here.” Harald had no idea who Simatović was; he’d just written the name down during an interview and filed it away for future reference. Then they demanded to know if any of the reporters had ever been to a town called Prekaz. They kept asking over and over again: “Prekaz? Prekaz? Have any of you motherfuckers ever been to Prekaz?”

Prekaz is such a small town that before the massacre, people in Priština—a city half an hour away—had never heard of it. Harald just kept pleading ignorance, but when the Serbs finally released him, he called his editors and told them to be on the lookout. “I have no idea where it is; it’s not on the maps,” he said. “But something’s about to happen there. Just check the wires for a town called Prekaz.”

The next morning the first shells started to fall.

Back in 1991, as Yugoslavia began its descent into the hell of civil war, the newly elected Milošević had a somewhat delicate problem on his hands. He wanted to drive the Croats and Muslims out of large swaths of Yugoslavia, but he didn’t dare send the Yugoslav Army to do it.

The solution he came up with was simple. First, he surrounded himself with a trio of rabid nationalists—Jovica Stanišić, Radovan Stojičić, and Frano (“Frenki”) Simatović—known collectively as the Vojna Linija, or the Military Line. The Vojna Linija had little association with the Serb Army; it was a shadowy group within the Ministry of Interior Affairs, which was known as the MUP. After the Vojna Linija was established, Milošević began arming local Serb populations in Croatia and Bosnia, and training paramilitary forces. The weapons, distributed by Stojičić and Simatović, were taken from police and army depots. The paramilitary forces simply came out of the country’s jails.

According to Marko Nicović, a former Belgrade police chief who later had a falling-out with Milošević, convicts were told that their sentences would be suspended if they went to the front lines. Many were only too happy to oblige. The best-known groups were the White Eagles of Vojislav Šešelj, a virulent conservative later named to the Belgrade government; the Red Berets of Frenki Simatović; the unnamed forces of Captain Dragan; and—worst of all—the Tigers of Željko Ražnatović. Arkan, as Ražnatović was known, was wanted by Interpol for bank robberies and murders committed throughout Europe.

In 1992 the Yugoslav Army officially withdrew from Bosnia, but Serb paramilitary forces, including Simatović’s Red Berets, continued to operate there. That same year Šešelj and Arkan went to Kosovo to terrorize the locals into peacefulness, opening a recruiting office in Priština’s Grand Hotel and putting snipers up on the rooftops. (They also made tremendous amounts of money on the local black market.)

Both men turned up around Srebrenica in 1993, “cleansing” the Muslims from the small towns in eastern Bosnia. The Dayton Accords left the paramilitary foot soldiers without much to do, so they either sank back into Belgrade’s underworld or looked for other wars; some reportedly fought—and died—in the jungles of Zaire during the downfall of Mobutu Sese Seko. They didn’t have to wait long for another war in their own country, though: by 1997 Kosovo had ignited.

Harald and I had been in Kosovo about a week when things started to calm down; we could almost joke with the police at the checkpoints. The Serbs were still shelling the villages in central Drenica, though, and before leaving Kosovo, we decided to make one more stab at going there. We went in on a big, sunny day, the shadows of cumulus clouds sweeping across the Drenica hills and the fields mottled and bare in the early-spring sunlight. We were headed for Ačarevo, a town rumored to be the center of KLA resistance.

There were two ways to get in: walk six miles along some railroad tracks and hope no one shot at you, or drive down dirt roads across the central plateau and hope no one shot at you. The cops at the checkpoint warned us that there was a lot of gunfire on the road and suggested that we wear flak jackets. We thanked them and drove on, and as soon as we were out of sight we turned onto a dirt track that we thought led to Ačarevo.

The road climbed up onto a plateau, and we started across the highlands of Drenica, like some huge, slow beetle scratching across someone’s dinner table. “I don’t like this,” Harald muttered. I rolled down the window so we could hear gunfire more easily, and soon the landscape of war magically materialized all around us: bunkers and machine-gun nests and tanks on distant ridgetops. They emerged out of nowhere, like images brought out by a darkroom developer. But when I looked away, it took me a moment to find them again. They were there; then they weren’t. “This is crazy,” Harald said. “The entire fucking Serb Army is watching us.”

He turned the car around, and we plunged back down the dirt road and went jouncing out onto the hardtop. It was difficult to see how the KLA could fight a guerrilla war in a land like this: no forests to hide in; no mountains to run to; no swamps to stop the tanks. Just open fields and brush-choked hills. It would be suicide to confront the Serbs openly on such ground, so the KLA’s only choice is to carry on a war of harassment that may eventually cost the Serbs so much, in money and lives, that they have to pull out.

For their part, the Serbs have no stomach for a protracted fight in which farm kids from Drenica are popping out of the hedgerows with grenade launchers and AK-47s. A grenade launcher will easily take out a tank; a Molotov cocktail placed in its air intake will destroy one as well. The Serb population—largely spared the horrors of Bosnia but demoralized by massive inflation and a crippled economy—isn’t going to stand for a war in which too many of its young men get roasted alive in their tanks.

For the Serb military, the only solution is terror. Every time a cop is killed, wipe out a family. Every time a police patrol gets shot up, level a village. Slaughter is a lot easier—and cheaper—than war, and it forces the young idealists in the KLA to decide whether they really want this or not. It’s nothing for a twenty-four-year-old with no future and no civil rights to sacrifice his life in a guerrilla movement; it happens all the time. But for him to sacrifice his kid brother and two sisters and mother: that’s another question entirely.

Harald and I continued north on a small paved road until we topped out on another hill, from which, far away, we finally saw Ačarevo. It wasn’t much, just a small white village shoved down between some hills. It rippled in the heat coming off the fields. We moved on, and around the next bend we found ourselves at a heavily reinforced checkpoint, with mortars by the road and bunkers dug into the hillsides. We stopped, and a cop came out cradling a machine gun. “Let me see your papers,” he said. He stood there studying them for a while as I sat sleepily in the passenger seat and Harald lit up a cigarette.

The sniper must have been waiting for a car to pass so the cop would have to step out into the road. He must have been lying there in the scrub oak, smoking cigarette after cigarette, completely wired with this new killing game, contemplating how he was going to escape when he finally lost his nerve and stopped shooting. The place was crawling with Serbs; he’d have only a few minutes to get out of there.

The first shot simply caused the cop and me to look at each other in puzzlement. The second one got Harald and me out of our seats. The third forced all of us—me, Harald, the cop—to dive behind the car. It’s amazing how fast animosity vanishes among people who are suddenly getting shot at. One cop fumbled with his radio; the others shoved their guns over the tops of the sandbags as they tried to figure out where to return fire. Pap…pap…pap. The guy on the radio shouted for help while Harald and I scrambled across the road and into the bunker. The cop next to us struggled to put on his flak jacket with the resigned look of someone who had to do this at least once a day.

The shooting stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and a cop dismissed us with a wave of the hand. “Get the fuck out of here,” he told us. We got back into the car and drove out of the highlands, past a town called Lauša—shot to pieces in the offensive—past the Serb police headquarters in Srbica, and right up to the gate of the munitions factory. The dirt road to Prekaz crosses in front of the gate, and we drove down it slowly, not wanting to give the impression that we were trying to slip past anyone.

The paramilitary soldiers didn’t stop us until we were right on the edge of town, coming at us out of a camouflaged bunker, with guns drawn and incredulous expressions on their faces, as if they couldn’t believe someone was stupid enough to defy them. They looked as if they would have stopped even a regular police car; they looked completely uncontrolled by anyone but themselves. One of them shouted for our papers while two others circled the car, guns trained on us. “We were just shot at by the KLA,” Harald said out the window. “Now we understand why you guys are here.”

It worked. The soldier studied our papers and then waved us through. As far as I could tell, the only reason the Serb military allowed journalists into Prekaz—a damning place, easily sealed off—was to spread word of what would happen to those who resisted.

Harald drove slowly down the town’s wide dirt street, which ended at a pasture. A dead cow lay rotting by the side of the road. Every house had its roof blown off, its windows shot out, or its walls caved in. Rooms spilled their contents to the world, as if disemboweled by some huge claw. Walls were pocked with mortar shell explosions; tongues of soot licked roofward out of windows. Bullet shells lay in gleaming little piles wherever someone had really put up a fight.

Harald and I walked through a wooden gate, splintered by artillery, and into the courtyard of a house. Two abandoned dogs, one with a wound on its back, growled at us from what used to be the doorstep of their home. Harald gave the dogs some sausage and a tin of sardines, and we stepped around them and into their family’s home. Schoolwork sat on tables, and jackets hung on pegs alongside things that had been blown to bits. It was odd what had been touched and what hadn’t.

After the attack this particular house had served as an outpost for the special police, who had gone through it room by room, laying their hands on everything that could be tipped over or broken open. Books, clothes, photo albums, and lamps all lay tangled on the floor. On top of one pile was a Serb porn magazine, discarded by the latest occupants.

We paid our respects to the fifty-five rectangles of freshly dug-up earth in the pasture above town, and then we drove back out to the world of the living. As we passed, the men at the bunker were posing for a group portrait—the destroyed town in the background, their machine guns wedged upright in the crooks of their arms. The men grinned broadly at us.

One of them wasn’t holding a gun in his hands. He was holding a huge double-bladed ax.