Kosova Crisis Center

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SERBIAN MASSACRES

• Grave condition, for more than 50 thousand fled people
• New serbian reinforcements in Kosova
• Rep. James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat, will introduce a resolution in Congress calling for the U.S. government to arm the KLA
• A big machinery goneby in the Peja direction
• New order given by serbian forces, albanian population has to flee again
• Granades even in Prishtina
• A part of Gjilani is being granaded
• Arllati, is under granades and set on fire
• Kosova Exodus Becoming Massive
• Destruction on the Serbian side
• How is it Possible to Have Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide in the Middle of Europe in the Year 1999? Refugees Tell Their Stories

Rep. James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat, will introduce a resolution in Congress calling for the U.S. government to arm the KLA

Rep. James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat, will introduce a resolution in Congress calling for the U.S. government to arm the KLA and to send ground troops in to help. He also called on the United States to recognize the region as an independent country, saying it was the only way to stop the killing there.

A big machinery goneby in the Peja direction

Kijevė, March 29th (Kosovapress) Yesterday, about five o`clock in the morning,in the road axis Prishtinė -Pejė, a serbian military convey including seven tanks, four armoured automobiles, three pragave, seven buses and 37th trucks, have bygone. From 14.oo-15.oo o`clock, in the road Prishtina-Peja, another military convey with 56 military cars, from which 28 were tanks and armoured automobiles, while 18 others were trucks have bygone. About 17.oo o`clock,in this road from the same direction, 13 tanks and some others automobiles have passed. At 18.oo o`clock, in this road ,33 other tanks and other transporters have bygone. Two tractors full of civilians were joined to this convey.This convey is forbidden between Mleēan and Kijeva. There are suggestions, that this military convey coming from west ,has intention to attack albanian population of Dukagjini.

New order given by serbian forces, albanian population has to flee again

Prishtinė, March 30 (Kosovapress) Serbian police forces have ordered all the inhabitans of the „Dragodani" quarter, which is inhabited by albanians, to flee from their houses. Citizens are getting away looking for shelters in the nearby mountains and valleys.

Granades even in Prishtina

Prishtinė, March 30 (Kosovapress) Today, since early in the morning, serbian agressive forces are shooting with granades, the quarter of „Taslixhe" in Prishtina. As resultof this, many houses of this quarter of Kosova`s capital are set on fire.

A part of Gjilani is being granaded

Gjilan, March 30 (Kosovapress) Yesterday, there have been many bombardments in the city of Gjilani, in the „Ēenar ēeshme" quarter.There are informations, for new victims,but up to now, we don`t have confirmations about the exact number.

Arllati, is under granades and set on fire

Malishevė, March 30 (Kosovapress) Serbian forces have come here last night, while today in the morning they have start to attack with granades, to pillage, and to burn the village of Arllat, which lies in the cross-road Prishtinė- Pejė and Arllat- Malishevė. Population of this village, has flet before few days in the nearby mountains. In this attack tenths of tanks, praga ,armoured vehicles and other military vehicles.

Kosova Exodus Becoming Massive

From "Liberation" French newspaper
Translated by Jason Eng

The Albanian prime minister, Pandeli Majko, took emergency measures to give haven to Kosovar refugees, whose numbers are increasing. He declared that his country expects to receive 100,000 refugees in addition to the 60,000 who have appeared in the last three days. Majko accused the Milosevic regime of attempting to ethnically cleanse Kosovo by resorting to a "genocide" of the Albanian inhabitants. According to HCR, more tha 60,000 Kosovars crossed the Albanian border since Saturday afternoon. A spokesperson for NATO estimated the flux to 4,000 refugees per hour. The European commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, Emma Bonino, who will travel to the Balkans on Wednesday, confirmed that there are currently 80,000 to 100,000 refugees.

Destruction on the Serbian side

From "Liberation" French newspaper
Translated by Jason Eng

According to NATO, aircraft in the course of the latest raids on Yugoslavia have destroyed a MiG-21 combat fighter, several Serbian Army helicopters on the ground, a "QG" of the Serbian special police in Pristina, and an anti-aircraft radar station.

How is it Possible to Have Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide in the Middle of Europe in the Year 1999? Refugees Tell Their Stories

By Peter Finn, R. Jeffrey Smith and Daniel Williams Washington Post Foreign Service Tuesday, March 30, 1999; Page A01

KUKES, Albania, March 29 –– She is 85 years old and curled in a fetal position. A cold mountain wind blows over her rail-thin frame.

Her eyes are bloodshot and tearless from exhaustion. Njalledeze Bytyci, matriarch of four generations of the Bytyci clan, raises her hand and says with the remnants of her spirit, "Walking, walking."

The worst of it began on Sunday. Around noon in the village of Leshan, Yugoslav army and Serbian Interior Ministry troops began searching house to house, evicting families and forcing them into a nearby elementary school. As their homes burned and soldiers fired in the air, 5,000 villagers were forced to shout "Long live Serbia!" in unison. Men were separated from women. Then began the long, forced march.

Sitting now on rubble surrounded by broken glass and garbage on the outskirts of this Albanian town near the Yugoslav border, the Bytyci clan is fortunate in the way of tens of thousands of other refugees arriving here -- they survived. Behind them in Kosovo lies a scorched land where, by emerging eyewitness accounts, hundreds and perhaps thousands of unarmed civilians have been massacred by Yugoslav and Serbian forces over the last six days.

In the last 24 hours, more than 100,000 refugees have reached the borders between Kosovo and the rest of the world in one the largest mass movements of people in Europe since World War II. Many are grief-stricken, stripped of everything by Serb-led security forces that are trying to remake the landscape of the province by emptying it of the ethnic Albanians who make up the vast majority of its population.

Instead of possessions, the refugees carry stories that paint a chilling picture of a corner of Europe in the last year of the millennium: Men with their hands behind their heads, praying to God for life. Women summoning strength from nowhere to carry children scared silent to safety. Old people stumbling and rising anew to keep up with their offspring.

At three border posts -- in Albania, Macedonia and the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro -- Washington Post correspondents today interviewed refugees who described an ethnic cleansing campaign underway in Kosovo on a scale that appears greater than NATO or U.S. officials have yet reported. Refugees spoke of being herded like animals, humiliated, terrorized and finally expelled from their homeland. As part of their forced exodus many witnessed executions and massacres, particularly of male adults.

The accounts could not be independently verified, because most journalists and all Western observers have been expelled from Kosovo. But refugees from small villages and the province's largest cities told of similar events that seemed consistent with a pattern.

What follows are their stories.

In Terna:

"We saw the Gashi family. They were massacred."

It was on Thursday morning, the morning after NATO airstrikes began, that security forces began to shell the village of Terna, near Suva Reka in central Kosovo, said Ramada Shaqiri, 37, a carpenter. He hid in his house with his family, including his wife and two children. They heard an explosion and gunfire nearby but assumed it was part of the general assault on the village.

As the barrage eased, his wife ran next door, he said. When she entered the basement of the Gashi family compound, she found the first of 37 bodies, including the 67-year-old family patriarch, Myslym Gashi. Ramada Shaqiri, who ran over to answer his wife's calls, said it appeared that security forces had tossed a grenade into the midst of the family and then opened up with automatic weapons. He said some bodies also bore knife marks on their faces, as if they had been slashed posthumously.

"We saw the bodies with our own eyes," he said. "We have heard of many massacres. But we saw the Gashi family. They were massacred."

Shaqiri said he and his wife and children fled to the neighboring village of Leshan for shelter before they too were rounded up and taken to the elementary school, where they were forced to shout "Long live Serbia!" and give the Serbian three-finger victory sign.

During the day, Shaqiri was separated from his wife and daughter. Tonight, he sat by the side of the road in Kukes waiting for her with his two brothers and a sister-in-law. Their possessions had been reduced to a single bag of clothes and a plastic bag with some bread and Coca-Cola.

"One day we will go back to Kosovo," he said. "That's our land."

In Celin:

"This is what happened."

At 4 a.m. that same day, Celin, a town of 2,500 in southern Kosovo, was surrounded by 12 Yugoslav army tanks. Fifteen minutes later, the shelling began.

Masir Rexhepi, 43, a professor of mathematics, said that he and others fled their red brick houses to the hills. With him were distant relatives Valoni Rexhepi, 17, and Admir Rexhepi, 15. Soldiers had entered the home of the two boys and told five occupants, all men, to remain in the house. The boys eluded them.

At 5:30 p.m., Masir and the boys sneaked back to their homes. Masir said he was gathering valuables when he heard the boys screaming. The bodies of their father, Naim Rexhepi, 37; his brother, Dirgut Rexhepi, 40; and Isamedi Rexhepi lay in the courtyard with two other men who had sought shelter at the house. All had been shot, Masir said.

In another farmyard, Masir said, he and the boys found 13 bodies that had been piled together and burned. He said he was able to identify only five of the corpses, brothers also named Rexhepi: Shani, Naisim, Njazi, Dever and Teki. One of the bodies was that of a young teenager, he said.

Masir and the boys returned to the hills. By Sunday, 5,000 people from villages in the area had gathered there. As security forces surrounded them, the villagers took a woman's white handkerchief and attached it to a stick. A man stood up and waved it.

The troops gathered the refugees, separating the men from the women. They were walked in two columns, men holding their hands behind their heads, for five miles, Masir said. They were then loaded onto trucks and driven within two miles of the border, where they were ordered to walk the rest of the way.

The march was a trail of horror, he said. A 22-year-old, Ayim Ramdani, suspected of being a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has fought a yearlong insurgency to gain independence from Belgrade, was pulled aside and shot in front of his parents, Masir said.

A deaf and mute man, Vefai Rexhemi, who did not understand when a Yugoslav soldier told him to give the three-finger Serbian victory sign, was taken from a column of refugees and shot in the head in front of his wife and two children. This afternoon, his wife, Dardan, also deaf and mute, held her two children and wept tears onto the ground from the back of an open truck as a neighbor spoke of her husband's fate. Masir said others were struck with rifle butts but that he was not assaulted. He said that the troops stripped men, but not women, of identity cards and burned them on the road.

Masir said those were the only two killings he witnessed on the march to Albania, but he said that other men who started in the long column were missing when the others reached Albania. No one knows what became of them. Masir rode south into Albania today in the back of an open truck loaded with others. Lighting a cigarette, he recounted the events of the last week.

As he spoke, other men from Celin said: "That is what happened."

In Pec:

"Choose which one you want to kill you."

At noon on Saturday, Shaqir Zhushi stood in a long line with 11 relatives and thousands of other ethnic Albanians, waiting to pass a checkpoint established by troops on the Ura e Zallit bridge at the edge of the Kapeshnica neighborhood in the western Kosovo city of Pec. After a long night of shelling by government forces, all the residents had been ordered that morning to abandon their homes and never return.

They stood two abreast in the line. As each person reached the checkpoint, Zhushi said, soldiers examined their documents and searched for money and jewelry. In the background, scores of homes were already aflame, and smoke swirled in the air.

As Zhushi, 39, neared the troops milling around the checkpoint, one of the soldiers recognized him and told him to step out of the line. It was a man named Jura, a Serb who had worked with Zhushi for 17 years on the same assembly line at a factory in Pec that made industrial batteries. They had gotten along well: "We'd exchanged greetings," Zhushi recalled.

Zhushi knew that Jura, like most Serbian men in Kosovo, had kept both a military uniform and a gun on hand. He had not seen Jura for the past eight months, when conflict between Serbs and ethnic Albanians had grown more violent.

Jura and several others separated Zhushi from his family and pushed him into a shop beneath the bridge that the military had commandeered for interrogations. There, Jura and four other men -- including three wearing ski masks -- kicked Zhushi in the legs and back with heavy boots, he said.

They accused him of having once lived several miles to the south of Pec in a town called Loda, which last year was a stronghold of the Kosovo Liberation Army and the site of several fierce clashes between the rebels and government security forces.

Jura looked straight at him and said, "Choose which one you want to kill you."

Zhushi did not know what to say at first. "I felt that it is finished for me," he recalled today. His first inclination was to say, "Do whatever you like." But he finally replied: "My brother saw when you picked me [on the bridge], and he knows you too. I'm not the person you're looking for."

The prospect of a witness evidently made Jura more cautious, and he demanded to know where Zhushi's brother had gone. "I said, 'He's gone.' And then I was released."

Afterward, he made his way to the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, joining more than 20,000 others who have fled there from Pec in the past two days. He said he had no idea what had become of his two brothers, two sisters, mother, aunt and his three sons, aged 9, 6 and 5. He hopes they arrived safely in Montenegro and that he can eventually find them.

"It's the hatred for being Albanians," he said to explain the actions of Serbs in Pec. "Because all the time they had [expected] we must be good servants. They didn't expect to be caught up in a conflict with us."

In Pec:

"Why are you trying to help him?"

When seven heavily armed men forcibly entered the home of 73-year-old Haxhi Smajlaj at 3 p.m. Saturday, all dressed in black and wearing large Orthodox Christian crosses on gold chains, their first questions were about money.

Haxhi, a farmer who shared a compound in Pec with three sons, five daughters and three other relatives, said he surrendered 200 German marks. When they asked for jewelry, his two daughters-in-law handed over all the jewelry they had received at their weddings.

After shooting at some walls, the men left the house, which is located in the Dardanija neighborhood of the city. But later in the afternoon, two others wearing dark green camouflage uniforms came to tell Haxhi and his family that they would have to leave immediately. Otherwise, said one of the men, they would be killed.

Similar orders were given to thousands of others in the neighborhood, who soon filled its narrow streets, he said. Haxhi and his family dutifully filed outside, and a neighbor -- a Serb -- noticed their distress. The neighbor complained to the troops, but they ordered him to shut up. "Why are you trying to help him?" they said. "He's an Albanian."

The last to leave the yard was Haxhi's 17-year-old son Rexhep, and one of the soldiers pulled him aside. Haxhi attempted to intervene, but he was struck in the back of the neck with a rifle butt, he said. "They took him and put him behind the house," Haxhi said. "We were forced to go away, to leave" without him.

After arriving at the Montenegrin border town of Rozaje on Sunday, Haxhi sent his daughters on ahead while he stayed behind. Asked why he was walking up and down in front of the bus station today, scanning the crowd, he said: "I am waiting for my 17-year-old son to come."

In Ferezaj:

"Leave or die."

They crossed from Kosovo into neighboring Macedonia squeezed into a truck -- 57 refugees in all, including 27 children of all ages. They came from the central Kosovo town of Ferezaj. Because of the relatives they left behind, they did not want their family name identified beyond a single letter: the "B family."

Last Thursday, Belgrade government troops entered Ferezaj and began to take up strategic positions, among them Albanian houses on high ground. Then they sought out the largest and most opulent houses in the city to convert into barracks for small units.

Soldiers, paramilitary groups and civilians broke into grocery stores and pharmacies, looted them and set them ablaze. The minority Serbian population in town always carried guns, the refugees said, even when they went out for coffee.

Meanwhile, columns of refugees from the countryside began to arrive, including relatives of the B family. "Serbs came into the villages and told us, 'Leave or die. You called for NATO to come. Let them save you,' " recounted one family member.

Neighbors began to arrive at their door as their own homes were taken over by troops. At night, explosions from NATO bombing echoed in the town. The families cowered in the basement.

"We had prepared," said the leader of the group, a young burly man wearing a black leather jacket. "We had bread. That's all we ate for three days. The electricity was out. We knew nothing about the outside world except for the bombs."

On Sunday, peering out an upstairs window, they saw soldiers seizing a house down the street. It was time to run. Carrying only some clothes for the children, they climbed into a covered two-ton Mercedes Benz truck and drove away. No one at roadblocks stopped them.

"I only think they wanted us to leave, or it was God's help," said the young man.

In Elezhan:

"I didn't even think about the shoes."

Chahir Gahi's last meal in Elezhan, a village in southern Kosovo, was a plate of beans he was sharing last Friday with seven neighbors. It ended when the front door was beaten down with rifle butts.

Yugoslav soldiers held AK-47 rifles at the necks of the diners. "They told us, 'You want a Kosovo state, now see what you get,' " said Gahi, a lanky 55-year-old former cement factory worker.

,-2 At homes in Kosovo, it is the custom to leave one's shoes at the door; Gahi and his friends were given no time to put theirs on. "I didn't even think about the shoes. We just got up and left," he said.

His brother, Cefet, was with him. Cefet had been driven from another village; soldiers had pointed guns at his belly and told him to go to Kacanik, but he refused, having heard troops were occupying the town. The brothers' wives were already in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia.

"They left two weeks ago. They said there would be trouble once NATO began to bomb. I thought it was silly. I didn't want to abandon the house," said Cefet.

"We walked toward the mountains," he said. "Houses on the way were on fire. It should have taken us perhaps an hour and a half, but it took us eight hours to reach the border. We were hiding from the Serbs and moved slowly."

Chahir and Cefet are now living in an old neighborhood of winding alleys and Turkish balconies in Skopje. Eleven refugees are sheltered in the house among the 11 permanent inhabitants.

Gahi said he would return to Elexhan, although he is certain his house has been burned to the ground. "I only regret that I had no time to untie the cows to let them graze," he said.

In Pristina:

"It was a sign that no one was safe."

A week ago today, Jasmin Jaha, a relief worker with the International Rescue Committee, was drinking coffee at the Cafe Koha in Pristina, Kosovo's capital. It was a peaceful morning, several days before NATO bombs fell on Yugoslavia. Then someone threw a grenade into the bar.

The blast threw Jaha off his stool and shattered his legs. A second grenade landed, but a friend grabbed it and tossed into the street. It was the beginning of a day of terror for Pristina -- and a long period of pain for Jaha.

Earlier in the day, Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas killed four Serbian policeman in the town. Retaliation followed, Albanians believe, in the form of the cafe bombing, arson at a restaurant and shootings of several civilians that night.

Jaha was rushed to a hospital to have his leg set. He rejected surgery to place two pins in his left leg, because he feared a long convalescence. "I felt things here would get worse, so I didn't want to be confined to a hospital," he said.

Three days later, the NATO bombing began, and he and other Albanians hid in their homes for fear of Serbian reprisals. Three days later, he fled with friends south to Macedonia.

"I have to lie on my back," he said Sunday from the back seat of a car after crossing the border. "But I would have crawled out to escape."

He said that Pristina began to burn not long after the first NATO bombs fell. A popular cafe called Tiffany's was burned along with shops along the main commercial street. Word of the slaying of a prominent human rights lawyer and his two sons shook Jaha and some acquaintances. "It was a sign that no one was safe," he said.

Finally, on Sunday, Yugoslav soldiers started going door-to-door on his street. Jaha heard gunshots, but he did not know exactly what was happening. Friends quickly organized a convoy.

The exit was harrowing, as it was for many Kosovars fleeing to Macedonia. Checkpoints dotted the road south from Pristina, and soldiers demanded money in exchange for safe passage. At the first checkpoint, the lead driver was pulled from his car, punched in the side of the head and put into a van. Soldiers extracted the first of several bribes that would reach a total of about $700 by the time the frontier came into view.

"We had money, so we could leave. People without money -- I don't know what they can do," said Jaha. He winced as he spoke, his face wounded in the grenade attack on the cafe. He did not sound hopeful, even if NATO were to send ground troops to Kosovo.

"The invasion is too late if it's not coming today," he said.