Kosova Crisis Center
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HORROR BY DESIGN: The Ravaging of Kosova
(NY Times)
How Yugoslav Military Planned and Mounted Kosovo's Ravaging
HORROR BY DESIGN: The Ravaging of Kosova (NY Times)
By JOHN KIFNER
Although the purge of more than one million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo since late March
seemed to be a random kaleidoscope of violence, a reconstruction of the early days of the
operation shows that it was meticulously organized from the outset. Western officials say
the plans were drawn up by the Yugoslav Army and the Interior Ministry of the Serbian
Republic, then carried out by a variety of Serbian forces acting under a single command.
It seems evident now that the operation had at least two major goals: crushing the rebel
Kosovo Liberation Army and permanently changing the ethnic balance of Kosovo by driving
out as many Albanians as possible.
By early May, the State Department says, 90 percent of all ethnic Albanians in Kosovo had
been expelled from their homes; 900,000 were driven across the province's borders and
500,000 more were displaced inside Kosovo. An additional 4,600 were reported killed -- a
number that is likely to increase as time goes on and more is known.
By expelling ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, Serbian forces aimed to restrict the
guerrillas' base of support and cover. By controlling the borders and the devastated
corridors along the major highways, the Serbs planned to isolate and then eradicate the
Kosovo Liberation Army in the forests and mountains.
The violent emptying of the Djakovica region is an example of such an operation. Hours
after the first NATO bombs fell, special police, paramilitary officers and local police
used a focused fury of violence and fear to clear the area of ethnic Albanians. In just
seven days -- March 30 to April 5 -- some 51,880 people were herded on foot from Djakovica
to a tiny remote border crossing in the mountains, according to records of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
But the Serbs did not limit their attention to suspected KLA strongholds. Another opening
assault of the drive to empty Kosovo, this one in the troubled province's capital city of
Pristina, illustrates another apparent aim of the Serb offensive: depopulation.
By expelling ethnic Albanians from Pristina and other large cities, Serb officials were
seeking to defuse a potential demographic time bomb. At the beginning of the Serb
offensives, ethnic Albanians accounted for 90 percent of Kosovo's population. Moreover,
the Albanian population was growing at a far faster rate than the Serb population.
Still, for all the signs of logic and planning behind the purge, many of the individual
episodes -- including the systematic gunning down of women and children -- appears
inexplicable in military terms, except perhaps as an indication of the unpredictability
and savagery that drove the exodus.
PART I
How Serb Forces Purged One Million Albanians
In the night of March 24, as NATO bombs began falling over Yugoslavia, Hani Hoxha said he
saw black-masked Serbs swaggering through Djakovica, shooting, cutting throats and burning
houses.
At 3:30 in the morning, about nine miles east, a tank pulled up and parked in front of
Isuf Zhenigi's farmhouse in the village of Bela Crkva. At daybreak the slaughter began
there.
That day, in Pec, 22 miles to the northwest, and Prizren, 15 miles southeast, Serbian
forces began firing wildly and burning Albanian-owned shops.
Meanwhile, in Pristina, about 44 miles to the northeast, Serbian operatives driving
military jeeps and private cars set fire to Albanian-owned cafes, clinics and the printing
presses of Kosova Sot, an independent Albanian newspaper.
These were the opening assaults in what quickly became a drive to empty the city, the
provincial and intellectual center of Kosovo.
As it began, the Serbs' purge of more than one million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo seemed
from the outside to be a random kaleidoscope of violence. But a reconstruction of the
early days of the operation -- based on interviews with scores of refugees, and with
senior officials in Washington and NATO, as well as on a computer analysis of reported
horrors from many sources -- shows that it was meticulously organized and aimed, from the
outset, at expelling huge numbers of people.
>From this reporting over the last nine weeks, it is possible to see the design behind
the roster of atrocities cited by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague in
its indictment on Thursday of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and four of his
top officials for crimes against humanity.
With specific charges including the wave of killings in Djakovica and its surrounding
villages and the forced expulsion of Albanians from Pristina, the indictment charged the
Serbian forces with a "campaign of terror" that "intentionally created an
atmosphere of fear and oppression through the use of force, threats of force and acts of
violence" in order to drive out Kosovo's majority Albanians.
The Serbs have insisted in recent months that most of the refugees fled Kosovo because of
NATO's bombing. Western officials, however, say the plans were drawn up by the Yugoslav
Army and the Interior Ministry of the Serbian Republic and carried out, under a single
command, by a variety of Serbian forces acting in concert: regular soldiers, the
blue-uniformed Special Police of the Interior Ministry and the dreaded private armies of
ultra-nationalist warlords who had achieved a reputation for blood lust and looting in
Bosnia and Croatia.
The plan was a harsh refinement of a campaign last summer by Interior Ministry forces that
failed to crush Albanian rebels. It was put into effect after a mounting campaign of
terrorism on both sides, including the ambushing of Serbian police patrols and officials
by the Albanians and several instances of the kidnapping and killing of Serbian civilians.
But in retrospect, it seems evident that the operation had at least two major goals from
its inception: crushing the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army and permanently changing the
ethnic balance of Kosovo by driving out as many Albanians as possible.
Hounding more than a million Albanians from their homes accomplished two purposes for the
Serbs.
First, it removed the guerrillas' base of support and cover, in effect, drying up the sea
in which the guerrilla fish swam.
With the Serbs controlling the borders and scorched earth along the highways, they could
isolate and mop up the Kosovo Liberation Army in the forests and mountains. Young men
viewed as potential rebel recruits were singled out and either killed or removed to an
unknown fate.
In the longer run, depopulating Kosovo defused a demographic time bomb for the Serbs:
Albanians already made up 90 percent of the population and were reproducing at a far
higher rate than the Serbs.
Although killing and torching were plentiful, the Serbs' most potent weapon was fear. The
seemingly random, flamboyantly public killings of the first few days meant that as the
campaign progressed, all it took was a handful of armed, masked Serbs to drive thousands
of people from their homes, rob them and send them off in caravans, their houses in
flames.
Independent accounts indicate that there have been mass killings of from a dozen to
roughly 100 people in more than 40 places. The State Department now puts the death toll at
4,600, a number only likely to increase as time goes on and more is known. But even that
horrifying statistic indicates a goal of depopulation rather than extermination; it is low
by comparison with the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, where in one massacre alone, at
Srebrenica, the Serbs were accused of killing 7,000 people.
To amplify the effect of the killings in Kosovo, Serbs gunned down Albanians in the
streets and in their homes, sometimes at random, sometimes from target lists. Bodies have
been mutilated, with ears cut off, eyes gouged out or a cross, a Serbian symbol, carved
into foreheads or chests.
In many places the Serbs compounded the fear with humiliation. Older men were beaten for
wearing the white conical hats of the Albanian mountains or forced to make the Serbian
Orthodox three-fingered sign. One refugee convoy passed row on row of white conical hats
set atop fence posts.
Two months into the campaign now, the terror has been devastatingly effective and
virtually unhampered by NATO's bombing campaign, judging by accounts from refugees, relief
workers and officials from international agencies, NATO and the United States Government.
By early May, 90 percent of all ethnic Albanians in Kosovo had been expelled from their
homes, the State Department says, 900,000 driven across the province's borders and 500,000
more displaced inside Kosovo. Most of those remaining have been chased into hiding in
forests and mountains, huddled together in villages penned in by snipers waiting to be
allowed to flee, or captured, their fate unknown.
More than 500 villages have been emptied and burned, the State Department said.
And there was another element to the pattern: The Serbs made every effort to insure that
those who fled abroad would not come back. Almost universally, refugees reported that they
had been not only robbed but also systematically stripped of all identity papers,
rendering them, in effect, stateless nonpersons, at least in the eyes of the Serbian
government, and making it difficult for them ever to return home. Even the license plates
of their cars -- the Serbs kept the good ones -- were methodically unscrewed at the
borders. "This is not your land -- you will never see it again," the refugees
were told. "Go to your NATO -- go to your Clinton."
Part II GJAKOVA : Emptying a City of All but Bodies
''They were burning the houses and they started to scream like a wolf - 'woo, woo' - and
they shot people in the back.'' Dr. Flori Bakalli
The Serbs began attacking Kosovo Liberation Army strongholds on March 19, but their attack
kicked into high gear on March 24, the night NATO began bombing Yugoslavia.
Djakovica was one of the Serbs' first major targets.
A look at a map explains the strategic significance of this city of 60,000, which was
populated almost entirely by Albanians. The city and its surrounding chain of villages,
stretching between Junik and Prizren, lie in the shadow of the Accursed Mountains, a
remote, rugged range running along the border between Albania and Kosovo.
The Kosovo Liberation Army maintains its camps and staging areas on the Albanian side of
the mountains. A Western military officer, sketching out a map, slashed a series of lines
down the mountains into the valleys around Djakovica, indicating rebel infiltration
routes. Clearly, he said, the Serbs want to empty the area of ethnic Albanians, fortify
and control it to block the rebels.
Those who survived it say they will never forget the focused fury of the Serbian forces
who attacked Djakovica in the hundreds hours after the first NATO bombs fell.
"A group of six men with masks came, and they took the women and children out of the
houses, and they burned the houses," said Mehdi Halilaj, a 27-year-old economist,
recalling that first night. "The first night they burned 50 or more shops and about
35 houses. They were helped by the police."
"They took 11 men and killed them, and some they cut up their bodies," he
continued, speaking in English. "They left their bodies in the street for everybody
to see, and nobody dared take them away. The city was very scared from Wednesday on."
A woman called Ardina, who asked that her family name not be used, said: "The second
night we saw their lights, cars, trucks, an armored vehicle. They started shooting like I
have never heard in my life. I thought everyone was dead."
"We were lucky," she said, speaking in English. "All the houses around us
were burned and people killed. That night killed two brothers were, a man about 40 burned
in his house and my sister-in-law with Down syndrome, they burned her in her house. She is
dead. There was a body on the street, nobody could touch that body all day long."
As in many places, the Serbs were guided to the most affluent and influential families,
the people who helped give the Albanian community its cohesion. It is not known whether
this was on instruction, or perhaps motivated by the greed, or grudges, of individual
attackers, but one effect may be to damage Albanian prospects for rebuilding their
communities.
"In this block, they burned a lot of houses," Ardina said. "They were the
best houses in town, the rich people," she said. "There was a Serb from the city
guiding them. He told them: 'Burn this house. Kill this one.' Everyone in Djakovica knows
him. They killed a large number of intellectuals, especially doctors. They shot a
prominent surgeon, Dr. Izet Hima. They went for the rich people, to steal their television
sets or whatever they see, burn their houses and kill them."
>From the first days, the speed and scale of the Serbian campaign were stunning, even
by the violent standards of Balkan wars as waves of paramilitary thugs, special policemen,
regular soldiers and armed Serbian civilians swept through region after region of Kosovo,
acting in concert.
The burning and killing in the center of Djakovica went on for three weeks beginning in
the narrow streets and small Ottoman-style houses of the Old Town, and then moved on to
the newer high-rise buildings in the more modern section. "In the beginning they were
just burning at night," Ardina said. "But after a week they were burning all day
long, starting at 9 o'clock in the morning."
"There were selected homes burned in the beginning, after that it was all the
buildings," Dr. Flori Bakalli said, in English. "There were special police,
local police, paramilitaries, and some of them civilians, armed. They were burning the
houses and they started to scream like a wolf -- 'woo, woo' -- and they shot people in the
back. Near my house there were five of them I saw myself."
Ethnic Albanians moved from house to house and apartment to apartment, fleeing and moving
in with relatives and friends, they said, to stay ahead of the advancing Serbs. In the old
town, where many of the dwellings were built close together, Albanians broke holes through
the walls so they could run from one home to another to escape if the Serbs knocked on the
door.
Everybody, children included, slept fitfully in their clothes and shoes, ready to run.
Someone had to be always awake, peering through a window or the peepholes of steel gates
to see if the Serbs were coming.
Hoxha, a dignified white-haired man, took a reporter's notebook to sketch his family's
compound and their futile attempts to elude Serbian attackers as they killed and burned
their way through the neighborhood.
"We moved from one house to another and finally to my older daughter Tringa's
house," he said. "That night I saw an old man, about 80, killed and burned and a
15-year-old boy as well. We stayed there for four nights, and the fifth night the Serbs
came."
"It was around 12 o'clock, and we didn't have any electricity, when they came, about
30 people, paramilitary, V.J. and Serbs from Djakovica who had been given uniforms and
guns," Hoxha said, using the initials by which the Yugoslav Army is known. "We
were sleeping. My son-in-law was watching through the hole in the steel gate and came and
told us to wake up."
They had parked a car sideways across the gate to block it, but the Serbs pushed through
with a heavier vehicle. Thinking that the Serbs were looking only for men of military age,
Hoxha and two other men climbed out a second-story window, dropped onto a wall and
escaped.
He spent the next seven hours hiding in the narrow space between two buildings, squeezed
between the concrete walls, listening to shouts and screams and gunshots.
In the morning he came back to the compound and found the bodies of everyone who had been
left behind, some of the bodies burned. Later he said he had learned that the Serbs had
first shot his 15-year-old daughter, Flaka, in front of her mother, then the older
daughter, Tringa. His wife pleaded with them not to kill the children, but then they
killed her. One of his granddaughters, Shihana, a spunky girl of 6, ran away and tried to
hide in a closet, but they killed her there and set fire to the closet.
After he explained all this, he put his head in his hands and cried.
Next door, in the Caka family house, 20 people were hiding in the basement, when the
Serbian forces broke in. They shot 18 people in the back of the head. A 10-year-old boy,
Dren Caka, was somehow only wounded in the left arm, and escaped by pretending to be dead,
and later gave his account to reporters at the medical tent set up at the Morini border
crossing. After the Serbs left, he said, he managed to slip out a window, but he could not
take his 2-year-old sister with him and she was burned alive when the Serbs torched the
house. It was he who witnessed the killing of Hoxha's family.
Over the course of the assault, more than 100 boys -- presumably regarded as potential
Kosovo Liberation Army recruits -- were captured, refugees said, and taken to a sports
center. No one knows what has happened to them.
In just seven days, March 30 to April 5, some 51,880 people were herded on foot, according
to records of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, from Djakovica to a tiny
remote border crossing in the mountains called Qafar-e-Prushit. The way looks like a road
on a map, but it really becomes just a muddy footpath up the steep climb, which can be
traveled only on foot because vehicles would set off the mines the Serbs had planted. They
were city people in city shoes, and they pushed the sick and elderly along with them in
wheelbarrows.
As Djakovica suffered, other Serbs were at work nearby purging a wide area they regarded
as a rebel highway.
In a rare account by a Serb, a captured soldier described to NATO interrogators how his
infantry battalion was sent without explanation to Pec.
On March 27, the soldier said, his commander gathered about 100 men outside an elementary
school and outlined their mission: expelling Albanians from their homes. The time had
come, he said, to drive the Albanians out of Serbia, according to an American official
familiar with the account.
The troops were to move through the city house by house, he said, ordering residents to
dress in a few minutes, pack one small bag and leave in the direction of Decani, a city to
the south. The soldiers looted jewelry, torched homes. At day's end, many were driving new
cars.
An artillery and armoured unit deployed to the nearby village of Ljubenic used rougher
tactics. The soldier said a friend in the unit had told him they had killed 80 men while
expelling the women, children and elderly.
In another of the region's villages, Bela Crkva (Bellacrkva in Albanian), on March 25,
soldiers and special policemen torched the homes and farm buildings and killed at least 62
people, most of them gunned down with automatic weapons in a stream bend.
"They just started shooting," Zheniqi, a survivor, said in an interview.
"The dead bodies behind me pushed me over a cliff and into the stream. I was lucky
because all the dead bodies fell on top of me."
It was one of a series of mass killings over the next few days along a seven-mile stretch
of villages in the rolling hills, including Celina, Pirane, Krush-e-Vogel (called Mala
Krusa in Serbian) and Krush-e-Mahde (Velika Krusa), where Bekim Duraku remembered, life
was so "beautiful, if someone offered to take me to the United States, I wouldn't
have gone."
On March 26, the third day of the NATO bombing, the idyllic life ended in one of the
best-documented of the mass killings, including an amateur videotape of the bodies.
Serbian forces stormed through the village shooting down people in several areas, burning
some bodies, digging a mass grave with a backhoe for others and leaving some lying in
piles on the ground.
Part III Villages: Expelling Refugees for a Relief Crisis
The violent emptying of the Djakovica region had a specific military purpose: cutting off
the Kosovo Liberation Army supply lines. The Serbs followed it up by planting more mines,
strengthening their forces along the border and mounting raids into Albania.
But in a long stretch of villages, towns and cities across Kosovo -- places either close
to the border or on main transportation routes -- there were similar, if less intensely
concentrated, outbursts of killing and burning in those same days with another aim:
driving out the majority Albanian population.
How it worked is readily discerned by comparing the refugee figures kept at the Albanian,
Macedonian and Montenegrin borders with a map of Kosovo. What the comparison shows is how
areas close to the border were cleared first, often by wild bursts of killings that served
as an example. This cleared transportation routes that facilitated the hounding out of
people from other villages, who gathered in the main town of a region, and from the
cities.
Sweeping his hands over a map in broad arcs across the major roadways, Fron Nazi, an
Albanian-American scholar heading up a major human rights study and in touch with both
refugees and the rebels, demonstrated how the Serbian strategy was apparent: first to
empty the population centers and control that scorched earth, then to isolate the rebel
fighters in the forests where they could be contained, squeezed and even starved out.
Forcing the refugees over the borders, NATO intelligence experts believe, served another
purpose: overwhelming NATO troops stationed in Macedonia with an unmanageable relief
crisis, calculating that the task of feeding, housing and caring for hundreds of thousands
of refugees would consume the alliance's energies and divert it from preparing a military
campaign.
"It was the first use of a weapon like this in modern warfare," a NATO
intelligence officer said. "It was like sending the cattle against the Indians."
The refugees accounts in their thousands bear a striking sameness as they tell of Serbian
gunmen bursting into their homes, threatening to kill if the Albanians do not give up
jewelry, of seeing relatives or neighbors killed. Almost every Albanian interviewed begins
by telling the exact time the Serbs arrived. But after days of hiding or plodding along in
refugee columns, they often could not remember what day it was.
In many accounts, it is possible to discern a division of labor among the Serbian
attackers.
Typically the Yugoslav Army, usually the Pristina Corps of the Third Army, surrounded an
area, shelling it with tanks, artillery or or Katyusha rockets. Then the police, local
Serbs who were sometimes reservists, and the paramilitaries moved in for the close-in
dirty work, going block by block, house by house, pounding on doors, demanding money, and
often shooting people on the spot.
After the door-to-door terror, the military moved in to herd the people out, either on
foot or tractor, or sometimes on trains and buses, the refugee accounts agree.
The Pristina Corps, in close conjunction with the blue-uniformed Serbian Interior Ministry
troops, cleared transit routes. As the flow of refugees accelerated, regular soldiers in
green camouflage were deployed at key intersections to control movement.
By all accounts, it was a tightly ordered, coordinated campaign, from the artillery that
shelled villages, to the masked gunmen who killed, looted and spread terror, to the
armored cars and lines of troops who chased people hiding in the woods to corral them in
larger central towns for eventual expulsion. In some cases, human rights workers
interviewing refugees say, different groups of gunmen were distinguished by different
colored armbands or headbands.
Even the wild-appearing masked irregulars -- Arkan's Tigers, the White Eagles and others
-- were under tight control, NATO experts said, and reported to the intelligence arm of
the Serbian Interior Ministry.
"They were in there with Belgrade's blessing," a NATO intelligence official
said. "What they would be allowed to do is up to the local commander."
The level of violence varied widely, depending on the whim of the local Serbian official
in charge, or even individual gunmen. An international official visited a woman of about
50 in a hospital with both of her nipples hacked off.
"All she wanted was to tell her brother in Srbica what happened," he said,
referring to a town in north-central Kosovo. "How could I tell her Srbica doesn't
exist any more."
Some people were clearly targeted, particularly men age 15 to 50, suspected or potential
rebel fighters, and those who worked for or rented space to the observer teams from the
Office of Cooperation and Security in Europe. One key political activist who was a bridge
between Kosovar factions, Fehmi Agani, was pulled off a train outside Pristina by the
Serbian police and killed. There were reports by human rights groups that doctors had been
singled out.
Evidence on the incidence of rape is less complete. President Clinton and other Western
leaders often charge that there has been organized rape. But while it is clear that there
have been rapes, accounts that are available do not resolve whether they were systematic.
Rape was not mentioned in the indictment by the war crimes tribunal.
But for all the signs of a logic behind the purge of Kosovo, many of the individual
episodes -- including the gunning down of women and children -- seem inexplicable in
military terms, except that the very unpredictability of the savagery added the powerful
fear that drove the exodus.
"That's what so terrifying -- there are no rules," said an official in close
touch with the international war crimes investigation in The Hague. "It's so random.
One set of people might be spared, and the people next door do the same thing and are all
killed. There was a man who gave the police 10 marks and they let go, and another who gave
them 250, so they thought he must have more and killed him."
By the time, three weeks into the campaign, that the Serbs came to drive the ethnic
Albanians out of the north-central city of Mitrovica, said Jacques Franquin, a United
Nations official, it was enough for them to gun down an old woman and a teen-age girl in
one neighborhood for everyone around to quietly board buses and be directed out of town
through traffic control points.
Part IV Pristina: 'In Every House They Broke the Doors'
''We waited two months, hoping something would happen.'' Luljeta Jarina
In Pristina, the knock on Bajram Kelmendi's door came at 1 o'clock in the morning of the
night NATO started bombing.
"We will kill you if you do not open in five seconds," the Serbian police
shouted, his wife, Nedima, recalled. Five uniformed policemen burst in, forced the family
to lie on the floor and demanded money, one warning, "If you are lying, I will kill
the little children."
They took away Kelmendi, a well-known human rights lawyer, and his two sons, age 30 and
16. They told the elder son, Kastriut, "Kiss your wife and two children because this
will be the last time you see them," the elder Mrs. Kelmendi said.
The family found the three bodies by the side of the road two days later.
Brutal, too, but Pristina was different.
In the Djakovica region, the Serbs had a clear military goal: to cut off the Kosovo
Liberation Army. But Pristina, like the other cities the Serbs emptied, was not a rebel
stronghold. Indeed, in previous outbursts of fighting in Kosovo, villagers often went to
stay in the city until things calmed down.
Born in the Drenica valley, the Kosovo Liberation Army was largely a rural movement and
tied in with the traditional clans, although it did begin to pick up urban sympathy with a
Serbian crackdown in March 1998.
Within the divided Kosovar society, Pristina was the base of the nonviolent leader Ibrahim
Rugova and his Democratic League of Kosovo, whose tactics won the praise of Western
leaders -- mainly because they did not cause trouble. Among the city's educated elite,
there had been suspicion and criticism of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
In Pristina, the Serbian aim appears to have been depopulation.
And from some of the targets chosen, like Kelmendi and Agani, the activist pulled from a
train and killed, it also seems clear that the Serbs set out to destroy the Albanian
political class and its institutions.
The offices of Rugova's Democratic League was burned down on March 24, and a guard was
shot and killed by the police at the newspaper Koha Ditore, whose publisher, Veton Surroi,
had been a delegate at the talks in Rambouillet, France, early this year. The next night,
the warehouse of the largest Kosovar charity, the Mother Teresa Society, was burned. On
March 28, the house of Rexhep Qosja, a prominent academic, head of the Albanian Democratic
Movement and another member of the Rambouillet delegation, was torched.
The first few days of the NATO bombing were marked in Pristina by nightly arson and bomb
attacks on Albanian homes, shops and businesses, refugees recall. Police cars raced
through the night, amid explosions and gunfire that terrified the Albanian residents.
Some people began fleeing, mostly middle-class residents who had cars.
"At first, while the telephone was working, friends were calling and telling us this
house was burning, or they arrested this guy and so on," said Ali Muriqi, 34, of the
engineering faculty at Pristina University. "They were talking about intellectuals.
Then at 6:30 in the evening, the electricity went off. Then the movement started, the
police going around with weapons." Muriqi fled Pristina by car on March 29.
On March 30, in a chilling display of force, the Serbs began systematically emptying
Pristina's neighborhoods -- Vranjevci, Tashlixhe, Dardania, Dragodan -- marching the
Albanians along streets lined with gantlets of masked gunmen draped with weaponry,
refugees said.
By the tens of thousands -- in an operation that required extensive advance logistical
preparations -- they were herded into the city's railroad station overnight. At dawn some
were packed aboard trains -- one refugee said he was among 28 people in a compartment
meant for eight -- bound for Macedonia. Others were loaded on buses and even a
refrigerator truck that normally transports sides of beef and dumped near the Albanian
border to leave the country on foot.
"I walked out into the garden, and there were three people with black masks and big
guns," said Suzana Krusniqi, collapsing in tears as she crossed the Albanian border
with her elderly parents the next day.
"In every house they broke the doors," she said, speaking in English. When we
went out, everyone was in the street walking between men with black masks and big
guns."
The forced exodus of Pristina gathered momentum in April. When the Serbs marched Ramadan
Osmani and his family from their home to the railroad station in early April, he said, it
was so crowded they had to wait 12 hours for a train to Macedonia, where they slept in a
field for six days before finding a space at the Bojane refugee camp.
Some ethnic Albanians tried to stay in Pristina. Many lived a cat-and-mouse existence
after eluding the first wave of Serbian looting and expulsions, hiding in other people's
homes or fleeing to nearby villages. Fearing discovery, they left always by back doors,
made little noise, lit candles only in rooms where heavy blankets covered the windows, and
sent old people out to buy food.
Hafiz Berisha and his family evaded being expelled from Pristina for two months, hiding in
five homes. But last Sunday, the 70-year-old retired policeman was standing in line to buy
bread when Serbian policemen walked up and pulled his cousin and a neighbor, both men
under 30, out of the line and hustled them away. Berisha said he had seen two people
gunned down in front of him and 40 bodies in a mass grave, but the sight of the helpless
men being led away was too much. "You can't even buy bread," he said.
He fled the next day.
Luljeta Jarina, 19, and her father, Ramiz, who had worked in the personnel department of a
mining company, were among those who went into hiding. Once when she ventured into the
garden behind her home out of boredom, a Serbian sniper shot at her, she recalled.
And each night, Serbian soldiers and policemen cruised the streets of the city, firing
their Kalashnikovs wildly into the air. Just this Wednesday, the Serbs rounded up 18 men,
including her father, at gunpoint. All but her father and two others were taken away, to
an unknown fate, she said.
"We waited two months, hoping something would happen," she said.
On Sunday, they found a Serb cruising the city in a bus -- a new entrepreneur driving
refugees to the border for 20 to 100 German marks apiece, about $10 to $55 -- and fled
their native land.
How Yugoslav Military Planned and Mounted Kosovo's Ravaging
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and THOM SHANKER
he purge of Kosovo this spring was led by Yugoslav army officers handpicked by President
Slobodan Milosevic to replace the internal security forces who had tried and failed the
previous summer to wipe out the Albanian rebels, NATO officials say.
Allied officials now acknowledge that they missed signs that the Yugoslav army was
preparing a much more extensive operation in Kosovo than they had attempted in 1998, one
that would move well beyond attacking Kosovo Liberation Army strongholds to cities and
towns that had no direct ties to the rebels.
The Interior Ministry's drive against the rebels last year was no half-measure. Special
policemen and soldiers drove as many as 400,000 ethnic Albanians from their homes in and
around rebel strongholds. Then they swept east to west across the province, sifting
through the hordes of refugees in search of the elusive rebel fighters.
But NATO officials say the Serbs made a tactical error in that earlier purge. They did not
seal off the borders with Albania or Montenegro, allowing the rebels to mingle with
civilians and escape. The Kosovo Liberation Army was battered, but not defeated, and NATO
officials say the Yugoslav army concluded that an even more brutal attack would be needed
to quell the rebellion.
The fighting continued sporadically into the fall, when the United States brokered a
cease-fire under which the Serbs agreed to pull back many of their troops.
That agreement did not last long. Plainclothes intelligence operatives from the Interior
Ministry filtered back into the province as the Kosovo Liberation Army renewed its
attacks. Western nations convened talks at a medieval castle in Rambouillet, France, in
hopes of forcing a permanent settlement.
NATO officials say they failed to appreciate that the Serbs were girding for war while
they talked of peace. In November, Milosevic fired the chief of staff of the Yugoslav
army, Gen. Momcilo Perisic, who had made clear his distaste for ethnic cleansing.
He was replaced with Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, a career officer who NATO officials say had
close ties to Milosevic and had served previously in Kosovo. A NATO intelligence official
said this appointment was ominous for another reason: reports that Ojdanic's daughter had
been raped by an Albanian when he was a commander at the Yugoslav army base in Prizren in
Kosovo.
Milosevic also replaced the overall commander of army forces in southern Serbia, turning
to a general whose wife is said by Western officials to be related to the Serbian leader's
wife, Mirjana Markovic.
That officer, Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, had previously commanded the main Serb army in
Kosovo.
Even more sinister was the appearance in Kosovo during the winter of the notorious
paramilitary groups that had played such a large part in the killing and purging of
Bosnia.
There were Arkan's Tigers, the private army of the indicted war criminal Zeljko
Raznjatovic, a parliamentary deputy from Kosovo. Also spotted were the White Eagles of
Vojislav Seselj, the pistol-waving law professor who is a Serbian deputy prime minister,
and a band known as Frenki's Boys, led by Franko "Frenki" Simatovic.
Such units had previously been the strong arm of Serbian ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and
Croatia. In Kosovo, according to U.S. officials, they were formally under Belgrade's
command, reporting to Serbia's intelligence agency.
The United States threatened to bomb the Serbs if they did not sign a peace deal, which
the Albanians had reluctantly accepted. In February and March, Western diplomats
monitoring the shaky cease-fire saw the Serbs building up their forces. The question was
why.
Pavkovic's predecessor as Third Army commander offered a clue early that winter, warning
that his soldiers could look forward to a "hot spring."
By this time, NATO officials say, Pavkovic and his colleagues had worked out a new plan
for attacking the Kosovo Liberation Army that took account of the lessons from the failed
attack last summer. The Yugoslav army was in charge, with the Interior Ministry taking
orders from army officers.
This time, the army planned to seal Serbia's border with Albania so rebel fighters could
not escape. A torrent of refugees unleashed by the ethnic cleansing would be pushed across
the border with Macedonia, tying down NATO troops there that were poised to enforce any
peace settlement. It was, NATO officials now say, a "hammer and anvil" plan in
which the army would drive the rebels against the closed border and crush them.
NATO officials said they had no proof that Milosevic reviewed the specifics of the
operation. But one U.S. official monitoring the situation said the military campaign
"was signed off and approved at the General Staff level, and then, obviously the
final go-ahead would have been given by President Milosevic, as head of state."
This assessment is based on the fact that as head of the Yugoslav state, Milosevic was
president of the Supreme Defense Council, with ultimate responsibility for military
operations.
At NATO headquarters, alliance diplomats signed off on a military plan of their own to
bomb the Serbs.
Both sides prepared to execute their plans in March.
The Serbs moved first. On March 19, the Yugoslav army attacked key rebel strongholds and
lines of communication on the periphery of Kosovo, saying it was defending itself against
new rebel operations. The 1,300 Western observers pulled out of Kosovo the next day.
Pavkovic made no secret of his intentions, warning publicly that his troops were poised to
take care of "internal enemy" if NATO went through with its threats to bomb.
On March 23, Serbian security forces began setting fire to villages that had never known
rebel activity and -- even more telling -- began expelling ethnic Albanians from cities,
which had never been used as bases by the rebels. NATO began bombing at nightfall. The war
was on. Within days, tens of thousands of refugees would be streaming across three
international borders.
Prishtina residents weary of war, wary of peace (CNN)
PRISHTINA, Kosova (CNN) -- As Yugoslavia and NATO finalize a plan that will end
hostilities, the people of Kosovo's capital, Pristina, are weary and full of apprehension.
Nine weeks after ethnic Albanians started flooding out of Pristina and NATO warplanes
added it to their target list, the battered city's residents yearn for peace but fear the
changes that will accompany it.
"For two months we've been living in a jail," a retiree told CNN's Jim Clancy.
"We can't go out, we have to run away, our children have to hide."
With a peace deal within sight, Yugoslav officials on Tuesday allowed international
journalists into Pristina for the first time since hostilities -- and the large-scale
expulsion of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians -- began in late March.
City scarred by bombings, looting
While the city hasn't seen the kind of wholesale destruction that occurred in
Bosnia-Herzegovina during that country's war, Clancy reports, many buildings that NATO
judged to be legitimate targets have been gutted by the alliance's bombs.
Throughout Pristina, windows in homes and shops are shattered, either by the force of
explosions or by looters. Authorities said they had arrested 800 people, mostly Serbs, in
looting incidents that targeted Serb and ethnic Albanian shops, as well as apartments.
On the streets, the impact of the exodus of tens of thousands of the city's ethnic
Albanians is clear.
Serbs worried about return of refugees
The prospect of a mass return of those residents, and the corresponding departure of
Yugoslav security forces, helps fuel residents' apprehension.
"They fled once NATO started bombing," one Pristina resident said, echoing the
official Yugoslav position that it was alliance bombs, not a policy of forced expulsions,
that led the vast majority of the province's ethnic Albanians to flee into exile.
"It should be possible for Serbs to live alongside the ethnic Albanians once again,
if the conditions are right," he said.
The simple question for many of Pristina's Serb residents is whether they should remain in
Kosovo as it returns to its previous status of having a majority ethnic Albanian
population, or whether they should move north into the Serb- dominated part of Serbia.
Many fear that if they go into Serbia proper, with its economy in ruins from years of U.N.
sanctions and weeks of NATO pounding, they will end up homeless and jobless, becoming
refugees in their own country.