[ALBSA-Info] Massacres Continue

[Asti Pilika]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000129/aponline041912_000.htm

Albanians Lost in Neutral Zone

By Melissa Eddy
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, Jan. 29, 2000; 4:19 a.m. EST

DOBRASIN, Yugoslavia -- This village of 1,000 ethnic
Albanians lies
just
inside Serbia, overlooking the boundary with Kosovo.
NATO-led
peacekeepers aren't allowed to come here. Serb police
aren't supposed
to, either.
     But they do.
     Three days ago, villagers say, a dozen of them
came over the
hillside beyond the schoolhouse. Shots rang out and
the Serbs raced
away. Hours later, villagers found the bodies of Isaj
Saqipi and his
brother, Shaip, beneath their tractor, each shot
through the head.
     Under an agreement signed by NATO and Serb
generals last June, the
three-mile swath of land ringing Kosovo's boundary
just inside Serbia
is
supposed to be off limits to both Serb police and
peacekeepers who
patrol the province. But Dobrasin residents say Serb
police are
ignoring
the agreement, leaving them unprotected in a no man's
land.
     "We don't have any defense or anything," said
Adem Saqipi, 37.
"They (NATO forces) have to do something to protect
us, or we have to
abandon the village."
     The situation in the Dobrasin region today -
where about 70
percent
of the 100,000 people are ethnic Albanians - echoes
the ongoing
conflict
that in March provoked NATO to intervene in Kosovo
with a massive air
campaign. Moved by the plight of hundreds of thousands
of refugees,
NATO
bombarded Serbia for 78 days to force Yugoslav
President Slobodan
Milosevic to end his crackdown on ethnic Albanian
militants.
     Naime Saqipi remembers the pictures on TV from
Kosovo last year,
the accounts from villagers who described how Serb
police stormed
villages. The bloody bodies, shot and disfigured were
so fearful, she
said, they made her cry.
     This time the victim was her husband, killed in
the raid three
days
ago. One of his eyes had been gouged out; his hands
cut into strips.
     "I never thought I would see my own husband like
that," she
sobbed,
as her 7-year-old daughter clung to her neck.
     The family's father brought the corpses to
Kosovo's main morgue in
Pristina, fearful the Serbian authorities would not
bother to return
them, even if they conducted an autopsy.
     U.N. police won't conduct an investigation,
either, because they
have no jurisdiction over the neutral zone and no
border agreement with
Serbian authorities, U.N. police spokesman Bruce Lloy
said.
     It is not the first time the people of Dobrasin
have had troubles
with Serbia's police, who send patrols of blue armored
vehicles over
the
hillside near the schoolhouse. The police even harass
the Albanians
when
they make the simplest of trips - such as a shopping
excursion a few
miles up the road to the market town of Bujanovac, the
villagers said.
     "They have even taken people from Dobrasin off
the bus and thrown
them in the river and left them there for hours in
freezing
temperatures," said Adem Saqipi, a cousin of the
victims.
     State-run Serbian media, for its part, has
reported several
explosions and armed attacks in the border area around
Dobrasin,
located
170 miles southeast of Belgrade. They attributed the
attacks to "ethnic
Albanian bandits and terrorists."
     Stojan Arsic, the Serb mayor of Bujanovac, said
the incidents are
the work of "Albanian terrorists (who) cross over and
attempt to
provoke
incidents here."
     NATO-led peacekeepers say they know about the
attacks, but won't
do
anything about them.
     "Our mandate ends at the boundary - beyond which
Belgrade must
bear
the responsibility for the security of its citizens,"
said British
Warrant Officer Mark Cox, a spokesman for the
peacekeepers in Pristina.
"We hope that they are actively ensuring the security
that their
citizens deserve, also regardless of their ethnicity."
     The sentiments don't comfort people in Dobrasin,
who remain
trapped
by lines on the map. Panicked people fearing for their
safety already
have fled to Kosovo or Bujanovac, to stay with family
there.
     "We don't know what to do," said a young man from
Dobrasin, who
gave his name only as Isa, for fear of retaliation.
"We can't get
anything from this side (Serbia) and we can't get
anything from the
other (Kosovo)."

© Copyright 2000 The Associated Press

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