[ALBSA-Info] Washington Post Article on Bytyqi Brothers

[National Albanian American Council - NAAC]

National Albanian American Council
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For Your Information
Dear Friends,
We wanted to share with you the following article that appeared in today's Washington Post about the Bytyqi Brothers.  The article also talks about the Bytyqi Family Fund created by NAAC to raise money for the return of the bodies of the Bytyqi Brothers to the US and for the funeral expenses.
In adition, Florim Lajqi who interns with our office in Washington is interviewed in this article.  


War Far From -- and Close to -- Home 
Three Sons Went Back To Fight for Kosovo. Their Father Still Waits. 

By Christine Haughney
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 27, 2001; Page C01 

NEW YORK
Florim Lagqi weaves his gold Nissan through the Bronx's Albanian neighborhood around Pelham Parkway, lowers the volume on his stereo and apologizes. He knows that not everybody appreciates romantic bellows about Kosovo war heroes.
If his friends the Bytyqi brothers were here, they would pop out Lagqi's patriotic tunes and put on some thumping house or techno. The three brothers would bug him to speed faster down the main four-lane strip with elevated trains rumbling above. And they would bug him in English, not Albanian. The Bytyqi brothers insisted that American boys -- and they considered themselves American boys despite their unbridled devotion to Kosovo -- speak English.
Instead, Lagqi cruises absently through Pelham's streets while his mind churns through war memories. When he and the Bytyqi brothers left New York in 1999 to fight against the Serbs with the Kosovo Liberation Army, his college professor -- a Vietnam War veteran -- wept. It took one day of fighting for this Bronx boy who left Kosovo when he was 3 to understand.
"The first day you have artillery shells falling close to you, you see people get wounded or killed and you feel bullets ricocheting off the rocks," says the 23-year-old.
War sticks with you. He learned that at 21. Now he wonders what so many young soldiers in Afghanistan will see and how it will haunt them.
He and the Bytyqi brothers were among nearly 400 young men from New York's Albanian communities who sold their sports cars and quit their $1,000-a-week jobs as waiters to fight for their relatives in Kosovo. They bristle when people call them "ethnic Albanian rebels" and "guerrilla fighters." They rattle off accounts of ransacked homes and dismembered relatives. The Albanian American soldiers of the Atlantic Brigade fought the Serbs for six weeks until a U.S.-led coalition compelled Slobodan Milosevic to sign a peace agreement and withdraw Serbian troops from Kosovo early that summer. Then most of the Atlantic Brigade returned home to New York.
Since he got back, Lagqi has tried to move far from that first day of war. In late spring he finally stopped having nightmares in which he would be shot and cut up by Serb soldiers.
With the news of what happened to the Bytyqi brothers, Lagqi has started to dream about the war again. It is nighttime; the Serbs perch on a hill and Lagqi thinks he is supposed to be dead. But the Bytyqi brothers bound through his dreams and bring him ammunition.

The Seeds of Change
When Lagqi was young, the word "Kosovo" conjured images of summer afternoons playing hide-and-seek in corn and grain fields on visits to cousins. The trips to the province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's largest republic, were a release from the cramped high-rises and clogged streets he knew in the Bronx. In Kosovo, his cousins didn't have fences -- only rows of apple and plum trees -- to mark where their land ended and their Serb neighbors' began.
Lagqi's first brush with the Serbs came when the neighbors' children hurled snowball-size rocks at him as he passed their fields. His cousins quickly briefed him on Serbs' "savageness," telling him "they could cut people up. . . . Basically I grew up believing that they're evil."
After Milosevic, then the Yugoslavian president, revoked Kosovo's autonomy in 1989, the ethnic unrest made visits too dangerous. The teen's fascination with the region grew. He closely followed the unfolding war, watching documentaries about the conditions and hearing from his relatives about violent demonstrations and Serb abuses.
By the winter of 1999, he was obsessed with the conditions of Albanians in Kosovo. He feared that Kosovo would turn into the next Bosnia and his relatives would be subjected to the same ethnic cleansing that took place there. "I just couldn't stand here and read about it," he says. Despite his parents' fears, he signed up for the Kosovo Liberation Army. He finished his junior-year midterms at John Jay College -- he was majoring in criminal justice -- withdrew before spring break and headed to war.
Lagqi first met the Bytyqi brothers at the soldiers' send-off party in early April. Amid the more reserved soldiers, all the long hugs and farewells, the Bytyqi brothers stood out with their loud American voices and constant jokes.

Over There
Ahmet Bytyqi (Ba-TOO-chee) clings to a picture of his three brave and brazen sons at that send-off party. It was the last time he saw them. As he sits on the back porch of an Albanian friend's modest pale-blue ranch house in the Hamptons, the dark shadows under his eyes hint at his helplessness.
"Those crazy bears," he says of the Serbs through bites of a thick steak and garden-grown hot peppers. "We got stabbed in the back and we won't be stabbed again."
He, his wife, his oldest son and daughter left Kosovo in 1972 because, Bytyqi says, Serbian prejudice against Albanians prevented him from getting a job. They settled in Chicago, where he worked as a machinist. His wife then gave birth to four sons: Iler in 1973, Ylli in 1975, Agron in 1976 and Mehmet in 1978.
In 1979, the couple had to return to Kosovo to care for their ailing parents. In Kosovo, they had another son, Fatos. But within months Ahmet came back to the United States, settling in the Hamptons, to make money for his wife and now seven children in Kosovo. They became a long-distance family and would stay that way for more than 20 years.
By the early 1990s, Serb prejudice against Albanians had grown so severe that new laws prevented Albanians from working, going to school, or buying and selling property without government permission. "Verbal crimes," such as insulting Serbians' "patriotic feelings," could mean prison time. For the Bytyqi brothers, the laws meant fidgety days at home because they could not go to work or school.
In 1993, four of the six sons fled to the Hamptons to live with their father. There the brothers worked as painters and pizza makers. On nights and weekends, they shot pool and flirted with women at the nearby Charlie Brown's Bar and Grill. They played volleyball on the beach. They cleared a friend's driveway of paint trucks and shot baskets. They built up a fleet of used cars -- a Mazda, a Jaguar, a Cadillac, various Dodges and a construction van. The brothers swapped them each time they broke down.
But the troubles in Kosovo tugged at them. They spent hours flipping through TV channels searching for news about the growing abuses of Albanians. They obsessed over how shaky their mother's voice sounded when she told them that tanks had surrounded their house in Prizren. In the spring of 1999, without telling their father, three of the four brothers signed up for the Atlantic Brigade.
When he found out, Ahmet warned: "You're not going to dance in nightclubs, you're going to war!" Then he vowed to follow his sons and fight, too.
But the Atlantic Brigade wouldn't allow an entire family to fight -- too much risk they could all die. Brigade officers finally agreed to take three brothers as long as they would remain separated. Ahmet and Iler, the oldest of the four brothers in the United States, would stay behind to raise money for the family.
"Daddy, we're going to come back," Ahmet remembers his three sons saying.
By the end of the charter flight to Kosovo, the brothers had caught the attention of the other soldiers. In the cramped bathroom, Agron bleached his dark hair a brassy blond. Mehmet tied an American-flag bandanna over his dark crew cut and chatted loudly about the Hamptons. Even the quieter brother, Ylli, boasted that he would use the skills he learned as a restaurant chef to make sure that none of his fellow soldiers died hungry.
Fellow soldiers say the Bytyqi brothers approached any war task with Spartan zeal. Ylli pushed past other KLA soldiers to grab food for his brigade. Mehmet carried a roasted sheep for three hours without taking any to eat for himself.
Sometimes their bravura bordered on brashness, as if they felt they could defy death. On the front line, Agron got so charged about firing at Serbs that fellow soldiers had to pull him to the ground when he stood up before snipers. Agron often left his helmet off so he could show off his bleached hair. Mehmet refused to wear his heavy bulletproof vest.
When NATO ended its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in mid-June of '99, the brothers escorted their mother, sister and youngest brother, who had fled to an Albanian border town, back to their home in Prizren. When they called their brother in Long Island, Iler said they sounded "ecstatic" and promised to return after they had visited friends and relatives in Kosovo.

End of the Road
For nearly two weeks, Lagqi and the Bytyqi brothers celebrated. They drove around in a Volkswagen Golf the brothers borrowed from a cousin. Lagqi and Agron sped through Prizren's narrow streets while Agron boasted about Eastern Long Island's wide roads he soon would speed on.
On June 26, 1999, Lagqi met Agron and Mehmet for lunch at the family home of a fellow soldier. Dressed in American T-shirts and jeans, the brothers ate tomatoes, peppers and fresh bread and joked about how they soon would feast on lobster and steak in New York. They talked about the parade they hoped the Albanian community would hold for them when they returned and speculated on how their status as war heroes would impress women.
"See you in a couple of days," the brothers told Lagqi. They were heading to the city of Podujevo in northern Kosovo. Then they set out on what turned out to be their last drive.
The details of what happened next still plague Lagqi:
Agron and Mehmet Bytyqi picked up Ylli and several Gypsies who had protected their mother during the war. The group headed north to the Serb border, 3 1/2 hours away. At the makeshift Serb checkpoint of Merdare, officials stopped their car. The Serbs allowed the Gypsies to continue but arrested the brothers. A magistrate judge sentenced the Bytyqis to 15 days for illegally crossing the border between Serbia and Kosovo. The next day -- June 27 -- police transferred them to a prison in southern Serbia. Four days before the end of their sentence, a police inspector told the warden to release them into his custody. The brothers were not seen again.
On July 18, 1999, Lagqi showed up at the Grand Hotel in Pristina to meet the brothers and return with them to New York. "We made an agreement. If we're going to leave, we're going to leave together," Lagqi says.
He heard the rumors that Serb police had kidnapped the brothers and held them in prison. But like his fellow soldiers, Lagqi predicted that as Americans they would return home safely. He waitedtwo weeks for their return, then flew home with 15 fellow soldiers and promises from KLA soldiers who remained to pass on any news.
It wasn't until two years later that Lagqi found out what happened. Ahmet Bytyqi picked up his phone on the morning of July 13 this year. It was a sober State Department official saying they had found his sons' decomposed bodies on the top of a mass burial pit in the Yugoslav national forest. Their executioners -- apparently Serb policemen -- had tied their hands with wire, covered their heads in black hoods and shot them at close range. The brothers were wearing civilian clothes and carried documents identifying them as American citizens of ethnic Albanian origin. A later call said the police beat the brothers until their bones broke, then sprayed them with machine-gun fire.

Moving On
Through the thick haze of cigarette smoke hanging over a Grand Central Terminal bar, Lagqi appears with his girlfriend. She sulks over the prospect of spending another summer evening with KLA soldiers. But Lagqi explains how these men are like his brothers. He kisses her hand, apologizes early for the looming war talk and leads her to a table.
One by one the KLA veterans join them, greeting each other with hugs and jokes. They rotate their conversation between Albanian and English -- jokes about women and jabs at their masculinity.
After a round of beer, talk turns to the fighting in Macedonia between Macedonian government forces and ethnic Albanians of the National Liberation Army. The KLA soldiers say they will help the National Liberation Army fight. They say they will leave in September.
"I'm going," Lagqi vows. He will fight again, he vows.
But when September comes, he doesn't go.
Officials at the National Liberation Army headquarters ask his brigade to hold off and see if the peace process works out. The longer he waits, the more he wonders if he will be able to fight at all. The prospect of putting his life on hold for another war grows less appealing. He wonders if he can help Albanians in other ways -- "not with a gun, using my head."
He checks on his application to George Washington University -- he'd applied long before deciding to fight and was on the waiting list. He finds out he's in. Within days of the start of classes, he registers.
Lagqi wants to get a graduate degree in international affairs. That way he can return to Kosovo someday and help improve conditions for his relatives. He muses over whether his professors will help him understand why the Serbs shot and burned some of his cousins. Maybe he will learn what could have kept him from going to a war that replays in his mind each day, why Serb police killed the Bytyqi brothers.
He, Ahmet and the KLA soldiers have waited close to four months for their bodies to be returned for burial. They have raised $8,000 out of the $25,000 it will cost; the National Albanian American Council has set up a fund to help raise money. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, everything has been put on hold. But the State Department has promised to call Ahmet when it knows the bodies are coming back. When Lagqi picks up his phone in Washington, he hears the weeping of his girlfriend calling from Lower Manhattan, where she now cleans out asbestos from nearby damaged buildings. "I tell her: 'Look, it's part of life. Try to imagine the World Trade Center out of your head. Try to get the image of bodies out of your mind.' "
He consoles her about adjusting to the stench of death.
"After a while you take your hand off your nose."

© 2001 The Washington Post Company 

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