[ALBSA-Info] New Book on Kosova

[Agron Alibali]

Newsday (New York, NY) 
January 23, 2002 Wednesday ALL EDITIONS 
PART II, Pg. B06 

Staying Behind; 
In an excerpt from his new book, Newsday foreign correspondent Matthew. McAllester takes readers into the lives of an Albanian family that chose to remain in Serb-occupied Kosovo 

 Matthew McAllester; Newsday foreign correspondent 

BODY: 
In a new book about the war in Kosovo, Newsday foreign correspondent Matthew McAllester tells the story of the Serb-Albanian conflict from inside the town of Pec - where the destruction and brutality often pitted neighbor against neighbor. In this excerpt from "Beyond the Mountains of the Damned:The War Inside Kosovo" ($24.95, New York University Press), it is late March 1999, and Yugoslav government forces are driving hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo. 

Nowhere are the expulsions more ruthlessly carried out than in Pec. Within days, Serb paramilitaries have forced nearly all of the town's roughly 80,000 Albanians from their homes. Many are robbed, beaten or even killed on the way to neighboring Montenegro or Albania. Murderous paramilitaries now control the town, acting on direct orders from President Slobodan Milosevic's government in Belgrade. After those first days, only a handful of Albanians will stay behind. Among them will be the young families of Isa and Musa Bala, brothers and local butchers. 

THERE WAS not enough food in the house and so Isa had to go shopping. It was the morning after the bombing started, March 25th, and Isa woke early as he always did and walked to the nearby bakery. The sky was clear and it was a chilly and fine morning. But the mountain air was mixed with ash and smoke. Isa met friends along the way and they told him stories of what was happening around Pec. One told Isa that a mutual friend had been killed the previous evening. The man had received a phone call and was told to come to his front gate. As he stood there in the darkness, someone shot and killed him. 

Isa hurried on to the bakery. About 30 people stood in line, panic-buying. Most were Serbs, the Albanians in the neighborhood either too frightened to come out shopping or already making the journey to the borders. There was no bread left, only rolls. 

"These rolls are too expensive for me," grumbled a Serb man who stood in front of Isa in the line. 

"Just buy them," Isa told him. "Now's not the time to worry about money." 

The line took forever and Isa left, impatient and increasingly uneasy. Nearby, some Serbs had started to break into two Albanian-owned shops. The owner of one of the stores stood there and begged them to leave his shop. 

"This is a war," one of the looters said, laughing. "So don't worry about your shop anymore." 

Isa walked across Yugoslav People's Army bridge and into the center of the town to the Albanian commercial district of Haxhi Zeka, the old part of the city where jewelry shops and bookstores squeezed in together along narrow streets. He walked around and saw most of the jewelry stores burning. Only a few stood untouched. But now Serbs were kicking in their doors and windows and stuffing watches, necklaces and rings into their pockets and into bags. Even the police were doing it. Hardly a car moved through the town. Those that did blared Serbian music from their stereos. Besides Isa, the only other Albanians were passing through the center toward the road to Montenegro. Adults carried babies and others pushed their old and sick parents in wheelbarrows. The police officers were taking money off them and then letting them go. In some Serb-owned cafes, young men sat and drank coffee, entertained by the spectacle of the Albanians' flight. Here, too, the Serbian music was loud and martial and it filled the street. 

Cheese; Isa's wife and kids wanted cheese as well as bread. He had to get to the cheese market, near the train station. So far he had just bought dishwashing detergent in a Serb-owned shop. 

"Hey, where are you going?" It was a Serb police officer. 

"The cheese market," Isa said. 

"Don't bother," the officer said. He wasn't aggressive, but Isa sensed that the police wanted all Albanians off the streets so he quickly started to walk home back over the Bistrica River. Isa saw houses with their front doors kicked in, family photographs littered on the grass of a front yard. He kept his head down and tried not to see who was burning the houses, afraid that he would be shot if the men saw him looking. As the merry arsonists started a new one, they would fire a burst of gunfire into the air to celebrate. 

In the street on the way back, Isa met a Serb woman he knew, a woman whose late husband had been Albanian. "Shame on them for what they're doing," she said. 



HE MET another Albanian man he knew wandering around, looking lost. 

"Why are you crying?" Isa asked him. 

"They killed my father and my son," the man said, stumbling on. 

He overheard two Serb women in conversation. "The Serbs are used to war," one said. "This will be easy." 

"I'm not afraid of the NATO pact bombing us," the other said. "We'll fight back and win." 

There was the smell of burning furniture, wallpaper, plastic and floorboards everywhere. Small patches of smoke drifted across the street. As Isa reached his shop on the way home, he noticed that someone had scratched the name "Ivana" onto the front wall of his store. That was the name of a 10-year-old Serb girl who lived in one of the apartments upstairs from the shop. 

He couldn't resist visiting his second home, the shop. He slipped the key into the keyhole and quietly let himself into the cool room with its smell of blood. In the back room of the store, which he usually used for storing equipment and unwanted pieces of cow, he had hidden the large slabs of beef he had expected to sell from behind the counter in the later days of March. His knife sliced through the flesh and a large chunk of meat was ready for his family in a plastic bag. Sausages still looped down from the hooks behind the counter and he pulled off a few of them and stuffed them into the bag. And then he left. 

So far, apart from the meat and the detergent, he had found nothing on his mental shopping list. He had wanted to buy something to drink for his kids, some candles in case the power went off and some dishwashing liquid, shampoo, soap. What kind of provider was he to come back empty-handed to his wife, mother and four children? And there was his brother's family to feed also. The bakery was still open across the street from his shop. He scurried over, bought some cookies for the kids and handed the Serb storeowner 60 dinars. 

"Wait, wait until I give you the change," the man told the quickly exiting Isa. 

"No, it's no problem," the butcher called over his shoulder as he strode out of the shop. 



PEC IS emptying and still we haven't left, Isa thought. Everyone else is going. 

Barely a house in the Albanian neighborhoods of Karagac, Kapesnica and Zatre was undamaged by now. In the days to come, tanks would shell and then drive down the streets of Haxhi Zeka and the Long Quarter, ramming into the shopfronts on the south side of the main street in the commercial district so that the whole row was left as a pile of rubble. The streets of Pec were already ruled by the Serb paramilitary groups - the Frenkis, Munje, the Black Hand - who had moved into Pec in the weeks and months leading up to the start of the bombing. They seemed to have it all planned, moving from house to house, street to street. Then forming people into columns and marching them out or forcing them onto buses and trucks bound for the borders. They had not come down Dushan Mugosha Street yet, though. Aside from Isa, quite a few Serbs lived on the street, so perhaps that's why it had been spared. Or perhaps it was just a matter of the paramilitaries getting to it in due course. 

Isa Bala didn't know what on earth he should do. Should he and his family get into his white Zastava pickup truck and join the exodus? He had lots of Serb neighbors and surely they would protect him from this. He was on good terms with everyone. Also, it would be hard to take his paralyzed mother, Mahie, out of the country. Several years before, his mother, now 62, had been standing on a table at home painting the ceiling when she had fallen and broken her back. Now she spent her days lying on a mattress. Taking her on a long journey without a home at the end would be hard. 

Three days before the bombing had started, he and Musa stood in the shop discussing their options. Musa still had his car at that point, a light blue Mercedes 190 - it would be stolen two weeks later - and he, too, had the option to drive over the mountains with his wife, Vjollca, and their three children and then down to Ulcinj, where Vjollca's family had fled. Musa happened to have rented an apartment in the popular vacation town for a year and so he knew they would have somewhere to stay. 

"You should go," Isa told Musa. "Go to Ulcinj." He could see that Musa was afraid even though the worst was yet to begin in Pec. 

"No, no, it's too dangerous. Look, I'll come to your house. You've got lots of Serb neighbors. They know you and they won't touch us." 

"I'm telling you," Isa said. "You'd be better going now." 

"No, we'll come to your place. You can't be sure on the roads anymore. There are bandits everywhere. We'll be round soon." 



IT WAS LATE afternoon. Musa left the shop, drove his car quickly through the back streets to his house in Kapesnica, packed up his family and by 7 that evening he and his family were at Isa's house. There was plenty of room for them. But Isa thought his younger brother was making a big mistake. 

Now, several days later, Isa was making his way back to his house and still he wondered what to do. With the start of the bombing and the paramilitaries' campaign of evicting people from their homes at gunpoint, Musa's fears had overwhelmed him. He had become silent, barely ate, smoked his favorite L&M cigarettes constantly and took the wind out of his racing thoughts with the scorching grape- liquor raki until he lost consciousness. When Isa looked at his brother's face, he saw wide, unblinking eyes and cheeks still with fear. 

Isa walked up the path to his front door and made his way inside. At the top of the pine stairway, his children stood, wearing their hats, scarves, gloves and winter coats. Halise was tucking their scarves inside their jackets, getting them ready to leave. She wanted out. She wanted to pass through the city center, meet the road to Montenegro, pass the Serb checkpoints and push on over Kula Pass into Rozaje with the few Albanians still left in town, most of whom were leaving. They would walk in the snow if no one gave them a lift. Everyone else was doing it. From Rozaje, Halise planned to head south to Ulcinj. It was still Yugoslavia but it would be safe compared to the hell of gunfire and burning houses that surrounded them. 

"No, absolutely not," her husband told her, shooing the kids back inside, telling them to take off their winter gear. "We're staying. I can't leave my mother here. Anyway, we have no enemies, so it'll be fine." 

The children were scared. "Daddy, send us to Montenegro or somewhere. They'll shoot us dead," his daughter Dardane told him. Isa's word was final. He had made his decision. 

For the Balas, this was the start of an extraordinary 11 weeks inside Serb- controlled Kosovo, a time that would end in wrenching tragedy and revenge. 

GRAPHIC: 1) Cover Photo by Julian Simmonds - Isa Bala with two of his four children: Veton, left, and Roni. 2) Photo by Julian Simmonds - Isa Bala, above, decided to remain in Pec, in part because of the difficulty of moving his invalid mother. 3) Newsday Photo/Matthew McAllester - Isa's wife, Halise, comforts Veton, one of the couple's four children. 4) - Photo by Isaac Guzman - Matthew McAllester. 5) Newsday Photo/Matthew McAllester - A resident of Pec works to repair his damaged home. In the Albanina neighborhoods of the town, nearly every house sustained dasmage. 6) Photo - book jacket "Beyond the Mountains of the Damned: The War Inside Kosovo" 



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