April 17, 1999
IN KOSOVO
Empty Towns, Burned Homes and Shops
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
ROSEVAC -- The evidence of ethnic purging here in Kosovo is written upon the
doorposts of their houses and
upon their gates.
On the streets of this quiet,
modest city in southern Kosovo,
many doors and storefronts bear
a spray-painted Christian cross
with a Cyrillic "C" in each quadrant -- the "S" of roman script --
a widely understood sign that the
owners and occupants are Serbs.
The four letters stand for an
ancient Serb slogan: "Samo
Sloga Srbina Spasava" -- only
unity will save the Serbs. Out here
it is also a mark to insure that
when Yugoslav security forces
and paramilitaries sweep
through in search of Albanians,
the angel of death will know
which homes to spare.
Hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians have been forced
from their homes in these sweeps,
either to flee abroad, or to wander
furtively within Kosovo, or sometimes to die.
The Yugoslav Army took reporters on a long bus journey
through eastern and southern
Kosovo to show them the carnage
from what the Yugoslavs said
was a NATO bomb that struck
one column of Albanian refugees.
Yugoslav authorities apparently believed that the terrible images of the bombing would overwhelm the evidence of their own
activities. But the most overpowering impression, even on a trip
controlled by an army at war,
was of an organized campaign to
evict Albanians from large parts
of Kosovo and to burn down their
businesses and homes.
Though that is the essence of
countless refugee accounts garnered and retold by Western journalists along Kosovo's borders, in Macedonia and Albania, it was
still extraordinary to see the effects on the ground inside Kosovo,
even from the windows of a bus
that only stopped when and where
the Yugoslav Army chose -- and
from whose windows no one was
allowed to film or photograph.
Yugoslav authorities have variously said that Kosovar Albanians are fleeing NATO's intensifying bombing campaign, now well
into its fourth week, or that the
damage is done by the bombs, or
by the insurgent Kosovo Liberation Army, or even by the Albanians themselves, to create provocations and propaganda.
But the scale of the "cleansing"
-- the sheer number of burned-out
houses and businesses -- was unmistakeable, even in regions of
Kosovo that traditionally have a
smaller number of Albanians. Before the purges began, the Albanians numbered about 1.8 million in
Kosovo, and the Serbs 200,000.
While NATO's leaders say they
are fighting to protect and defend
the Albanians, it seems clear that
much of the Serb campaign has
been completed, at least in areas
that the reporters were taken
through.
Along the road from Gnjilane to
Urosevac, then south to Prizren
and northwest to Djakovica, there
were many hundreds of destroyed
dwellings and looted, burned
shops. Sometimes there were only
a few such houses in a village;
sometimes the whole village was
empty, with farm animals wandering about and fields clearly untended for weeks in spring planting
season.
While the Yugoslav authorities are
asking Kosovo Albanians to return to
their homes, it is less clear where all
of them would now be expected to
live.
The Albanians tend to build their
homes in walled compounds, and
often there were signs of shelling
first, either by tanks or the Praga
anti-aircraft guns that the Serb
forces often use for close-in artillery.
The houses -- sometimes decrepit,
one-story dwellings and sometimes
grand affairs of three and four
stories, with steep roofs and satellite
dishes -- were invariably burned out,
with their walls standing, blackened
and charred, but as shells only, their
red-tile roofs collapsed and their contents, and their inhabitants, gone.
Sometimes the houses were not
burned, but their walls were crushed,
as if run over by a bulldozer or a
tank, with bathtubs poking out of the
rubble at weird angles, or shoes scattered atop the broken bricks.
Sometimes, too, the houses were
intact, but appeared empty, the
doors left wide open and some personal effects, clothes and food, scattered outside, as if the inhabitants
had left in a hurry. Along with the
eerie absence of people, given the
number of buildings in the towns,
there seemed to be an unusually
large number of stray and very
hungry dogs.
Any visible shop or restaurant
with an Albanian name or reference
-- a restaurant called Illyria, for
instance, the ancient name for the
Albanians, near Urosevac -- had
been looted or burned.
The region was by no means empty of Albanians. Groups of them
could be seen in the towns or the
fields, but they were relatively few in
number compared to the past, and
overwhelmingly elderly or female.
Almost no Albanian men of fighting
age were to be seen, at least not from
the road.
Prizren, an elegant old Turkish
town, normally crammed with car
traffic, street vendors and numerous
Albanians, was strangely quiet and
empty. Unlike Pristina, the capital,
there had been very little bomb damage. But Albanian store windows had
been broken and the contents looted;
Serbs on the street, asked what happened to their neighbors, shrugged,
or, as one man said simply, "They
left."
Prizren is also famous for the
League of Prizren, a gathering of
Albanian intellectuals in 1878 who
proposed an independent Albania
free from Turkish control. But many
Serbs feel the League inspired others
to "ethnically cleanse" Serbs from
Kosovo, and a monument to the them
in the town has now been razed to the
ground.
From Urosevac, the bus was supposed to go on a more northern route
to Prizren, through Stimlje, Dulje
and Suva Reka, towns that refugees
say have been thoroughly cleansed.
But a Yugoslav Army media minder
said that NATO's bombing and attacks by the Kosovo Liberation
Army around Dulje had made the
road unsafe, so the bus of reporters
was redirected south, through Strpce
and Brezovica, a mining town and a
ski resort town in the breathtaking
and still snowcapped Zegovac mountains, along the Lepenac River.
Even along this road, the number
of burned-out houses was impressive, and stood in such harsh contrast to the beauty of the scenery,
with grazing sheep in sunny green
mountain pastures, as to seem almost cartoonish.
In a small cafe in Strpce, at a toilet
and watering stop for the reporters,
some army officers were drinking
coffees and plum brandy. Two Serbs
drinking beer spoke amusingly and
aggressively about Serbia's defiance
of NATO bombing and demands.
Their particular anger was directed
at President Clinton and Secretary of
State Madeleine K. Albright. Asked
what they would do if NATO troops
invaded, one laughed and said:
"Keep drinking beer." He paused,
then continued: "And then I'd pick
up a rifle."
Asked about the expulsion of ethnic Albanians, he said that no such
thing had happened. Asked why the
last 10 miles of road were lined with
burned-out houses, one man said:
"No, no, no. Not true. Just write what
is true."
In Gnjilane, where a large Yugoslav Army barracks and warehouse
were destroyed early in the air campaign, the headquarters of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which had provided
the international verifiers that monitored Kosovo until just before the
war, was also trashed and burned.
The Kosovo roadside was lined
with ample evidence that the Yugoslav Army had dug itself in. There
were tanks and artillery pieces hidden deep in the woods or parked in
the garages of civilian homes, or
nestled in barns, surrounded by hay,
or stuck into hay stacks.
No large groups of Yugoslav Army
troops were evident. Apparently they
had dispersed, much of their job
done in this part of Kosovo; or they
were basing themselves farther
from the roads. Army officers drove
the streets in civilian cars, sometimes with a printed paper taped to
the windshield with the letters VJ,
for Yugoslav Army, in a triangle to
indicate their official status. Some
soldiers drove along the road
crammed into the cab of a tractor.
There were small groups of soldiers at checkpoints, walking along
the streets or sitting in cafes. They
seemed confident and generally untroubled by the NATO planes that
flashed overhead, or by the explosions that boomed and echoed
through Kosovo's hills. At every
bridge, burning piles of old tires or
sawdust created smoke intended to
confuse NATO pilots or munitions.
After nearly two days in Kosovo,
however limited and controlled the
movements of the reporters, there
was a strong sense that this was a
war between the ancient and the
modern -- between timeless ethnic
and tribal struggles, mythologies
and cruelties and the high-tech weapons and modern values of human
rights and shared sovereignty of the
Western world.
NATO has insisted that it will keep
bombing until the Serbs give up Kosovo and let the Albanians come
home. But in the tragic wreckage of
Kosovo, there was every sign that
the Serbs were prepared to stay and
fight.
Among Albanians interviewed in
the Prizren hospital or along the
Djakovica-Prizren road, itself lined
with burned-out houses, there was
little hope that they would come
home soon, if ever. They said they
were not returning home, as the Yugoslav authorities said, but being
moved farther from the border region with Albania and Macedonia
that was their home.
They had been on the move for
more than three weeks, said one of
them, Ismet Sulja, pushed by the
Yugoslav Army from Molic to Dobros and then farther inland, to Djakovica and then toward Prizren, both
to escape the bombing, as he said,
but also, perhaps, to clear the border
in case of a ground war.
Another Albanian, when asked at
one of the sites of carnage near Bistrazin about ethnic cleansing, within
the possible hearing of Serb authorities, shook his head. "I'm very
tired," he said, and turned away.
