May 4, 1999
IN KOSOVO
Fleeing Kosovars Dread Dangers of NATO Above and Serb Below
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
EC, Yugoslavia -- Silvia Buzshila, just 16, sat huddled and
shivering on the ground by the bus station in this Kosovo city,
surrounded by her family and about 35 other Albanians -- surrounded
but utterly lost.
Threatened by Serbs and bombed by NATO again Monday for the
second time in four days, presumably by NATO, Miss Buzshila had
absolutely no idea where to find safety, or even a bed for the
night in Pec. In a city of 70,000 before the Serbian rampage began,
looted Albanian shops now gape emptily and the smoke from burning
Albanian houses still rises thickly in the air, already heavy with
rage and fear.
A drive here from Belgrade, Serbia's capital, revealed an eerie,
other-worldly place, full of blood and blood oaths, of houses
licked by flame and others painted with Serbian slogans and symbols
to protect them from the fiery fate of Albanian properties.
"I'm afraid of the bombing. I'm afraid of everything," Miss
Buzshila said. "Where are we supposed to go?"
Her father, Djemail, 56, did not understand his daughter's
English, but he heard her tone, and he began to sob.
Only 18 miles from here, the Yugoslav government said, a NATO
warplane rocketed and strafed a bus and some cars at a police
checkpoint Monday, high in the soul-stirring mountains that lead to
Montenegro. NATO spokesmen said they had no information about such
an attack.
Yugoslav officials who accompanied reporters to the scene Monday
said that at least 17 people were killed and 40 wounded. The scene
was horrific in the increasingly familiar way in which frail human
bodies are ripped apart by explosive blast and steel.
A bureaucratic paper giving Zoran Mihajlovic the right to get
gasoline for his white Ford Sierra, plate DJ 173-70, from April 29
to May 3 to secure food for his restaurant, lay soaked in his blood
by his car. His Ford was holed with shrapnel, its glass burst, its
white paint burned away.
It was hard enough for reporters who arrived after the event.
They noted the smear of blood by the woman's black-strapped shoe;
the two blasted civilian cars and two police cars; the buzzing
flies; the scraps of flesh; the unexploded cluster bombs; the
meager belongings in the rice-bag suitcases of the refugees and
travelers, still crammed into the shattered bus, its faded blue
polyester curtains ragged from broken glass and shrapnel.
But Miss Buzshila and her family were there when it happened
Monday, at about 2 p.m., in a second bus behind the first, trying
to flee to Montenegro. Asked what she saw, she cupped her hands to
her face, covering her eyes and twisting her head violently away.
The Buzshila family is from Prizren, the lovely old Turkish town
deep in southern Kosovo where ethnic groups had lived peacefully
together. Four days ago, while the Serbs intensified their
expulsions of Albanians from Prizren and NATO intensified its air
campaign, a bomb fell on a house just behind theirs, and the
Buzshilas decided to flee.
It was not the Serbs so much, she said in English -- unprompted
and untranslated -- that set the family to flight. It was the bomb
that made life in Kosovo seem impossible. That she should have been
where a bomb fell again Monday seemed so utterly implausible that
even she could not take it in.
NATO denies that its bombs cause anyone to flee, but that is a
dubious notion to anyone who has had one land nearby, when it feels
as if one's head is coming off and one's stomach is so clenched it
strains a muscle.
The Serbs deny that there is any organized effort to expel
Albanians from Kosovo. That is an even more ludicrous notion to
anyone who has seen the hundreds of shelled and burned houses, the
empty villages in the Kosovo countryside, the wandering farm
animals, the starving horses and wild packs of dogs, the empty
cities and echoing streets, the looted stores and ruined mosques,
with Christian crosses spray-painted on them.
As Miss Buzshila spoke, a young Serbian man with a short beard
rushed up, also speaking English. "Don't listen to these Albanian
lies!" he shouted. "We've done nothing to these people!" He
spat. "You all write lies! Did you see that bus? That's a real
crime! You go and just write more lies while we go home and wait
for the bombs -- and for what? For nothing!"
Others gathered and began to push and shout.
Miss Buzshila retreated, cowering into her father and the other
Albanians, who pressed themselves against a low stone wall, waiting
for a bus to anywhere else.
All over Pec, houses and shops stand burned or labeled. Many are
marked with the Serbian symbol, a cross with a Cyrillic "C" -- the
Latin "S" -- in each quadrant. Some have the word "Serbia"
spray-painted on, or display the Serbian flag. One house was marked
"JUL" on its windows, the abbreviation for the Yugoslav United
Left party of President Slobodan Milosevic's wife, Mirjana
Markovic.
Many of those spared had the Serbian cross and the word Romi, in
both Latin and Cyrillic, to indicate the owner is a Gypsy, or the
words, Romska Kuca -- Gypsy house.
Decaying bodies of animals line the sides of the roads, dead
from starvation or lack of care or the crazed speed at which people
drive, as if they can outrun the airplanes or somehow cheat the
bomb aimed for the bridge. That also applies to the the buses, many
of which do contain policemen or soldiers. But some contain
ordinary people terrified for their lives.
On the road from Pristina to Pec, a huge crater suddenly
appeared Monday, still smoking and seeming to cause the reddish
clay-like earth to bubble up. But there was already the beginnings
of a muddy, dirt-path detour through the empty, burned-out villages
where cows wander and chew on wood, and others lie bloated and dead
in courtyards, unburned and unburied, left for the maggots and
flies.
At one such place, in a tiny Albanian village where the road
runs narrowly between woven branch hedge rows, there was suddenly a
checkpoint and a roadblock, and a single soldier, surprised by the
traffic, barring the way.
Perhaps what lay down that road was just another deployment of
soldiers living in small groups in abandoned houses, ready to try
to hold the ground if NATO troops should come. Or perhaps it was
another crater making even this path impassible.
But the smell of corruption there was overwhelming. Perhaps what
was down that road was the kind of atrocity that the refugees
assert, NATO decries and the Serbs deny. Under Yugoslav army
escort, dangerous enough these days in Kosovo, it was impossible to
do other than to turn around.
Nearby, a large, three-story house of white brick, set with
charm by a brook, was burning brightly, the flames cracking the
window glass and pale grey smoke moving up through the red-orange
roof tiles.
Stopping for a moment to watch the collapse of a grandiose set
of dreams, the army escort said: "Don't assume. I think it is just
one disappointed soul, who shut the door and said goodbye."
But from the high switchbacks that mark the road between Pec and
Podgorica, one could see miles into the green valley that spread
out below. There were at least 10 billowing pillars of new smoke,
and hundreds of houses already burned, and the big cracking sounds
of NATO planes launching new attacks from the clear spring air, far
above the human wretchedness of Kosovo.
