June 20, 1999
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
When 'Fear Ate Everything,' and There Was No Place to Hide
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
TIMLJE, Kosovo, June 18 -- The proud
talk of NATO victory seems hollow here, in
this dank little cellar where Nesibe Gashi
has been hiding for months, with her memories and her nightmares and her grief.
Outside, there is the rumble of British
armor, but inside there is mostly silence,
broken by sobs.
Mrs. Gashi's husband is long dead and
her son, Emin, is missing, having fled to
the mountains to try to stay alive. Her
house has been looted and burned, her
animals killed, her village reduced to rubble. A sweeping, five-day orgy of rage and
psychosis by Serbian forces and her own
neighbors, she said, began the first night of
the NATO bombing campaign, March 24.
"There was fighting near here all the
time," she said, as Serbian forces struggled with the Kosovo Liberation Army,
which was always strong here near the
Jezerce mountains. "But with the bombs,
the Serbs turned on the people."
That is not a popular view in Washington
and London, but Fehmi Baftiu, the director
of the Mother Teresa charity in Stimlje
bears it out. "Before, the whole population
of Stimlje, perhaps 13,000 and 35,000 with
the villages, was here, and all the villages
were full," he said.
"The night the NATO airplanes flew,
that night they started to burn in Stimlje
and shoot with different weapons. They
went from house to house and didn't check
if anyone was inside -- they just shot and
burned."
The first night, he said, many Kosovo
Albanians fled Stimlje for the woods. The
next day, Serbs entered their homes to loot
and then burned them.
"For five days without stopping, every
night they shot weapons and burned and
beat people on the street, and people ran
until Stimlje was nearly empty," Baftiu said. "Look around: The houses that
are not burned are looted or damaged. And
it was worse in the villages."
The Serbs, moving through areas where
the insurgency was strong, emptied the
villages and brought refugees down to
Stimlje, where they were put on more than
100 buses and shipped toward Albania,
Baftiu said.
"The earth was burning, from the
ground and from the sky," he said, referring to NATO's bombs. "Fear ate everything, and it seemed there was nowhere to
hide."
As for the killing and destruction in
Stimlje itself, much was done by local
Serbs, he said. There was no local Serbian
male not mobilized and in uniform. "I
know the names and the faces," he said.
Predictable Results
As the raw stories of atrocities mount,
large and small, checked and unchecked,
they begin to become wearying, like bloodlust itself. The world knew what was happening in Kosovo, but the details first
humanize the horror, then overwhelm.
Without context, the rage of Kosovo's
minority Serbs seems entirely arbitrary;
even with the context of the long historical
conflict, it still shocks.
The hordes of journalists fresh to Kosovo, hearing the wrenching tales of refugees
and seeing their handdrawn maps, consider every burned house as newly destroyed,
when a good part of the destruction took
place last year, in the various Serbian
offensives against the insurgents that first
caused NATO to threaten bombing in October.
That confrontation brought the international verifiers of the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe to
Kosovo, and this war has now brought
some of them back.
North in Glogovac, in the Drenica region, Vaga Nielsen, a Dane, returned to see
what had happened to the town where he
had served as one of the European monitors.
After long experience in Bosnia, he said
sadly, "I knew we would be watching the
ethnic cleansing of Kosovo and then be
accomplices."
Nielsen returned with another organization he asked not be named. He was
relieved to see Glogovac. "It's bad, but not
as bad as I thought," he said.
But he said he is ashamed that the
earlier monitors' mission failed and pulled
out of Kosovo five days before the bombing
began, leaving a vacuum that let the Serbian offensive against the Kosovo Liberation
Army intensify without witnesses.
"I feel a little responsible for what happened," Nielsen said quietly. "We and
the West were accomplices. We didn't
want it to happen, but we couldn't prevent
it. And all of it," he said -- the half-measures and the withdrawal and then the
bombing -- "set off something terrible."
He's returned, he said, to do what he can
to fix what has broken.
Trying to Live Together
Most of the Serbs who are fleeing Kosovo, in a broken mirror-image of the forced
Albanian exodus, are not likely to be back,
given the tardy NATO efforts to keep them
here and to restrain the rebels' army.
Peace may prove infectious, but this is a
culture of revenge, where compromise is
viewed as weakness, said a prominent
member of Pristina's small Turkish minority.
"The brains and thoughts of Balkan people do not change so easily," he said.
"There will be new cycles of revenge.
Balkan people cannot stop themselves so
easily. And I'm afraid that the Albanians
will make themselves no better than the
Serbs."
The West "wants to bring peace here,
and we need peace," he said. "But it won't
be easy, and the West does not understand
the Balkan people very well."
He told a story of a Serbian neighbor
with whom his aunt had warred for 30
years. "But that Serb saved my aunt from
the police," he said. "Why, no one can
understand." And for 30 years, he continued, the family had wonderful relations
with another Serbian neighbor. "But that
neighbor threw my cousin out of the house
when he sought refuge."
The man paused, stirring his Turkish
coffee, as a British foot patrol strolled by.
"They may have to stay forever," he said.
"There's no logic here. There is no tradition of democracy, of compromise. The
trouble comes where you don't expect it.
The Albanians ruled the Serbs with little
justice from 1974 to 1981," he said. "They
reaped what they sowed. And now it's
changed again. But it's the ruling logic of
the Balkans."
If NATO cannot keep Serbs here and
allows Kosovo independence, he predicted
flatly, "There will be another war."
Death, but Eventually Peace
A Serbian official in Pristina pointed to a
passage in the post-World War I diaries of
the late Milos Crnjanski, an anti-Communist novelist whom Belgrade brought back
to Yugoslavia in 1965.
"What difference does it make to us to
kill three million people?" he wrote. "The
sky is the same everywhere and blue, so
blue. Death has returned, but peace will
follow. We will be free and strange."
