Kosovo: War and Revenge 9780300237665

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Kosovo

Kosovo War and Revenge

Tim Judah

Yale University Press New Haven and London

For my parents with love and thanks

Copyright© 2000 by Tim Judah All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. Set in Stempel Garamond by Northern Phototypesetting, Bolton, Lanes. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Judah, Tim, 1962Kosovo: war and revenge I Tim Judah. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-08313-0 (hbk: alk. paper) ISBN 0-300-08354--8 (pbk: alk. paper) 1.Kosovo (Serbia)-History-Civil War, 1998- I. Title. DR2078 J83 2000 949.703-dc21

99-89404

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For permission to quote from All Things Considered on National Public Radio the author and publishers would like to thank American Radio Works. Photographic credits: by kind permission of Mrs Marina Rainey: 1; Tanjug Photo: 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 16, 17, 24, 26, 28, 32, 40, 41; Tomislav Peternek: 5, 7, 10, 19, 22; Author's collection: 9, 11, 13, 36; Seamus Murphy: 12, 20, 23, 37, 38, 39, 42; UNCHR: 14 (F. Del Mundo), 25 (U. Meissner), 27 (H.J. Davies), 29 (R. LeMoyne), 34 (R. Chalasani); PA News: 15; NATO Photo: 18, 21, 30, 31, 33, 35. Maps drawn by Jim Pavlidis

Contents Preface Author's Note Acknowledgements Introduction: Kossovo Day

Vl Xl X111 XVl

1

History: War by Other Means

2

Slobodan.Milosevic@gov. yu

33

3

Phantom state

61

4

Homeland Calling

99

5

Friends from the woods

135

6

Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore'

164

7

Agreement for Peace?

197

8

You will bomb us

227

9

We will win. Period. Full stop~

265

10

Tomorrow's Masters of Kosova

286

Appendix One: Kosovo population censuses 1948-1991 Appendix Two: UN Security Council Resolution 1244 Notes Select bibliography Index

1

313 314 322 334 337

Preface Migjen Kelmendi had been in hiding for a week. A well-known Kosovo Albanian writer and journalist, he feared that he might be marked down for execution by death squads when the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began. Then the Serbian police began clearing Pristina, the Kosovar capital. Kelmendi borrowed a baby and pretended to be part of a family. Others huddled around him so that he was less likely to be recognised. Kelmendi was used to foreign travel. But nothing in his experience had prepared him for the journey he was about to make. The police gathered a group of two to three thousand people in the street and then prodded them in the direction of the station. 'They were driving us like cattle. The children were screaming and the elderly were very slow.' They marched down Pristina 's main street, past the theatre and the Hotel Grand. 'The saddest bit was that, along the way, I saw bunches of people, Serbs. They looked at us with complete indifference. It was unimaginable. ' Then they got to the station. There they found that there were already 25-30,000 people. 'What's going on?' Kelmendi asked. People replied: 'We are waiting for the train to take us to the border, to Macedonia.' By this time it was four o'clock. Over the next few hours three babies were born and two old men died.]ust before midnight the huge crowd heard the noise of NATO planes wheeling across the night sky. 'People began to clap. They were shouting "NATO! NATO!" and saying, "They will help us. " Then we heard shooting very close to us and realised we were surrounded. Everyone fell silent immediately.' At one o'clock in the morning the train arrived. It was an ordinary passenger train with twenty carriages, each divided into cabins. At that moment, 'the animal instinct in everyone, including me, came out.' Everyone surged forward, fighting and shoving. 'The strongest got on and then got their families in

vii Preface

through the windows.' In each cabin there were thirty people and the corridors were jam packed too. There was no air and there was no water. Children were crying while parents were hunting for the ones they had lost. There were about 7-10,000 people crammed on board. After a couple of hours the train began to move and the motion sent the exhausted children to sleep. But the train kept stopping and starting. Apparently people kept pulling the emergency communication cord. So the train stopped at Kosovo Polje, close to the legendary battlefield where the Serbs fought the Turks in 1389. There, police stood on the platform while exasperated Serb railwaymen worked their way down the train with a mechanical key trying to turn off the emergency brake system. While they were in the station the police ordered everyone to get off 'There was panic. No one wanted to get out. They were frightened they would be separated.' In others words, that men would be shot. So, no one got offand after five minutes, the police said 'Stay there and be quiet!' The train lurched off into the dark again. An hour later it stopped. People got off to get water for their children. 'The police hit them in front of their families. ' Then, everyone was ordered out and told to walk down the tracks. This took them across the border into Macedonia. Immediately over the frontier, Kelmendi turned on his mobile phone. He had been far too frightened to use it while he was hiding. It rang straight away. It was his wife. She was in Montenegro. She was crying: 'You're alive, you're alive!' Of course, the Kelmendis were lucky. Tetovo, May 1999

* * * Through the night of 27-8 April I stood on the border between Kosovo and Albania at a place called M orina. The people on the first tractors were surprisingly calm, considering that, that morning, they had been ordered from their homes at gunpoint and ,then saw them being torched. This group of about 2,000 came from a cluster of villages near the western Kosovo town of

viii Preface

Djakovica. The police were angry and shouting that the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had, a few days earlier, killed five of their men. I talked to some of the people on one of the first tractortrailers. They said that they had started their journey with 37 packed on the trailer but that, at a hamlet called M eja, the police took ten men off A 15-year-old boy was then ordered to drive. They told me that, apart from small boys, he was the only male left on their trailer. This was not quite true. A middle-aged man said: 'I have a bad leg. One policeman said "Get out" and the other said "Stay in."' They left a blind man too. Then I saw an old man sitting in the corner, still cutting a fine figure in his traditional felt cap and with a curly grey moustache. 'What about him?' I asked. 'We forgot the old man,' laughed Sevdie Rexha, the young woman I was talking to. The people on the next couple of tractors said the same thing. Many of their men had been taken offat Meja and they had seen them sitting in a field under police guard. Looking across the border I could see the lights of more tractors as their engines began to grumble and they started to roll across from Kosovo. A minute later their drivers stopped and stared, uncertain what to do when they saw the dozens of aid workers, Albanian officials and television camera lights looming out of the darkness. A dog sniffed at the first one across. 'Did you see the men in the field at Meja?' I asked. The tractor was still moving. These people were in shock, their eyes red from crying. 'They killed them, they killed them,' shouted a woman as she passed. I ran to catch up. 'In a field ... in a field ... more than a hundred ... they took two from us ... They're dead! They're dead!' A hundred metres away Sevdie Rexha, the old man, the blind man, the lame man and the rest of them sat on their trailer. A drunken Albanian soldier was abusing them. 'Stop crying, stop moaning ... why did you leave your kids behind?' They still did not know what the others now arriving knew. I wondered whether I should say something. I thought not. They would find out soon enough. Everyone on the tractors now arriving had seen the bodies, but no one had actually seen the killing. Hasan Shabani, aged 73, sat on a sack waiting for his wife. They had been walking but

ix Preface

a tractor-trailer picked him up and she was hauled onto a horse-drawn cart, which then got left behind. He said he seen the men taken from the convoy at M eja lined up. 'They were punched and kicked.' Women were rushing forward, crying, trying to get their sons and husbands back, but the police and paramilitaries, some wearing masks, were firing in the air, swearing at them to get back on the convoy. 'How many years have you been married?' I asked Mr Shabani. 'Thirty-eight,' he replied, 'but that's a funny question to ask at a time like this. ' In the distance, over Mount Pastrik, there were flashes and rumbles. It could have been thunder and lightning. It could have been artillery. But it wasn't. It was NATO bombing the Serbs. For the fifth week running. Morina, May 1999

* * * On the hill near the Serbian village of Drsnik in central Kosovo I counted smoke billowing from eight houses. Or at least I thought they were houses. Some proved to be haystacks. Revenge meant that even Serbian haystacks had to burn. In the northern town of Mitrovica I sat on a wall with Meli Uka, a pretty, 22-year-old Albanian student. We sipped Coke and watched a column of fleeing Serb families packed into cars and tractor-trailers. They looked no different from the Kosovars I had seen who had been expelled from Kosovo a few weeks earlier. M eli smiled benignly and said: 'They wanted Albanians out and now this is our revenge. I am very happy about it and I never want them to come back. Now we are free.' Forty-five minutes later I saw the Serbian village of Samodreia on fire. Two Albanian brothers, Nairn and Namun Bala, were watching it burn. The Serbs had left two hours earlier. 'The KLA did it,' they said. 'Those Serbs were our neighbours. We never had any problems with them. We grew up with them, played with them and ate with them. But, when the Serbian police came and burned our houses they turned their backs and said: "Puck you!"' Namun said: 'There are 28 of us in our family. We asked the KLA not to burn the houses because we could live

x Preface

in them, but still, they went ahead and did it. ' Cars full of KLA fighters drove past, waving happily and tooting their horns in triumph. In VuCitrn Albanian families swarmed through the Serbian Orthodox priest's house. Mothers manoeuvred sofas down stairs, children roamed about with hammers smashing religious pictures while others piled food, church candles and anything else they could carry on to wheelbarrows. When they were done they moved to the church. A girl with a manic expression on her face smashed the windows. Women tugged on dark red velvet altar cloths and precious icons crashed to the floor. A man struggled to wrench the chandelier from the ceiling. Outside, two French soldiers from the Kosovo Force, KFOR, the newly arrived international peace force which has NATO at its core, looked on amiably. Up the road a Gypsy house was on fire. Albanians accuse many Gypsies of having 'collaborated' with the Serbs. At that moment the local French commander drove past. According to the sticker on his jeep, his regimental motto was 'Avec le sourire.' He said: 'Our job is to reassure the population.' I said it didn't look like he was reassuring the few remaining Serbs. He replied, sans sourire, 'The orders are to let them pillage. ' I said: 'That's mad. ' He said: 'Of course it's mad, but those are the orders. ' As everywhere else in Kosovo, Serbs in Pristina live in terror. I rented a flat and soon Mileva, the Serbian woman from next door, came over. Almost whispering she said: 'What am I going to do? Someone stuck an Albanian name on my door. It is a message that they want me out.' Pristina, June 1999

Author's Note Don't look for biases in place names. There are none. Kosovo is Kosovo, as the region is known in the English-speaking world and not the Albanian Kosova or the full and official Serbian Kosovo and Metohija (or the abbreviated Kosmet) unless in a quote. 1 The same holds for the other place names. I have used the Serbian ones because, for the moment, people outside Kosovo are still more familiar with names like Pee and Djakovica rather than Peja and Gjakova. It is also the way the names are still spelled in all but Albanian maps, and once you start using one spelling you have to try to remain consistent or you risk confusion. To repeat: the choice of spelling is not a secret signal of support for one side or another! Technically the world Kosovar should refer to any inhabitant of Kosovo, whatever their ethnic background. However, in recent years, the term has come to be used as a shorthand for Kosovo Albanians only. I have followed this practice. It is useful as a name because, unlike 'Albanians' it distinguishes between Kosovo Albanians and Albanians from Albania itself. Unless footnoted, quotations are from my own interviews or from the local or international media written down at the time, in my notebook. Throughout the former Yugoslavia the German Mark is the most widely used hard currency, hence the references to Deutschmarks. Unless there was a particular reason, I decided not to spell out the full Albanian and Serbian names of every political organisation. The Albanian name of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the KLA or U