On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin. Marie Colvin
about home. The uniforms are from Switzerland, Germany and America – all bought by the KLA recruits on their way to war. One man wears a black jacket that says ‘Let’s go!’ on the sleeve. Most have good boots but some set off to battle in black rubber wellingtons.
Those returning from patrol collapse onto iron bunk beds still in their clothes. The beds are warm from those who have left to replace them.
It is a barracks with no comfort. The windows have been blown out by shellfire. Off-duty soldiers cook on wood-burning stoves, heating up big pots of stew from tins left behind by the Serbs. There is no electricity. There is a generator but the base commander thinks it makes too much noise so it goes unused. At night those who cannot sleep stand in the halls lit by a fire and talk of home – never of war.
Coffee, cigarettes and sometimes bread arrive by donkey from Albania. Soldiers cluster around to greet them. Days are spent cleaning out the barracks. A sodden pile of detritus from Serbs is in the courtyard – fatigues, sweaters, playing cards, empty soft-drinks bottles and letters. Soldiers amuse themselves by looking through photographs of Serbs in uniforms with their girlfriends.
Last week they passed around one letter that horrified even these people who are used to news of Serbian atrocities. It was written by a Serbian doctor, Bojan Mihailovic, to his son at the front. It closed by saying: ‘When you come back home, can you bring me the body of one dead Albanian so that I can cut its neck.’ The letter went on to say love from ‘Jasna, mother Anka and grandmother Milica’.
From the front line overlooking Batusa yesterday, a landscape that would under normal circumstances be a lovely valley of red roofs, farmhouses and green fields instead looked empty and dangerous. We could see through binoculars that Djakovica, in the distance, had been burnt and shelled. Only Serbs were left.
All the ethnic Albanians fled or were bused out. All the villages I have walked through are empty. Many of the men with me know these villages. There is almost nothing left behind in them. Whatever was not stolen has been smashed or broken.
On two days last week the Serbs fired shells that emitted white smoke. It seemed to be some kind of chemical. Those who breathed it suffer red eyes, an inability to breathe, small pupils and disorientation. Doctors do not know what it is. A few gas masks have now arrived.
The spirit of the men here is extraordinary. Many are young and have no experience. Most have families in Kosovo and are constantly worried about mothers, fathers, children, sisters and brothers.
There is Burim, 19, an architectural student, who after being expelled from Kosovo by the Serbs joined the KLA as soon as he crossed the border.
Angel left his restaurant in Sweden and told his mother he was going to find a wife in Albania. ‘I am not a soldier and I have no experience, but I have come to Kosovo with all my heart,’ he said.
Pren left his friends and family in Zurich without a word because he feared they would try to stop him.
All are very young. It is somehow more heartbreaking that some of these men will die with the end of Serbian occupation in sight.
Massacre in a spring meadow: war in Europe
2 May 1999
In a war of numerous atrocities Marie Colvin talks to over 100 witnesses of the most horrifying slaughter Kosovo has endured.
Seven-year-old Egzon Zyberi interrupted adult conversations late last week with a childish monotone. ‘Long live Milosevic!’ he chanted. ‘Kosovo is Serbian!’
The little boy in orange trousers seemed to want an explanation, his brown eyes darting about for a reaction.
They were strange words to hear from a young Kosovan refugee but everyone around him knew what had happened.
They were what Serbs in uniforms and black masks had made Egzon, his brothers and cousins shout as the children watched their fathers and grandfather being dragged away to a killing field at the village of Meja in southwestern Kosovo on Tuesday morning.
‘I didn’t feel well to say this,’ Egzon muttered to a translator, when asked what had happened at Meja.
Egzon’s 40-year-old father, Dani, his 30-year-old uncle, Skandar, and his 65-year-old grandfather, Burim, were all pulled out of a refugee convoy by the Serbs. Arbur Hajosaj, a 16-year-old boy they had picked up on the road with his grandmother, was also taken.
They appear to have been some of the many victims of what is emerging as the worst Serbian atrocity of the war in Kosovo.
The women and children last saw them being escorted into a field in the centre of Meja where lines of men already sat in the open under the barrels of what they described as hundreds of Serbian gunmen. Then the Serbian forces on a narrow road shouted at the family to move, move, move. There was no chance to say goodbye.
None of the women knew how to drive a tractor so a 12-year-old neighbour jumped into the seat. ‘He kept bumping into the other tractors,’ said Egzon, perking up at something he could talk about. ‘He didn’t even know how to drive.’
Egzon and what remains of the Zyberi family now live in a tent in a muddy field outside the city of Kukes in northern Albania. Snow-capped peaks tower over them. Their tent shelters Egzon’s mother, grandmother and two aunts, his three small brothers and his two little cousins, one only two months old.
In a corner, weeping silently, is Fawze Hajosaj, the elderly woman who lost her grandson to the Serbs. The Zyberi family does not know her; but she has nobody else so they have taken her in.
The Zyberis are far from alone in their affliction. They are in a camp, run by Médecins sans Frontières which shelters most of the families who arrived last week from the latest wave of Serbian ethnic cleansing around the city of Djakovica.
Women wash clothes in brightly coloured plastic basins, children play in the dirt, a few old men gather in little clusters. But in row after row of dark green tents there are no fathers. Family after family tells the same story and it always ends with Meja.
Yesterday the Zyberi women were still hoping their men had somehow escaped the Serbs. They had not been told that other families who passed through Meja after them had seen a pile of bodies in the field in the centre of the village. ‘There has certainly been a mass killing,’ confirmed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Estimates of the total dead ranged yesterday from 200 to more than 1,000. Whichever proves correct, the Serbian forces are now killing on a scale that matches their bloodlust in the Bosnian and Croatian wars. In Bosnia, they reached a peak of savagery shortly before their strategic position began to deteriorate.
The trigger that turned Meja into a killing field may have been the assassination there of a senior Serbian officer and several of his bodyguards by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) about 10 days ago. Shortly afterwards, a renewed wave of ethnic cleansing began in the area.
The Zyberi family had already been ‘cleansed’ once from its farmland around a remote village called Molic.
A month ago, under pressure from the Serbs, Nushe Zyberi, the grandmother and matriarch of the family, took her husband, her two sons and their families to live with her sister’s family in the village of Dobros. They hoped to sit out the Serbian offensive there and return to their farm instead of ending up homeless in Albania or Macedonia.
There was no work and little food. The only shops open in nearby Djakovica were Serbian and the owners had started refusing to sell food – even bread and milk – to ethnic Albanians.
Last Monday night, the adults and children went to sleep as usual crowded together in blankets on the floor. Tuesday morning dawned cold and rainy. While the children slept, the adults rose early. The women started a wood fire and began baking bread.
At 6am gunfire sounded throughout the village. The children awoke, crying and frightened. Dobros had been surrounded by what seemed to the Zyberis