On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin. Marie Colvin
leave their homes: ‘Go to Nato if you like them so much. Go to Albania, this is not your home, this is Serbia.’
The time had arrived at last to submit to Serbia’s systematic programme to ‘cleanse’ Kosovo of its 1.2 million ethnic Albanians. The men moved quickly. Dani and Skandar hitched their two tractors to metal carts and the families piled in. Their wives, young children, mother and father went into one cart, driven by Skandar; their mother’s sister and her family were in the second, with Dani at the wheel.
There was no time to take clothes or supplies. They grabbed some blankets to wrap the frightened children in and tacked a plastic sheet over the carts to protect them from the rain, before heading for Albania. They had only been on the road for a few minutes when the farmhouse burst into flames behind them, torched by the Serbs who were rampaging through the village.
Similar scenes were taking place in other villages around Djakovica, once a lovely city of white stone houses but now an armed Serbian encampment, and the road towards the border was becoming clogged with tractors, trailers and their human cargo. Serbian soldiers and police with tanks and armoured personnel carriers lined the route.
At Meja, a hitherto insignificant village on the route, Serbian soldiers and paramilitaries began stopping the convoy. The Zyberi family reached Meja at about 8am. They saw Serbian soldiers walking down the convoy, pulling men from tractors and beating and kicking some of them by the roadside. There was nowhere to turn off and escape.
Skandar Zyberi twice ignored Serbian demands to get off his tractor; then they hauled him off by his sleeve. Describing the scene later, his wife Sheribone, 28, wept and cuddled their two-month-old daughter, Ezuntina.
Skandar’s brother and father were ordered out of the cart at gunpoint by Serbs wearing black masks. ‘The children started crying and yelling “daddy, daddy” but the Serbs laughed,’ said Nushe, who watched in horror as her husband and two grown-up sons were led away.
‘Then they made the children say the Serbian things, terrible things. The children were so frightened.’
The last the family saw of the three men was their backs as they walked at gunpoint into the field where several hundred men were sitting surrounded by armed Serbs. With his hands clasped on his lap, Egzon apes the way they sat.
Another member of the family, Aphrodite Zyberi, 19, said the Serbs had shouted: ‘You killed seven of us; we will kill 700 of you.’ In Yugoslavia during the Second World War, the Nazis killed 100 people in retribution for every German slain by partisans.
Family after family reaching the refugee camp outside Kukes last week was interviewed separately yet described the same scene at the same place. Males aged from 16 to 60-plus had been forced from their families into the meadow at Meja. Serbs had shouted and beaten anyone who did not move quickly enough.
Xhamal Rama, a 58-year-old farmer, a neighbour of the Zyberis in Dubros, had held out for as long as he could at home; but at 9am he had also piled his wife and 10 children into a cart and had driven off on his tractor. His brother and family followed. ‘The Serbs were firing their guns and setting fire to the houses,’ he said. ‘They had masks and some had red handkerchiefs. They ordered us to leave and we could do nothing.’
Reaching Meja after the Zyberis, he found the Serbs behaving like ‘beasts’. Three of his nephews were hauled off his brother’s tractor and taken to the field, where about 250 men were being made to show the Serbian three-finger sign and shout, ‘Long live Serbia.’
Zek, 55, another farmer, who would not give his full name, had bruises on his arm and said he had been beaten by the Serbs for shouting, ‘Leave him alone’, when they took his 16-year-old nephew. Zek looked far older than his years, which may have saved his own life.
A slight, frail woman called Birami described how Serbs had arrived early on Tuesday at her village, Dalasaj, shooting and shouting that they would kill anyone who did not leave in five minutes.
Her husband, Alban, had piled their four children and their parents into his tractor-drawn cart and departed. As houses went up in flames behind them, Alban balanced Blerim, his blonde, five-year-old son, on his knee.
On reaching Meja, said Birami, they were confronted by masked Serbian paramilitaries or soldiers; she was not sure which.
Ordered off his tractor, Alban handed her Blerim and walked away into the meadow to join the other men. She could not drive and a neighbour had to take the wheel.
Another of the families caught in this terrible exodus had already been in a fleeing convoy a little more than two weeks ago but had been attacked from the sky.
‘A tractor in front of us burst into flames,’ recalled Fana, the mother of the family, who had seen too much to reveal her full name. People had been burnt in front of her eyes. Other people had jumped from their tractors off a bridge and drowned.
Nato later admitted it had mistakenly bombed the convoy but – like all the refugees – Fana and her family would not say a word against Nato. They insisted the plane must have been Serbian.
After that incident, they had camped in a ruined house in a village called Dalas. At 7am on Tuesday, they said, Dalas was surrounded by Serbs, some wearing black balaclavas, shooting in the air. The family took to the tractor again – and, again, the houses went up in flames behind them.
‘Serbs with guns and tanks stopped us at the village of Meja,’ Fana said. ‘They took my nephews and my son, he was only 16. We began to cry and scream but we could do nothing because they had guns. They were pushed to the ground and then made to walk into the field where other men were sitting.’
Her youngest son, 12-year-old Vilsan, began driving the tractor. ‘I couldn’t see for my tears,’ Vilsan said quietly as the family replayed the scene at the refugee camp.
‘They knocked my father down on the ground and beat him with their guns. But we had to drive because the Serbian soldiers said move immediately. I was afraid to look back.’
Vilsan is now the oldest male in the family. Two young women, the wives of Fana’s nephews, sat crying near him surrounded by young children. They had only the clothes they were wearing.
Several miles after Meja, the family had been stopped by other Serbian soldiers and robbed of all their money, DM700. Another family, the Salihus, had travelled from the village of Ramizi on foot after Serbs forced them to leave at 5am. They reached Meja at dusk on Tuesday.
‘We were so afraid,’ said Rucka Salihu, 23. ‘I saw dead bodies in a field in the middle of Meja. I was too frightened to look for long. I could only see that they were lying across each other on their stomachs, in this pasture near some bushes. Hundreds of them. Maybe 200.’
She crossed her hands, one over the other, to show how she saw the bodies lying. She said other men were sitting in the meadow, still alive and under Serbian guard.
Serbian soldiers pulled her uncle, Niman Salihu, 50, and a neighbour off the road into the meadow. Two soldiers then spotted Rucka’s brother, Kiytim, 18, who is small and dark and looks young for his age. ‘Two Serbian soldiers shouted to me to put down my bag and stop,’ said Kiytim. ‘The bag was full of bread. Then my sisters began weeping and surrounded me and I was so afraid I was sick.
‘One of the Serbian soldiers, the older one, shouted at me again but the other one said, “Oh, let him go, he’s too young”, and we kept walking and I was surrounded by my family and they just let me go. My sisters’ tears saved me.’
He cannot forget the sight of the meadow in Meja. ‘There were bodies in the field. A pile of bodies. I was too scared to make any accurate count. I tried not to look for long because the Serbs would notice me.’
After five minutes of walking, the Salihu family heard a burst of gunfire that went on for about 10 minutes.
The first news of the massacre at Meja came in the hours after the refugees started crossing into Albania at the Morina border post under a full moon late on Tuesday night.
Nobody expected them, as the Serbs had