Both Sides Lose Symbol of Trust in Kosovo

His domain was sacred. So when Serbian troops and tanks blasted through the streets here last week, more than 1,000 terrified ethnic Albanians took refuge in the tekke, trusting that the legendary Baba Sheh Muhedin Shehu’s 4-century-old house of worship was safe.

Mystical leader of the dominant local Muslim sect, the Baba, 76, possessed reputed healing powers and a stature that transcended his following. He was one of the few people respected by both separatist-minded Albanians and the tiny Serbian minority that runs this town in Kosovo province.

“They believed he was untouchable,” said Nekip Shehu, a distant relative.

But after five days of fighting between government forces and separatist guerrillas, the tekke was nearly deserted and the Baba was dead. It seems evident from a witness’ account that Serbian combatants violated the holy compound and shot him in the back.

In Kosovo’s 5-month-old conflict, the battle of Orahovac was doubly significant. It was a new display of brutality by Serbian police and Yugoslav army troops against civilians. And it launched a string of setbacks for the rebels, who failed on their first try to seize an urban center and who on Tuesday abandoned their nearby stronghold, Malisevo, without a fight.

The cleric’s execution-style slaying, one of eight such Albanian deaths related by witnesses, added a poignant element of tragedy: It shattered what little trust had existed between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in the largest town hit by the fighting so far, making both sides doubtful that the place can ever recover.

A week after the rebel retreat, Orahovac is eerily quiet. Its streets, rising gently up a hillside, are nearly deserted except for the police. A big majority of the town’s tile-roofed buildings are standing, but the scattered pockets of destruction include a neighborhood of about 30 burned-out homes near the police station.

Windows are broken everywhere and looting appears to have been widespread, although some goods remain on store shelves. Police on duty at one checkpoint lounge under beach umbrellas and sip canned cola lifted from an abandoned Albanian-owned shop.

The dominant sound is the screechy megaphone of a Serbian functionary who drives around saying: “The town is free. Come out of your homes. There is no danger to anyone.”

But dozens of Albanians interviewed in their homes said they are too traumatized to venture beyond the city block they live on. And those who fled during the fighting to a temporary shelter several miles from here said they are reluctant to go home. An estimated 15,000 of the town’s 22,000 inhabitants are gone.

“There is no one in authority we can trust, no one who can guarantee our safety,” said a 44-year-old Albanian doctor. Instead of reporting back to work at the town’s Serb-run hospital, she has gathered a plastic bag of medicines donated by relatives and is treating people on her street.

Serbs suffered less in the fighting but were equally disillusioned.

“What hurts me most is that no one among our Albanian friends warned us that this [guerrilla] attack was coming,” said Blagoje Milenkovic, a Serb whose big plastics factory here counted 360 Albanians among its 600 workers.

The Baba, say people on each side of the ethnic divide, was perhaps the only figure who could have rebuilt their trust.

Known universally by his honorific, roughly equivalent to father, the Baba settled blood feuds between Albanian families and helped the poor of both communities. His Sufi Muslim sect, Rufai Helveti, believes in mystical cures, but nonbelievers, including Serbs, turned to him to treat anything from depression to snakebites.

“He was a respected citizen,” said Zoran Grkovic, Serbian president of the Orahovac town council. “He was not a militant. He always said he didn’t want war.”

The Baba shied away from the conflict--mindful, his relatives said, of the nine years he spent imprisoned by the former Yugoslav federation’s Communist regime for his Albanian nationalist beliefs.

But townspeople said he quietly blessed an agreement a month ago by Serbian and Albanian civic leaders to urge the Serbian police and the Kosovo Liberation Army not to fight over Orahovac, which was prospering from its vineyards and winery.

People here had good reason to worry. Most of the 400 people killed in the conflict have been civilians. As in Kosovo as a whole, which has 2 million people, 90% of the population here is ethnic Albanian. Most of the people sympathize with the rebel army’s demand for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, the dominant republic of the rump Yugoslavia.

The leaders’ effort was ignored, and each side now accuses the other’s army of starting the battle.

Grkovic, the town council leader, said that 1,000 guerrillas marched into Orahovac and its surrounding villages July 17, seized Serbian civilians and announced they were taking over. Ethnic Albanian townspeople said that government agents posing as rebels started the action by shooting at Serbian targets, provoking a retaliation against Albanian civilians that in turn drew in 150 rebels to protect them.

In any event, rebel leaders in the heat of battle proclaimed an intent to capture Orahovac, but they were overwhelmed by government forces.

The Serbs fired into neighborhoods with a ferocity aimed at terrorizing people as well as killing them, many residents said. Albanians suffered 48 of the 52 civilian deaths listed so far; the toll is rising as families venture out and search the ruins of their homes.

News of executions had an even more chilling effect on those who survived.

One fit a pattern of Serbian killing in previous Kosovo encounters. On July 20, three Serbian police officers wearing gray scarves showed up in the yard of a home where 15 men were hiding in a basement with dozens of women and children. Sami Ramaj, 23, said the men agreed, to save the others, to walk out one by one and surrender. They announced through the door that they were unarmed.

Ramaj was the ninth to leave. As he walked into the yard, he recalled in an interview, he and the man in front of him saw the police shoot dead the other seven, who were standing in a row with their hands raised.

The Baba was slain the next day, 24 hours after a harrowing experience that undermined his mystique.

As the shelling moved closer to his tekke and destroyed part of an outer wall, he told the smoke-choked followers packed in the compound that, despite their faith, he could not guarantee their safety. Two people inside were already dead. His son arranged a brief cease-fire that allowed the rest to walk out unharmed.

Left alone in the eight-building compound with his own family and the Baba, Nekip Shehu, the cleric’s relative, heard the sound of windows breaking and intruders calling in Serbian: “Oh Baba Sheh! Oh Baba Sheh!”

Shehu stayed hidden in his home about 40 feet away and did not look out. In an interview, he recalled the following exchange:

“You don’t have to break anything,” the Baba told the intruders. “I have the keys. Whatever interests you, I will show you.”

“Is there anyone hiding in there with you?” asked one Serbian voice.

“No, no one.”

Next Shehu heard several shots. An hour later, another relative found the Baba’s body face down on the bloodied flagstone pavement outside his doorway. Family members, who last Friday buried him in the tekke beside the tombs of his 15 predecessors, said the Baba had at least two bullet wounds in the back.

One sign of the town’s distrustful divide is the story being spread this week by Serbian authorities that the rebels shot the cleric for refusing to back their cause openly.

Told what the Baba’s relative had overheard, the town council leader admitted having no evidence for his own claim. Then he said he was puzzled by the slaying.

“I cannot imagine that anyone who didn’t know what he meant to the community could have shot him that way,” Grkovic said. “I knew him personally. His death is a huge loss. Maybe he could have helped us overcome our divisions.”