Terrified Refugees Tell of Atrocities

From the morning after the first NATO airstrike last month until as recently as two days ago, Serbian forces in Kosovo have been carrying out a series of massacres against ethnic Albanians in a triangle of territory in the southern part of the province, according to refugees who say they witnessed the violence.

In one incident, 70 men reportedly were lined up next to a river and mowed down with machine guns into the water. In another, about 25 men, women and children were herded into a basement and shot and slashed to death.

These and other reports of mass murder are coming out of Kosovo along with the flood of refugees flowing into Albania. The stories cannot be independently confirmed but have been partially corroborated by the injuries of the survivors, and by a videotape smuggled out by a Kosovo man that he hid in the chassis of his tractor.

Despite such evidence, however, Yugoslav authorities have denied that they are engaged in atrocities and say that the more than 600,000 Kosovo Albanians on the move in recent days actually have been fleeing from the NATO bombardments that began March 24.

The refugees paint a different picture. They say they have been expelled against their will, usually with no warning. During their exodus from Kosovo, they say, they have been hounded, beaten and robbed.

Piecing Together Evidence of Massacres

With no international organizations and few foreign journalists in Kosovo, it is only in the last few days that it has become possible to piece together evidence of the reported massacres taking place alongside the deportations.

What follows is an account of calculated terror and mass murder that has been reported taking place against unarmed civilians in four places north and west of Prizren, the province’s second-largest city: Bellacerk, Krusa e Madhe, Negovac and Djakovo.

Salim Popaj marched with his walking stick across the border bridge at Morine on Saturday, one more figure in a wretched tide of thousands. As soon as he was approached by a reporter, the words came tumbling out. With eyes red and a voice that was breaking, he said: “Five of my sons have been killed.”

It was 8 a.m. Thursday, March 25, in Bellacerk, a small village outside Rajovac, 12 hours after the first NATO airstrike designed to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to sign a peace deal with the Kosovo Albanians.

About a dozen Serbian police arrived with tanks and gathered all of the villagers together outdoors. Then they pulled out dozens of men who looked of military age. They lined them up next to a river. About half the police opened fire with automatic rifles as the rest stood guard. Some of the bodies toppled into the river, and afterward the others were pushed in, Popaj said.

“I have seen it with my own eyes,” said Popaj, 68. “I was 20 steps away from them.” Besides his five sons, ages 44, 32, 22, 18 and 13, the dead included Popaj’s two brothers and three nephews and about 10 more-distant relatives, he said. He estimated the total number killed as more than 70.

That night, after the police had gone, the villagers took the bodies out of the river.

“We made graves,” Popaj said. “If you want, you can find them there.”

Another Bellacerk man, who gave only his first name, Janu, said he witnessed the same killings from where he was hiding in a ditch 100 yards away.

“I thank God that I am saved now and I am still alive,” he said.

Villagers Rounded Up and Then Executed

A few miles from Bellacerk and on the same day, Milaim Bellanica, 31, saw a contingent of Yugoslav police with armored cars and truck-mounted antiaircraft guns approaching his village of Krusa e Madhe and hid in a wood on the outskirts of town. According to the account Bellanica gave Saturday in Albania, he stayed concealed as the people of the town were rounded up and sent to Negovac, a small town that the Serbs were turning into a concentration center for the area’s ethnic Albanians.

During the roundup, a number of the men of the village tried to escape but were spotted by the Serbs, who then sealed off the area. In the hours that followed, they captured all of the men and summarily executed them, Bellanica said.

Unlike other refugees reporting atrocities, Bellanica has offered documentary proof: a videotape that he made of the bodies and then smuggled out of Kosovo.

Bellanica said he returned to the largely emptied town the day after the killings and discovered the corpses. His first reaction was to return to his house to collect his video camera, in order to document what he had seen. But on the way, he was spotted by a Serbian civilian and was forced to hide in his basement. On the day he returned to town, Serbs found three elderly ethnic Albanians still there and executed them. Additional killings occurred the next day.

It was not until Thursday, a week after the initial killings, that Bellanica felt confident enough to emerge from his cellar. He proceeded to the bodies and began videotaping some of them for about half an hour before he was spooked by returning police and fled.

He was able to record 12 bodies in grisly detail. All were those of young men, and most appeared to have been killed at close range by bullets through the throat or the back of the head. Some appeared to have been on their knees when killed. A few had been set on fire.

In all, Bellanica said, he counted 64 bodies--people he knew well, lifelong co-workers, classmates and neighbors. From memory, he was able to jot down a list of 27 of their names. By that time, Serbian authorities were pushing Kosovo Albanians out of the area, and Bellanica simply joined the throng. The videotape he secreted inside the chassis of his tractor.

“It was a very risky thing,” said Bellanica, who gave the tape to the British Broadcasting Corp., which broadcast the least graphic images worldwide Saturday. “But I did it for the sake of my son, my grandsons, and to let the world know what the Serbs are doing to our people.”

Serbs Systematically Shelling Villages

For the past 10 days, members of the Serbian police and army in Kosovo have been systematically shelling all the villages around Negovac and forcing the inhabitants to flee toward the hamlet, nine miles from Prizren, that normally houses about 1,000 to 2,000 people. Displaced persons have doubled up in homes, or slept in cars or out on the street, according to accounts by numerous refugees in Albania on Friday and Saturday.

At 2 a.m. Friday, Muharrem Krasniqi was lying in bed there and awoke to the sound of a plane overhead. He turned to a friend sleeping nearby to tell him about it.

“I thought it was a NATO plane,” Krasniqi said. Then came the explosion. All the windows and doors around him shattered, and the walls came down in a blinding flash.

He found himself on the floor and ran outside, only to find chaos. “They were all crying, screaming, all over the village,” he said.

Since then, traumatized and wounded people saying they were at Negovac have been filtering into Kukes in tractor-pulled wagons or on foot. Most say that they left behind between 50 and 100 dead and unburied people and that many seriously wounded were also left. The refugees say it was a low-flying Yugoslav jet that dropped three or four bombs on the crowded hamlet, although most acknowledge that they cannot be sure the bombing was not some terrible error by NATO.

“My husband was sleeping in a car. There were five of them in the car. My husband’s head was severed,” said Lumturi Krasniqi, one of dozens of wounded lying in a hospital in Kukes on Saturday. She had a wound in her foot, while at her side was her 5-year-old son, Betim, whose partially severed ear was reattached by doctors here.

A Door-to-Door Killing Mission

On Thursday night, Serbian police entered Djakovo and began going from door to door, beating and killing ethnic Albanians, according to Sklezen Byci, 31, who arrived in Albania about noon Saturday in a beat-up green Volkswagen van.

After hiding in his house overnight, Byci went to the house of his neighbors, where he had heard shooting. In the basement, he said, he discovered about 25 bodies. The people had been shot, and then their bodies were doused with gasoline and partially burned.

Another neighbor, Salik Bytyci, traveling in the same van, said he had seen the bodies too. An old man with an enormous mustache and a white felt hat of the kind worn by many Albanian peasants, he broke down as he described the scene.

“I am 78 years old, and I have lived through three wars, and I have never seen this kind of killing,” he said.

Another resident, a 45-year-old mother who asked that her name not be used, cried inconsolably as she collected high-protein biscuits at the border. She had not seen the bodies herself but had heard shooting and screaming in the night.

“I hid in the basement of my house, and I did not know if I would get out alive,” she said.

“You must stop them from killing us,” she sobbed.