As Refugees Flood Borders, Kosovo's Men Are Missing

By JOHN DANISZEWSKI

April 6, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

KUKES, Albania —

When U.N. refugee worker Laura Boldrini stood at Albania’s border with Kosovo over the weekend, she felt as though she were on another planet, “a planet of no men, only women and children.”

Like many aid workers and journalists, Boldrini has observed that the overwhelming majority of refugees streaming in from Kosovo province are female, and that those males who have made it through the gantlet of Serbian checkpoints have tended to be the old and the very young.

“There were no young men,” Boldrini said. “There were old men, but I’m talking about [there not being] men between the ages of 17 and 45.”

Along with persistent reports of summary executions and mass internments of young men inside Kosovo, the low number of ethnic Albanian men making it over the border since the exodus began last month has raised fears here.

“There’s a story happening over there that’s going to make the My Lai massacre [in South Vietnam] look like a Christmas party,” one humanitarian worker warned Monday.

Where have Kosovo’s young men gone? To hear refugees now in Albania tell it, many have been killed, often gruesomely. Others reportedly have been arrested and held in undisclosed locations, or have been forced to serve as “human shields” against strikes by NATO or by Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas.

But many here say they believe that most military-age men are hiding in the forests and mountains of Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia, either because they have joined the KLA or because they dared not accompany their families through police checkpoints for fear of being arrested or killed.

The result is that many of the exiled Kosovars, who have lost their homes and their possessions, are in a state of anxious uncertainty about their male relatives’ fate.

“I have two nephews in the KLA who are still in Kosovo, as well as two cousins. I don’t know whether they are still alive,” said Deli Sokoli, 48, from the village of Pozar.

U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials have called attention to the men’s absence and have said that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic will be held responsible for crimes committed against them.

“The vast majority of refugees crossing international borders out of Kosovo have been women and children, and we are gravely concerned by the whereabouts and fate of the missing men,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said last week.

Tales of Death and Terror

Many refugees crossing the border reported seeing or hearing of men who were slain at police checkpoints inside Kosovo because they were unable to produce a certain sum in German marks--varying from about $100 to $200.

Others told of Yugoslav forces that killed small family groups to spread terror and spur the evacuations of entire neighborhoods. Still others said they have seen or heard about the slayings of 50 to 100 men at a time, such as a reported massacre of 70 men March 25 in the southern Kosovo village of Bela Crkva, or of 64 men over three days in another, nearby village. A videotape said to show the victims there has been smuggled out by a refugee.

A new massacre involving mostly males was alleged Monday by refugee Belzat Tertini, 62, of Djakovo. Speaking to The Times in Kukes, where he was traveling on foot carrying a granddaughter on his shoulders, he said that, on Wednesday at dawn, Serbian paramilitary forces invaded a mosque during morning prayers and killed 80 people.

Tertini said he was in his basement about 50 yards from the mosque when the killing took place, that he could hear the screams of the victims, and that when the killers’ rampage ended after about 20 minutes, he emerged to witness the bodies, some of which had been decapitated.

Tertini’s account could not be verified. But separately, two other refugees in Kukes said Monday they had heard that many men had been killed in a mosque in Djakovo, a city that has been in flames for days as Yugoslav forces expel its mainly ethnic Albanian population.

Meanwhile, Bashkim Millaku, 36, a refugee from the city of Glina who reached Kukes on Monday, said he was one of a group of 500 men who had been interned, abused and used as “human shields” by the Yugoslav forces last week in a town called Kraljan, west of Pristina, the Kosovo capital.

Millaku tearfully recounted that he had been trying to get to Albania on Thursday when he and the others were taken prisoner and forced to strip naked and lie on the ground in the rain for hours. Later they were made to sit in front of Yugoslav artillery that was bombarding a village held by the KLA, he said. The majority of the prisoners were ultimately released, but about 90 younger men were told to remain, he said.

“They imprisoned and maybe shot them,” said Millaku, who added that he could hear gunshots as he was leaving.

Groups of refugees still camped in parks or wandering the streets of this northern Albanian city shrug when asked about their missing men, as though the answer is obvious. “In my village, only children, women and the older men came,” said Hidajede Bugaj, a 24-year-old biology teacher. “The young men are in the mountains. They could not dare to come; they knew that they would be killed.”

One young man who did make the trip was Mentor Fetahi, 25, who said his relatives had no one else to accompany them. He hid money in his clothes and in the engine of the tractor he drove, and paid off police at about 60 checkpoints along the way. “I was sure I was going to die,” he said.

Banan Kadria, a 16-year-old from the village of Lumarti, said he was terrified during his exit from Kosovo in a crowded farm cart pulled by a tractor. “I am here only because whenever I entered a checkpoint I got under blankets, and they could not see me,” he said.

Fears That Worst May Be Yet to Come

Unlike in Albania, horror stories of missing men and massacres were not prevalent among the refugees who arrived in neighboring Macedonia.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 120,000 Kosovo Albanians have been evicted to Macedonia since NATO airstrikes started. Many of the refugees were expelled from Pristina and surrounding villages in a mass, organized fashion. As a rule, the men were not separated from their families.

This method of “ethnic cleansing” differs significantly from patterns elsewhere in Kosovo.

U.N. refugee agency spokesman Kris Janowski speculated that refugees from “the worst areas that saw most of the fighting, death and destruction” ended up in Albania, not Macedonia.

Until now, refugees ending up in Macedonia largely came from areas “that never saw fighting,” Janowski said. He fears that news of more atrocities will surface in Macedonia in coming days because the populations of Urosevac and Vucitrn, where there was heavy fighting, are en route.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren in Skopje, Macedonia, contributed to this report.

Many charities are accepting contributions to help refugees from Kosovo. The list may be found at https://www. latimes.com/kosovoaid.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Offering Help

Number of refugees nations are willing to absorb:

Germany: 40,000

United States: 20,000

Turkey: 20,000

Norway: 6,000

Denmark: 6,000

Romania: 6,000

Sweden: 5,500