Old Brown Coat Is ‘Main Reason That I Am Alive’

Like hundreds of thousands of his fellow Kosovo Albanians, Bashkim Millaku was forced at gunpoint to leave his home and his country by Serbian troops last week.

On his way, the 36-year-old father of two was caught in a roundup of 400 men, held prisoner for three days and two nights, tormented mentally and physically, robbed and denied food and water. He was used as a human shield. By the time Millaku reached Albania on Saturday night, he was in shock.

“We did not hope to be alive again,” he recounted.

Serbian authorities have claimed that the ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo because they feared NATO bomb attacks. But the experiences related by Millaku and other refugees arriving in Albania tell a different and far more sinister tale. His story may shed light on possible war crimes committed by Serbian forces in recent days.

What follows is his first detailed account of an ordeal in which, he says, an old brown coat saved his life.

The trouble began in Millaku’s hometown, Glina, in northern Kosovo. It is a community of 6,000 people, more than 80% of them ethnic Albanian.

He had been teaching basic electronics and computers until he landed a job earlier this year as a guard for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was involved in peace monitoring in Kosovo until it pulled out in late March.

“Conditions were very bad before that, but then they got worse,” said Millaku, sitting on an air mattress in a tent in northern Albania where he and eight family members have been living since Sunday.

Three days after the monitors left, the Serbs began a military offensive and shelled four villages near Glina, sending displaced people streaming into the town. Serbian police trashed or burned shops owned by ethnic Albanians.

“The other Serb shops were kept open, but only for Serbs,” Millaku said. “They did not allow Albanians.” At this time, Millaku and his family--his wife, Mirdita, 26, and their daughters, Dafina, 3, and Medina, 10 months--became virtual prisoners in their own house, he said.

“We could not go outside--everywhere there were police and security forces. . . . You could be killed or massacred.” One of his neighbors was wounded just looking out the window, Millaku said. Houses on the edge of town were emptied and set on fire, and Serbs moved in tanks and heavy guns.

“We were waiting for them to come for us,” said Millaku, a rangy man with light brown hair. To prepare, he took an old sack and cut two holes in it as a carrier for Medina.

The police came Tuesday, March 30. Five of them knocked on the door of the Millaku house, strode in and took away their passports and identification cards. They were given five minutes to take whatever they wanted.

When Millaku and his family left the house with their luggage--accompanied by five of his wife’s relatives--they found out that they weren’t allowed to drive their car. The police ordered them to walk to the center of Glina.

“There, we saw many of our Serb neighbors looking from windows, laughing at us, even clapping,” Millaku said. “They were mostly women and children because the men had gone into the Serbian [paramilitary] forces.”

There, Millaku and his family were crammed “like sardines” into a truck that was labeled “Humanitarian Aid” in Serbian.

The truck took them for a mile and then dumped them on the road. After walking for hours in the direction of Albania, the refugees were diverted by nearby Serbian shelling to a mountain village called Kraalan, where they were to remain pinned down for the next two nights. “We slept in an unfinished building . . . on the cement. There were no blankets. Everything was dusty,” he recalled.

After the second night, Serbian forces started targeting Kraalan itself. Panicked refugees retreated to a schoolyard. Many young men, fearing that they would be massacred, took off overland up the mountains. The rest of the refugees and villagers wanted to surrender. They tied white bedsheets to their tractors, Millaku said.

The Serbian troops rolled into the village and lined up on both sides of the road.

“They had tanks, armored cars and other weapons, but we did not dare even to look at them,” Millaku said. There was a variety of uniforms: army, police, armed civilians, men in masks. The refugees were ordered to walk between the lines of troops.

Millaku was carrying Medina on his chest in his makeshift infant carrier and had Dafina on his back. But a Serbian soldier told him roughly to put them down. Dafina cried and clung to his legs. She refused to let go. But at this point the Serbs were separating all the men, about 400, from the women, beating them with rifles and kicking them. Millaku himself was kicked and told Dafina to go to her mother, he said.

“She was crying, of course,” he said. “The families were hysterical. Everyone was crying.”

The men were marched into a field and told to sit on the ground, eyes cast down and arms folded on their heads. They were ordered to take off their shirts and coats.

Despite their efforts to remain in the village, the women and children were pushed away by the troops, who chased after them with a tank.

“I heard the voice of my daughter crying out, calling me,” Millaku said. But, trapped in the field, he could do nothing. “It was getting dark and starting to rain, and the wind was blowing.” The men sat with their arms above their heads for four hours, Millaku said, and some of them were beaten.

They were threatened as well. “They had lined us up in four lines, and they brought a tank there and said they would run over us,” Millaku said. “I heard some soldiers saying they needed a mass grave.”

Around midnight, all the coats and shirts were brought back in a heap in front of the captives. Two men at a time were allowed to go to the pile and take two items each--in the dark they could not see well enough to pick out their own. Some men ended with clothes too large for them and some too small. Millaku made a lucky choice. It was a beaten-up brown coat, unfashionable but practical, lined with sheepskin. It was two sizes too big, and in it he looked older than his 36 years.

Later he would say: “I think this is the main reason that I am alive now.”

The night was cold and sleepless, but the second day as a captive was worse. The Serbian forces were firing their tanks at a hill on the other side of the valley, where Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas were dug in. The KLA was shooting back. The return-fire bullets were whistling among the men. During this time, Millaku said, two of the ethnic Albanians were wounded.

“This lasted all day. We were begging them, ‘Please let us go.’ But they did not allow us. And they did not give us food or let us drink water for two days and two nights.”

The Serbs would offer only one loaf of bread for the 400 men. “They were laughing, just to see what we might do,” Millaku said. “But we shared.”

During the day, the Serbs demanded the captives’ remaining money from their pants. The cash that had been in their shirts and coats had already been stolen.

One of the Serbs told a spokesman for the prisoners: “The game is not over yet. We’re just getting started.”

During the second night, a military truck appeared, and the Serbs culled the oldest and sickest of the prisoners and took them away. They would later turn up safely at the Albanian border.

“The night was very, very cold--icy. They did not allow us even to light a fire,” Millaku said. “This was the coldest night I have ever experienced.”

In the morning, the captives were begging for bread, he said. Some of the men said they had food in their tractors, still parked nearby.

“We said, ‘Please just let us take some food.’ But instead they burned the tractors.” Shaking his head, he said, “They burned our bread in front of us when we were starving.”

On Saturday, the third morning of their captivity, a Serbian major appeared. He stood before the prisoners and railed about NATO.

“He told us: ‘You can see that NATO is very dangerous. . . . Now you can see that NATO is very dangerous for you and for us,’ ” Millaku said.

But that was untrue, Millaku said. “We knew what NATO was doing. We knew that NATO was not bombing the Kosovar Albanians. We couldn’t wait for NATO to come and bomb them. But there, we could not speak.”

While the major was talking, some Serbian soldiers behind the prisoners began to walk among them and pick out the young men. Then the whole group of captives was made to walk between two lines of Serbian soldiers.

“They picked out people they wanted,” Millaku said. “They would say, ‘You, you, not you,’ and pull somebody out.”

This is where he felt fortunate. “When we were passing, I was in this old coat and also I was stiff and walking like an old man. My legs were very tired, and I could not walk well. So it was good luck for me.”

Those being freed were sent walking down the road. But they left 90 young men behind. As they crested a hill out of sight, they heard automatic machine-gun fire that lasted for about 10 minutes behind them, Millaku said.

Millaku voice choked when he talked about the missing men, but he said he is not convinced that they were executed. It is possible that the gunfire was just to frighten them, he said, because the Serbs had often played such games.

On the road south, Millaku’s thoughts turned to his family. On the pavement, there were spots of blood. There was also an ominous-looking wagon covered in plastic and driven by men with yellow doctor’s masks. Millaku surmised that they were collecting bodies.

But he also found a more welcome sign. His wife had left a trail of photographs and articles of clothing strewn on bushes on the way so that he’d be able to find them. Nevertheless, Millaku was distraught. “Every step I took, I was expecting to find the bodies of my family.”

His wife had been thinking the same thing about him. Their daughter Dafina was crying constantly, saying, “Oh, they are going to kill my father,” recalled Millaku’s wife, Mirdita. “And I was saying to her, ‘Your father will come,’ even though I didn’t believe it.”

They all found each other Saturday night when Millaku climbed up to the border crossing into Albania.

“I couldn’t stop crying for one hour,” he recalled.

And in a tent here, Dafina was still clutching his leg.

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War Crimes Prosecutions

Talk of war crimes prosecutions in Kosovo is increasing. Some background:

U.S. definition: The United States defines war crimes as “any violations of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict.”

They include: The proper treatment of sick and wounded armed forces in the field and at sea, humane treatment of prisoners of war and protections for civilians. The protections include a ban on deportation of groups or individuals, the taking of hostages, attacks on personal dignity, unjustified destruction of property and racial, religious, political and national discrimination.

The court: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, established by the United Nations Security Council in 1993, is mandated to investigate and prosecute those who commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law in the former Yugoslav federation.

Kosovo indictments: For previous conflicts, the court has publicly indicted 59 people, including Serbian paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznjatovic, also known as Arkan, whose indictment was announced last week. The court has threatened to hold Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic accountable for any atrocities in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia, the dominant remaining Yugoslav republic.

Sources: Times staff and wire reports