THE DEATH OF BELANICA

Spread out by a gurgling river, surrounded by mountains and green fields, the village of Belanica is described by those who dwelt there as a place where orchards flourished, the earth was rich, and time passed unhurried among neighbors who had known each other all their lives.

It existed that way for centuries. And then, in a day, it was gone.

Over the course of 24 terrifying hours, up to 500 Serbian soldiers and police invaded, sacked and laid waste their placid farm community in south-central Kosovo.

Even before they swooped in on April 1, the Yugoslav army had shelled dozens of nearby towns and villages, systematically herding an estimated 80,000 ethnic Albanians into the center of Belanica. Trapped there with their cars, tractors, wagons and few remaining possessions, they became defenseless prey for a pitiless gang that was as intent on robbery and humiliation as it was on obliterating centuries of ethnic Albanian history in the province.

This account of the life and death of Belanica has, until now, been lost in the general mayhem and brutality of the “ethnic cleansing” sweeping Kosovo. The story of one extended family--Idriz Zogaj, his son, daughters, nephews and grandchildren--adds detail on the sad and cynical displacement of most of the province’s 1.8 million ethnic Albanians and the destruction of more than 400 Albanian towns and villages. The tales of killings, robberies, rapes and burning in one small village provides a clue to the scale of the crimes that have been committed, and continue to be committed, across Kosovo.

On the bridge at Morine, a remote Albanian border post, one can see what Belanica has become: another part of the overwhelming tide of human suffering that has been pouring out of Kosovo during the past month.

Watching the refugees arrive, disheveled, dirty, unshaven, rumpled and red-eyed, children clinging to mothers or staring blankly ahead, people lying in piles of pathetic mattresses and soiled blankets, coats and sweaters, is disturbing--not only for what it shows about the capacity for human cruelty. It is also disturbing because of what it does not show: who these people really are, where they came from, what they have endured and what they have lost.

Belanica is not unique, and people like the Zogajs have no special claim on the world’s conscience. But if an entire people can be stripped of their possessions, if individuals can be murdered with impunity, raped at will and tossed away to satisfy someone else’s vision of history, then it appears that the lessons of this century have not yet been learned.

Belanica, whose name means “little white nest,” was a small slice of paradise on Earth, according to homesick villagers. The community of 300 families and 3,000 people in the Podrime region of Kosovo had vineyards and wheat fields, shops and cafes, wide streets and a post office. It was bordered on three sides by mountains and situated by a small river, the Lumi Mirusha, where the children played.

Solid, stuccoed brick houses--paid for with the hard currency that Belanica’s sons earned in Germany, Switzerland or Australia--were built around a large grassy field, 20 acres in size and enclosed by a high stone-and-brick wall. This field, crisscrossed by roads and footpaths, was empty except for a new and an old school, a clinic and an ancient oak tree.

There is an interesting story about this field: Centuries ago, four brothers came to the valley and built homesteads--one on each side of the field. They made a pact that no one would build inside the wall. It would be a common grazing area.

Idriz Zogaj, for one, remembers tending sheep there as a boy in the 1930s. “In spring, when the lambs were new,” he said, “there were so many that it looked like the field was covered with snow.”

This field was the beginning of Belanica. Each brother founded a clan, and those four clans--Zogaj, Hoxha, Kafexhollaj and Sertollaj--continued living in Belanica until this year. There was even a quaint ceremony every May 6, the unofficial first day of spring, in which the old men of the village would meet and walk the circumference of the field, just to make sure that no one had infringed upon it.

The ritual will not be observed this year, for that meadow has now been violated. On April 1, villagers say, it became a place of murder, plunder and rape.

Idriz Zogaj, one of the expelled elders of Belanica, appeared in the collection center for Kosovo Albanian refugees in Kukes, northern Albania, that is known to journalists as “the junkyard.”

Amid the derelict bus barns and garages, burned out shells of vehicles, refugees camping by their tractors and living in the trunks and back seats of rusting cars, there was something arresting about Idriz Zogaj.

In his old olive-brown suit, brown sweater, white cap wrapped turban-like with a brown scarf, his carved wooden walking stick and an old-fashioned pocket watch on a chain, he seemed rooted despite the upheaval all around him. In spite of his age and white whiskers, he moved with purpose.

While his wife, Feride, a tiny, round woman overburdened by sad memories, tended to go off into a corner and weep quietly to herself, Idriz had the wherewithal to stride into a strange, teeming town and seek out a dentist to repair his dentures.

“Seventy-four years old, and the Serbs break my teeth,” he said, more in amazement than self-pity.

A Comfortable Life Shattered

Idriz Zogaj had 20 members of his family with him in the junkyard. He was the oldest. His great-granddaughter, Arbnore, rocking in a wooden cradle, was the youngest. Strewn around refugee collection centers scattered along Albania’s border with Kosovo were other more distant relatives and neighbors from Belanica.

Over the course of 10 days, often beneath a plastic sheet stretched as an awning off the side of their wagon to protect them from cold winds and rain, these people told of the death of Belanica, which, by extension, is the tragedy of Kosovo today.

“Belanica was one of the best . . . villages in Kosovo,” said Nakie Zogaj, Idriz’s husky-voiced daughter-in-law. “We lived as well as people in the United States.”

To be sure, their existence was more rustic and less affluent. But they lived in spacious, well-furnished houses, watched television, had mobile telephones, electricity and indoor plumbing, and they traveled.

At the end of a day tending their animals or their businesses, they might slip down to the cafe to sip tea or Turkish coffee with the neighbors.

The crimes committed against them over the past year have left these people angry, bereft and bewildered.

The story told by the Zogaj family was corroborated by independent interviews with at least two dozen other villagers and with residents of neighboring towns.

Yugoslavia’s government routinely denies all reported human rights abuses and blames NATO airstrikes for the exodus of people like the Zogaj family. It says its ethnic Albanian citizens are free and welcome to stay.

The refugees who have fled Kosovo to places like Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro say that is not true. More than 600,000 people have left Kosovo since NATO began bombing a month ago, and many more still are trapped in the province. Those who have been interviewed were virtually unanimous in saying that it was Serbian violence, not NATO, that caused them to leave.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials see mounting evidence of what they say appear to be mass graves inside Kosovo. One was sighted in Malisevo, four miles from Belanica.

‘We Never Had Any Problem With These People’

Until the past year, Kosovo’s population had been 90% ethnic Albanian and 8% Serbian. Belanica itself was purely Albanian, according to the Zogajs, although some Serbs lived in the vicinity. The mainly Serbian village of Kijevo was nine miles away.

Family members said their relations with Serbs over the years were cordial, even warm.

Iljaz Zogaj, Idriz’s gregarious son, who perpetually wears his sweat-stained traditional white woolen hat tipped back over his dark hair, served in the Yugoslav army from 1971 to 1973 and said Serbs were among his best friends.

“We never had any problem with these people,” he said.

Nevertheless, Serbs and ethnic Albanians remained deeply divided in their views of the history of Kosovo, Serbia’s southern province. Serbian nationalists speak of Kosovo as the historic heart of Serbia. To them, the ethnic Albanians are foreigners settled there during nearly five centuries of Turkish rule. Ethnic Albanians, on the other hand, argue that they are the real natives in Kosovo, having lived there since ancient times.

Those conflicting views have frequently led to bloodshed, and Belanica was not spared. But there were stable times too, particularly in the Communist Yugoslavia that emerged under Josip Broz Tito after World War II, which discouraged nationalism and tried to distribute power and perks.

After Tito’s death, Yugoslavia unraveled. Serbia’s new leader in the late 1980s was Slobodan Milosevic, a Communist apparatchik who seemed destined, like all the other Communist rulers in Eastern Europe, to be ousted after the historic events of 1989.

But Milosevic played to a long-suppressed sense of Serbian nationalism. And his first step in that direction was the 1989 cancellation of Kosovo’s autonomy. He stripped ethnic Albanians of their positions of power and installed Serbs to run Kosovo’s government and institutions. An underground movement grew among ethnic Albanians demanding independence.

The Zogajs sympathized with this goal. At first, they preferred the nonviolent path of Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova. But by mid-1998, especially after a massacre of ethnic Albanians in the nearby region of Drenica, their village gave its allegiance to a new armed group rebelling against Yugoslav rule, the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA.

Proudly, the Zogajs say more than 100 people with their surname are fighting with the KLA. Among them is Iljaz’s son, Muhamet.

The Fighting Draws Nearer

In early July, KLA forces seized territory in much of Kosovo. In response, Milosevic’s government launched a massive offensive. Yugoslav tanks became a frequent sight on the main road between Suva Reka and Malisevo that passed by Belanica. Tanks would fire on villages the Serbs believed were sympathetic to the KLA.

All the same, Idriz Zogaj said, the war seemed distant.

But gradually it drew nearer, and one night in late July, villagers of Belanica packed and retreated to a town called Pagarusa. That was the first evacuation of Belanica, the Zogajs’ first experience of loading up the farm wagons, covering them in carpets and plastic sheets, and living as refugees. It lasted four days.

That was just the beginning, however, of a period in which Idriz Zogaj said the villagers were “blown around like leaves in the wind.”

After they returned, fighting flared and the shells were landing nearby. So after 20 days, they took to the hills again. The evacuation meant that the villagers were away during the August harvest season.

Some of the men slipped back home and allowed their animals into the field to eat the crops. That led to the village’s first violent death, a foreshadowing of what was to come. The victim was 67-year-old Seloman Kafexholli.

Isuf Zogaj, 63, a neighbor and distant relative of Idriz’s family, said Kafexholli’s remains were found near his fields. “I think they took and killed him,” Zogaj said. “We only found the burned body.”

With a war raging between the KLA and Yugoslav forces, the Zogajs stayed away for more than a month this time. They sometimes camped outside along a river, and at other times stayed in the yards of houses, moving about to avoid the conflict. When they finally got back to their homes, said Nakie Zogaj: “We felt we were reborn. . . . There had been over 100,000 people in the fields and mountains, and it was really cold.”

Under Western pressure, Yugoslav authorities agreed in October to allow monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, into Kosovo.

Their arrival in January helped restore normal life to Belanica. Children went back to school, shops were open, work proceeded. The OSCE monitors, in distinctive orange vehicles nicknamed “the wasps” because they so annoyed the authorities, rented houses in nearby Suva Reka and Malisevo. Zogaj family members said proudly that when the monitors visited Belanica, grateful villagers never allowed them to pay for a meal or coffee.

But in faraway France, crucial peace negotiations between Kosovo Albanian nationalists and the Yugoslav government stalled. NATO threatened to bomb to force the Serbs to accept a deal. OSCE monitors abruptly pulled out of Kosovo on March 20.

At that, the Kosovo Albanians were left defenseless before a suddenly unleashed Serbian military machine.

Thousands of People Herded Into Belanica

Even before the start of NATO bombing March 24, tens of thousands of Yugoslav soldiers and police poured into Kosovo and embarked on a fierce and seemingly well-planned campaign to drive out ethnic Albanians. Smaller villages and hamlets came under shelling, after which convoys of armed Serbs would arrive and order the people to leave immediately for Albania. In some cases, young men were separated from the women and held prisoner or killed. Cars were confiscated.

Families were not free to go just anywhere. Through roadblocks and checkpoints, the troops and police were funneling people into the larger towns and villages. Especially over the weekend of March 27 and 28, Belanica inhabitants say, there was a huge inflow of displaced people into their village.

By March 31, they estimated, at least 80,000 people from 50 villages had gathered. Tractors and trucks parked so densely in the central field that they could not move. Private yards became parking lots, and many Belanica families sheltered the displaced inside their homes.

Meanwhile, Serbian forces drew inexorably closer.

Idriz Zogaj and his family were trying to decide what to do. They owned 20 acres of fields and orchards and four houses near the highway that were likely to be among the first to face attack. They felt more vulnerable than most people.

On the night of March 31, a Wednesday, Idriz said a KLA fighter came to his door to warn him that the rebel force was retreating and that the village would be undefended. He advised the Zogajs to leave for their own safety and join other villagers and refugees half a mile away in the center of the village.

It was up to Idriz as head of the family to make the decision. He called the family together and asked the women to give him their jewelry, which he buried for safekeeping. He also went to the locked drawer where he kept his money and withdrew his 4,000 German marks, worth more than $2,000.

The women packed tractors and wagons, and included the same plastic sheets they had used the past fall. They locked their cows in the barn and retreated to the village center. Idriz went with them.

Iljaz Zogaj and his cousins, Ali and Habib, stayed behind to watch the houses but dared not sleep. During the night, Idriz said, about 1,600 younger men climbed the surrounding mountains to escape the expected onslaught.

Thursday dawned with explosions. Yugoslav tanks began shelling the lower part of Belanica at 6 a.m. Iljaz, Ali and Habib left after the first shells fell and ran to join the others.

Idriz’s 22-year-old granddaughter Mexhite remembers how her heart was pounding, and when her father was able to look over a fence and see that their houses were burning, a pang went through her. “This house was built by the sweat of my father, my uncle and my brothers,” she said. Even more than the house, she felt sorry for the animals.

“If we’d had the chance, we would have set them free,” she said. She assumes they burned to death.

77-Year-Old Killed in His Kitchen as Wife Looks On

A neighbor of the Zogajs, 74-year-old Batisha Hoxha, was sitting in her kitchen with her 77-year-old husband, Izet, staying warm by the stove. They had heard explosions but did not realize that Serbian troops had already entered the town. The next thing she knew, five or six soldiers had burst through the front door and were standing in front of them, demanding, “Where are your children?”

Seeking to calm the intruders, Izet made a show of hospitality, she said. “He took a box of cigarettes and said to them, ‘Do you smoke?’ But the soldier got angry and said, ‘I did not come here for a smoke,’ and started beating him,” Batisha said.

Izet was slapped so hard that he fell to the floor, she said. While they were kicking him, the soldiers demanded money and information on the whereabouts of the couple’s sons, whom they accused of belonging to the KLA. Then, while Izet was still on the floor looking up at them, she said, they killed him.

“They shot him three times in the chest,” recalled Batisha, a frail-looking woman with translucent skin, speaking softly with tears in her eyes.

“He was conscious, and could not stand, when they shot him.”

With her husband dying before her, the soldiers pulled the wedding ring off her finger. “I can still feel the pain,” she said.

They fired shots just over her head. Bullets tore through the windows and doors of their house, built only two years earlier. Finally, they kicked Batisha and a 10-year-old boy who was staying with them and told them to get out.

“I was not even outside the gate when they burned it,” she recounted. Her husband’s body was in the flames.

In that moment, she said, she was paralyzed. She was standing on the street in the rain with no house, no husband and no possessions but the clothes she was wearing. Finally, strangers passed in a tractor and bundled her into their wagon.

Batisha’s daughter later found her in the refugee camp in northern Albania. Thanks only to that, she now has a single photograph of herself with Izet, an old man wearing the traditional Albanian white hat called a kapuc.

Looking at it tenderly, Batisha murmurs: “Nobody understands what we have seen and what we have suffered. Only God knows.”

Serbian Convoy Descends on Village

At 2 p.m., the shelling stopped, and within minutes an enormous convoy of Serbian police, soldiers and paramilitary troops roared into the center of Belanica.

It was a sight that filled the throng of ethnic Albanians with terror and dread. Witnesses estimate that there were as many as 60 tanks, accompanied by armored cars, heavy machine guns, rockets and buses filled with police and soldiers. By now, the open field was even more jammed with a chaotic mix of tractors, wagons, cars, trucks, bleating sheep and barking dogs. Already, there was a haze in the air from the burning houses and a stench of burning animals.

“When we saw the Serbian forces coming to us, we had no way out, no way to resist,” said Smail Zogaj, the 42-year-old son of Idriz’s neighbor Isuf. “We were waiting for the moment of our death.”

Isuf Zogaj continued the story: “As soon as they got out of their cars, they started beating people, kicking them. They were shooting in the air. They might have even killed some people right then. They were saying, ‘This is not your place, go to Albania!’ ”

There may have been more than 500 of them, in a variety of uniforms, Smail said. Many had black ski masks. Some had “Police” written on their backs. On their heads, some wore bandannas or cowboy hats. In addition to Kalashnikov rifles, they carried long knives. Some wielded hammers and swords.

“We were afraid even to look at them,” said Bahtjar Bytyci, 55, a refugee from Pagarusa.

Said Isuf: “We were among the wolves.”

Cowering Before Serbs, Paying for Their Lives

For the next 24 hours, the tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians who had been herded into the center of the little village of Belanica cowered helplessly before the armed Serbs, some of whom bragged about being part of Arkan’s Tigers--a paramilitary group led by war crimes suspect Zeljko Raznjatovic that has been blamed for atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In groups of four or five, they roamed from tractor to tractor, demanding money, threatening to kill and rape, and committing murder.

How many died is unclear because the refugees saw only those crimes near them. Idriz Zogaj believes that at least 60 people, mostly young men, were killed before the refugees were allowed to leave the next day. Other family members guessed more than 100.

The surest way to avoid being killed that night was to pay. Kosovo Albanians did not trust Yugoslav banks, and many were carrying thousands of German marks, which Serbian police and soldiers seized through relentless threats and violence. Witnesses said that before the night was out, the cash was spilling out of the pockets of armed men.

Idriz Zogaj estimated that he turned over 3,900 marks. The Serbs came back seven times in two hours, making threats each time--usually against the children.

One of the Zogajs, who asked that he not be further identified when speaking about this incident because of possible future reprisals, described a particularly sadistic murder:

As darkness fell, two masked, uniformed Serbs pulled a girl from one of the wagons, telling the girl’s father that they were taking her “to sleep with” for three hours. They demanded 1,000 marks to let her go.

The father paid, and the pair proceeded to another tractor. This time they picked out a woman who had given birth two or three days earlier. Learning this, one of the police told her husband: “She’s useless to me.” Then they moved to a third tractor, only a few feet away, where they selected a woman in her 20s, again demanding 1,000 marks. When the woman pleaded that she had no money, they made her take off her top to prove it, laughing at her. One of the men told her husband that she wasn’t worth raping and started to move on. But he saw another young man staring at them. This angered the policeman, who ordered the man, perhaps 25, to get down from his tractor.

The policeman pulled out a long knife and told the man to turn around. “I will stab you, and you should walk away and not fall down,” the policeman ordered. “Because if you fall down, I will kill you.” He then buried his knife in the man’s back. The man tried to walk, but instead collapsed as blood poured out of him. True to his word, the policeman finished him off with a burst of gunfire.

Witnesses to Many Atrocities

Other witnesses also said they saw knives at work that afternoon and evening.

Ramadan Bekolli, a master builder from Maralija, a hamlet near Belanica, was in the square near the school. From a distance of about 15 feet, he said, he saw a masked Serb amputate the arm of a 2-year-old boy whose parents had no money to pay him.

“The child was crying, the mother was crying, all the family was screaming,” Bekolli said. “After he cut off the arm of the child, he threw the child into the wagon.”

A 27-year-old journalist from the village, Shefqet Zogaj, said he was beaten, threatened several times and bullets were fired between his legs. But he escaped execution by paying a total of 500 marks and giving his video camera to the police.

He said he witnessed the killing of five people, including a man who appeared to be mentally ill, during the night.

“They killed even horses,” he said.

The sounds that still haunt him are the pleas of those who were about to be murdered. “They were screaming, crying out, crying to God, begging the police, do not kill me, saying, ‘I have family, I have children, I have a wife.’ But all of it was in vain.”

After their houses were burned, the family of Idriz Zogaj parked their tractors in the northeast side of the field. Like the rest of the village and the refugees huddled there, they could only wait. Through the day, they could hear screams and weeping around them. Soldiers and police came and demanded money.

They beat Idriz, breaking his dentures, and his son, Iljaz.

But the most frightening moment was when a policeman grabbed Idriz’s 15-year-old grandson Lutfi from inside the wagon. He jammed the barrel of his Kalashnikov into Lutfi’s right cheek so hard that it left a bruise and barked: “Who is the woman who gave birth to this boy? Give me 1,000 marks or his head is gone.”

The boy’s mother, Mehreme, paid up. But two weeks afterward, she had not recovered. Every night she woke up three or four times, she said. “I have the feeling that my son has been murdered.”

“That night was real hell,” recalled Nakie Zogaj, the most outspoken of the Zogaj women.

The women and children never stirred from the two covered farm wagons from 2 p.m., when the Serbian forces came Thursday, until the next morning, doing their best to avoid the soldiers and police. Frightened by the gunfire all around them, no one could leave the wagon even to use the toilet, Nakie said. Instead they urinated into buckets.

“We expected them to set fire to the wheels of the tractor and be burned alive,” Nakie said. “The little children were screaming with cold, and they were hungry, but we couldn’t dare to stick our necks out.”

The Pace of Killing Intensifies

From Thursday to Friday, killings took place in different parts of the field. Everyone seemed to have witnessed something:

Bajram Krasniqi, a 45-year-old farmer from Banja, said that early in the afternoon on Thursday he counted six bodies laid out in front of the mosque--five men and one woman.

A 51-year-old neighbor of the Zogajs said he saw a man beaten to the ground and then shot after dark. The neighbor, who himself had been beaten, said he could not be sure that the man died, but he thinks he must have. The neighbor, who asked that his name not be used, said the children had seen their parents and grandparents beaten. Jiggling a 2-year-old in his arms, he asked her, “Who made Grandpa’s nose bleed?” “Police,” the tot answered.

A man who asked to be identified only by the first name Rrahman said he witnessed the execution of two teenage boys, approximately 16 and 18, about 5 p.m. Thursday. “I was about 10 meters away. They asked those two for money. They didn’t have any, and afterward they took them into a yard and shot them with a lot of bullets,” said the man.

The corpses were left in the yard. A few hours later, Rrahman said, he asked permission to bury the bodies but was refused unless he paid 1,000 marks. “I couldn’t help myself,” Rrahman said of his courage in approaching the killers. “How could I leave these bodies there?”

Ramadan Bekolli, the builder who said he had seen the child’s arm amputated, said that when police seized him to demand money, they forced him into the basement of the village’s old school.

The room was totally dark, he said, and when he stepped into it, he tripped over a body. He stood and took another step, and again stepped on a body. The police said he would join the corpses there unless he paid. Bekolli said he turned over 3,700 marks.

Recounting the experience, he said he wasn’t sure how many people lay dead in the basement, but that there were at least two or three. The next morning, when he walked past the open entrance of the Belanica school, he saw Serbian troops and noticed what appeared to be a thick pool of fresh blood in the corridor.

Shemi Illuri, 27, of Maralija, said that while extorting money from him, police walked him to a ditch and showed him two men, whom he estimated to be 23 or 24 years old, both stabbed through the throat with screwdrivers. One was motionless, but the other was still stirring.

“I just about passed out,” Illuri said. “I thought it would happen to me.”

Illuri also said he was a witness to the shooting deaths of Osman and Bekim Vrenezi, 26 and 16 respectively, whom he knew from his hamlet. They were shot by armed Serbs near their tractor where they were fixing a tire, he said.

“We have so many stories, my mouth would get tired from telling them,” said Niazi Bytyci, 41, of Maralija. “We should all go to a psychologist after what we have seen.”

Gunmen Use Rape to Terrorize Women

Besides the killings and the robbery, at least three witnesses recounted seeing armed Serbs moving through the parked vehicles looking for young women and threatening them with rape. One man, who gave his name as Izmet Morali, said he saw at least two women near him being taken by the Serbs into a house that had been emptied of its occupants.

Morali said he was certain that these women were raped and later sent back to their tractors. He said he overheard one of them saying she had recognized her assailant and threatening to kill him “when Kosovo is liberated.”

Agitated and angry, Morali said his own wife had been touched on her breasts by the Serbs and later mentioned that his 16-year-old daughter was so traumatized by her experiences in Belanica that she had not spoken since and was now hospitalized in Tirana, the Albanian capital.

According to the Zogaj men, it took the Serbs about two hours after they arrived to gather the villagers from their houses, herd them into the field and begin systematically looting, burning and shelling houses and other buildings.

Around 4 p.m., police surrounded the square itself and began robbing and beating people, smashing cars and occasionally killing captives. This went on intensively until about midnight.

From then until about 4 a.m., the sounds quieted, except for an occasional gunshot and the wails of people crying. Around 4 a.m., the Serbian forces became more active again--robbing and beating people, shooting animals and stealing the better cars.

By 8 a.m., apparently sated, the Serbian forces began ordering the captives to leave Belanica in a convoy headed for the Albanian border.

A Long Journey Out of the Inferno

As Iljaz Zogaj, the 52-year-old son of Idriz, drove one of the tractors past the Belanica mosque, he noted that the minaret had been pierced by a shell. Houses in the lower part of town already were on fire, he said, and the houses in the upper part were being put to the torch with gasoline.

One of his last memories of Belanica is seeing about 30 young men being held prisoner by the Serbs, lined up in a row with their backs to the road.

“What happened to these people, I don’t know,” he said.

The journey to the border was achingly slow, nearly 36 hours to cover 45 miles. More humiliations awaited the Zogajs along the way.

At a little town called Nastrazup, the convoy was stopped at a checkpoint. Men were ordered to take off their traditional kapuc hats and pile them on the road where an Albanian flag had already been laid. Then they were ordered to drive over the hats and the flag.

It was at this same checkpoint that Bashem Zogaj, the 32-year-old son of Isuf and brother of Smail, was beaten unconscious by a Serbian policeman, then dragged away and left in a ditch by the side of the road. His father and brother saw it happen but could do nothing but drive on. When they later tried to go back, they were forbidden. They fear Bashem is dead.

“This was the worst day of my life,” Isuf Zogaj said. “Even if I could live 5,000 years, there could be no other day like this.”

Since April 3, the Zogajs have remained camped out in their tractors, wagons and plastic sheeting. The rate even for a filthy room in refugee-packed Kukes has reached 500 marks a month. Without money for food, members of the family live on humanitarian rations and bread from the U.N. refugee agency.

Their only hope, they say, is for NATO and President Clinton to restore them to their homeland. When they first arrived, they seemed to think it would be only a matter of days. But now they expect to remain in Albania at least several months. By searching various refugee encampments, they have found other people from Belanica and begun to reestablish some of the community ties that were so important to them in Kosovo.

Idriz Zogaj surveys his current possessions: a case of tobacco, some rolling paper, a Swiss pocket watch and his walking stick. In his wallet he has a few German marks left, and one Saudi Arabian rial from when he made a pilgrimage to Mecca three years ago. The Serbs wouldn’t take it.

Only in his mind’s eye can he travel back to his beloved Belanica now. But that is enough to bring a look of contentment to a proud old man’s countenance. “I had two houses,” he says. “I had my sons working. I had all the money I needed. I had a lot of crops . . . grapes, plums and apples. . . . I loved to walk in my vineyard, to pick my grapes and eat them.”