War’s Over, but Kosovo Remains a Battlefield

It was one of the few games they could think of that didn’t require toys. They didn’t have any toys after more than a year on the run.

But that hardly seemed to matter to 10-year-old Egzon Zabeli, his older brothers and several cousins. After moving from house to house and village to village in Kosovo, and finally sleeping in the woods for nearly two months to avoid Serbian troops, the war was over.

Any game, even if it was just jumping over a fence, was going to be fun. Egzon went first. He charged forward, planted his left foot and sprang into the air. Imagine the elation, the adrenaline--the sheer relief--the 10-year-old must have felt as he soared over the waist-high wooden fence surrounding his aunt’s backyard.

The war is over, it’s really over, was all he could think.

Then he landed--on a mine.

It was one of 42 that Serbian troops had left buried in the tiny backyard. The explosion June 15, three days after NATO-led peacekeepers rolled into Kosovo, claimed Egzon’s legs.

In the two months since, there have been more than 120 incidents of people being injured or killed by mines or other unexploded ordnance, such as cluster bombs. Although the situation in the Serbian province doesn’t begin to compare with heavily mined countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina or Cambodia, experts predict that hundreds more will die before the threat is over.

Workers are gearing up to begin clearing about 600 minefields, whose locations were disclosed by the Yugoslav army. Similar efforts are underway to clear an estimated 14,000 unexploded bomblets from North Atlantic Treaty Organization cluster bombs dropped on Kosovo. The devices have accounted for 40% of the incidents to date.

Clearing the known sites is relatively easy. It’s the uncharted “nuisance mines” left behind, mainly by Serbian paramilitaries, that promise to be the most difficult, said John Flanagan, project manager of the U.N.’s Mine Action Coordination Center in Kosovo.

These mines were intended for civilians, left at the entrances to fields, in and around schools, in gardens--anywhere innocent people might step on them. And because there is no record of where they were laid, “the only way you really know they’re there is if there’s a casualty,” Flanagan said.

This was the type of explosive left for Egzon. His left leg was amputated just below the knee, the right at mid-thigh.

Recently, Egzon--dressed in a cheap imitation U.S. Army outfit--appeared as brave as any war hero. He never cried and often laughed and joked with fellow patients at the hospital.

But his father’s blue eyes seemed on the brink of tears every time he looked at Egzon, seated in a wheelchair with an orange towel covering what was left of his legs.

“Whoever planted this bomb, maybe I would tear him apart with my bare hands,” Hetem Zabeli said. “But I could never do to their kids what they did to ours.”

Egzon’s mother, Hava, said she took the fifth-grader to the hospital in a wheelbarrow after the blast and was mocked and harassed by Serbian police. The police still were in Kosovo at the time and had set up checkpoints up the road from their village of Trstenik, about 15 miles west of Pristina, the provincial capital.

The Red Cross picked up the woman and her injured son and took them to the hospital in Pristina.

Detailed information about the victims is hard to come by in this early stage of the de-mining of Kosovo. U.N. officials, along with the international peacekeeping force known as KFOR and about 16 private de-mining firms and humanitarian agencies, are compiling a database that will help determine where best to focus their efforts. What’s beginning to emerge from the data is that the most likely victims are men younger than 25.

Of the victims, 28 are younger than 14. Four of them are in the same hospital ward as Egzon. There are two girls and two boys, each of whom was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Flanagan said the number of casualties is likely to follow seasonal peaks and valleys. In the first weeks after the war ended, during which refugees returned home by the tens of thousands, there was an average of three mine or ordnance accidents a day, he said. For the past several weeks, he said, it has dropped to about one a day.

But he expects the number to increase again as people head into the forest to collect firewood for the winter.

Meanwhile, officials are hopeful that a broad mine-awareness campaign, launched this summer and expected to continue even after school starts, will help save lives. But Flanagan is skeptical.

Although posters warning of the dangers of mines can be found all over Kosovo, he tells of a 13-year-old girl who picked up a cluster bomb and threw it at a cow, apparently just to see what would happen. Both were killed.

Former Kosovo Liberation Army troops are particularly apt to ignore advice about the dangers, he said.

“Their attitude is, ‘I’m a soldier. I can handle these things.’ Well, they can’t,” Flanagan said. “Mine awareness is one thing. Getting people to listen is another.”

Others simply grow weary of the hassle created by avoiding mined areas, he said. For weeks, a woman and her 18-year-old granddaughter walked about five miles to get from one place to another to avoid a 500-yard stretch of road that had yet to be cleared.

One day they decided to chance it. The granddaughter stepped on a mine and was killed. Flanagan predicts that this may be a common problem in the heavily mined mountainous area along Kosovo’s border with Albania.

“People there are used to just walking over the mountain from one village to another,” he said.

In Egzon’s case, there is uncertainty--and hope.

His mother said he clings to doctors’ promises that he will be able to walk again someday with the use of prostheses. Every day, she said, he asks when he’ll be able to wear his favorite pair of Puma sneakers.

“They told us that he can walk again, that he can kick a ball again,” his mother said. “They told us that, but we’re not so sure.”