A Family, a Village Begin Anew in Kosovo

For this small village in Kosovo, the end of 1999 sees the agony and woes of the past year giving way to renewal.

In the experiences of the Zogaj family, whose lives--previously chronicled in The Times--were brutally uprooted by a war that destroyed their home and forced them into exile, it is possible to see how the generosity of the international community, along with a latent resiliency in the human spirit, has replaced misery with hope.

That promise is reflected in the face of Lutfi Zogaj, a 15-year-old who eight months ago had a gun barrel rammed against his cheek. Now he shows only the shy smile of a young man trying to please his elders.

He carefully pours tea into glasses and sets them at the feet of the guests, men whose features are illuminated by candlelight for the sunset iftar meal that follows a day of fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Roast chicken, flija cheese pie, rice pudding and the luxury of a peeled banana are eaten off plates set on the carpet near the guests seated on cushions.

Electricity has not yet been restored, but the room is warm thanks to the stove, and the wind and coming snows are no great threat due to a newly built roof and glass windows imported from Austria.

All in all, this snug scene is hard to believe. In March, members of this same family were herded--along with the rest of the villagers--into Belanica’s central green; robbed, abused and terrorized by a motley crew of Yugoslav soldiers and Serbian police and paramilitary forces; and sent packing for the Albanian border. The villagers’ final memory as their convoy of farm carts departed was the sight and smell of their homes in flames.

After the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days and successfully forced the Balkan nation’s troops from Kosovo in June, the Zogajs--a family of 21 members led by 75-year-old great-grandfather Idriz--returned to a scene of devastation.

Their stone house was gutted, and, standing on the ashes and rubble on the ground floor, one stared up only at blackened steel beams and empty sky. Hardly any house around was undamaged by fire or artillery. Bloated carcasses of animals littered the fields. Across the lane from the Zogajs’ home, another family was digging up the bodies of three elderly relatives in order to give them a decent funeral.

Six months later, with the brutal Balkan winter bearing down, there has been astounding progress. In the first three weeks of December alone, 65 new roofs went up in Belanica to replace those destroyed by Yugoslav and Serbian forces. The new red tiles stand out brightly against the gray sky.

And there’s more: The devastated elementary school in the village green has been rehabilitated. Its broken wall and plumbing have been repaired, its roof patched, its windows replaced and its classrooms and hallways repainted. The rusting shells of cars that were torched by the Serbs have been dragged away. And instead of children’s screams of fear, the schoolyard echoes with laughter and the shouts of a soccer match.

Abuse Now Shifted Against the Serbs

The tenor of the reports coming out of Kosovo has been negative throughout the six months since NATO-led peacekeepers entered this province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, and an estimated 800,000 ethnic Albanian refugees returned from forced exile.

A campaign of score-settling by Albanian extremists has seen several hundred ethnic Serbs slain and thousands more driven from their homes. In one incident, a newly arrived U.N. worker from Bulgaria was shot to death because he answered a question in Serbian, erroneously marking him as a Serb. These human rights abuses taking place under the nose of the international community have left many to question whether NATO’s war defending the province’s ethnic Albanian majority against abuse by Yugoslav and Serbian forces was justified.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the small Serbian community remaining in Kosovo have refused to cooperate with ethnic Albanian politicians, and the Albanians themselves are internally divided. These differences have hobbled the work of the province’s United Nations administrators, led by the French humanitarian Bernard Kouchner.

Darkened lights, rising crime, growing mounds of uncollected garbage in the streets and a general sense of insecurity show how slow Kouchner’s administration has been to get a grip. UNMIK--the U.N. Mission in Kosovo--is multinational, multilingual and as bureaucratic as any other U.N. program, and Kouchner is still compelled to go begging the world to deliver on promised funds and personnel, especially 3,000 civilian police officers, only about half of whom have arrived.

Yet amid all this gloom, some good things are happening.

Among them, the race against winter has been largely won. From the time international aid organizations returned to the province in June--right on the heels of the NATO-led peacekeepers with KFOR, or Kosovo Force--they were determined to provide at least minimal shelter for the estimated 700,000 people whose homes where seriously damaged or destroyed during the war.

The target of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees was one dry, warm room per family for the winter, and the goal generally has been achieved. Housing kits consisting of heavy plastic sheeting and wood, or in some cases heated tents, have been distributed in villages across Kosovo.

German Volunteers Help With Rebuilding

Belanica was luckier than most communities. Situated in a zone administered by German peacekeepers, the village was put under the care of the Humanitarian Cargo Carriers. The private German organization, using money from the German government, assessed all the buildings in Belanica and then purchased and delivered lumber and tiles to put roofs over the scorched houses. HCC also led the reconstruction of the school. The village clinic was cleaned up; it is staffed now most of the time with local doctors and nurses and visited twice a week by foreign health professionals.

Parallel to these international efforts, the people of Belanica made their own strides to revive the village that is home to 2,600 people.

When the refugees first returned, the only commercial establishment was an outdoor card table where rudimentary items such as cigarettes, soft drinks and diesel fuel in cans were sold.

Now residents have reopened a working gas pump and established two or three shops selling household items and foodstuffs from Macedonia, Greece and Turkey. The yard and interior of the village mosque, whose minaret was destroyed by Yugoslav artillery, has been cleared of rubble by volunteers. A hole in the wall has been bricked over pending restoration.

School began even as the reconstruction work was underway. In August, students resumed the academic year that was interrupted in March by the outbreak of the air war. That term was finished in October, and the children started a new school year last month.

Teacher Suzanna Sertolli said most of the children seem to be recovering from their trauma, though a few--”those whose father or mother was killed”--keep to themselves.

“The absence of a parent can be sensed,” she said. “So we try to make these children to forget, to get the feeling of some happiness again.”

Mayor Gani Zogaj, a distant cousin of Idriz, said 13 people from Belanica and an undetermined number from a nearby area were killed in March after Yugoslav forces occupied the village. He said most of the villagers who survived are in a state of “postwar trauma.”

“Everyone is trying to find work, and to find a way to live somehow,” he said. “There is still a certain anarchy. We are not yet organized enough and have our internal problems.” Nevertheless, so long as foreign assistance continues, he believes that “we will come out of this better and stronger than before the war.”

Talk From Yugoslav Capital Unsettling

No Serbs lived in Belanica before the war, and none lives here now. Villagers are still bitter from the injuries done to them during the war and show no particular sympathy for the Serbs who have been slain or driven from their homes in other parts of Kosovo in recent months.

Indeed, the Zogajs, when they think of Serbs at all, still tend to see them as people to be feared. Especially unsettling are the threats that emanate occasionally from Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia and Serbia, that the Yugoslav army will one day return to the province.

“We are for the Americans, or the French, or for anybody who is good for Kosovo and who won’t allow the Serbs to be here and do such things to us as they did before,” said Iljaz Zogaj, Idriz’s son.

The Zogaj family did not wait for international assistance to start rebuilding. Doubtful that aid would arrive in time, Idriz was determined that the family--especially his toddler great-grandchildren--not go through the winter without a roof.

At first the Zogajs were sharing the floor of their barn with the resident mice, said Idriz. Later, they put up a donated tent in the yard for shelter.

But by using extended family networks, the elder Zogaj got a total of about $6,200 from two sons working in Switzerland and Slovenia, enough to start the repairs to the family home here. When that money ran out, he managed to borrow another $6,200 from friends and members of his wife’s family.

Idriz’s 27-year-old grandson, Muhamet Zogaj, did much of the labor. “Twenty tractors of debris we removed from that house,” he marveled. But everyone helped, said Iljaz, working 12 hours a day. The family moved in late last month.

For the old man, the sweetest moment was when the new roof proved its worth: “Three days after the roof was built, it rained. And when I saw that not a single drop was coming in, my heart grew big.”

Using donated fertilizer and seed, the family managed to till and plant its fields for next year. The wheat should be harvested in July and the corn a few months later--the first time in three years that the family of farmers will have produced a crop.

The following year, the first harvest from the currently unproductive vineyards should be coming in and, God willing, Idriz will taste his grapes again, fulfilling a wish he expressed when he was in exile.

Patriarch Frets About Debt Taken On

For Idriz Zogaj, who in spring bore the insult and discomfort of forced exile with uncommon dignity and stoicism, being in debt with no prospect of income is an entirely different matter; that is something almost too hard to endure.

In contrast to other members of his family, who show only delight at being back in their home after so many tribulations, Idriz is full of frets and worries. He believes that he made a mistake starting the repairs on his own. Other villagers have had their homes rebuilt at virtually no cost by the international groups, while he spent what was for him a small fortune to buy wood, concrete, steel and 3,000 roof tiles.

Now his money has run out, he said, so the family will have to wait for extras, such as interior doors, covering for the bare concrete floors, furniture and clothing. There are no factories operating in Kosovo, and the family will consume most of the crops it raises. He sees little chance that any family member will find a wage-paying job.

“I may have to sell my land because I cannot lose my honor,” he muttered bleakly. “I have to pay back that money.”

The women of the family--who tend to gather in the kitchen around a new white enamel wood-burning stove donated by the European Community Humanitarian Organization--show none of the anxiety about money, jobs and the future that preoccupies the patriarch.

“How can you ask?” scoffed Idriz’s tiny wife, Feride, when queried about whether she was happy to be back.

“When we were in Albania, we used to say that if only we could get back to our gateposts and then die, that would be enough.”

“Now we are all right, and we are happy,” summed up Idriz’s 22-year-old granddaughter, Mexhite Zogaj, who in addition to celebrating being at home is coaxed by brother Muhamet to admit her joy about something else: She recently became engaged.

For her, the memory of the family’s ordeal is fading--and yet still astonishing.

“Now when we speak about the war, we always wonder: How is it that we survived?” she said. “Sometimes I am unable to believe that we are all here and that we all lived through all that.”

*

“The Death of Belanica,” John Daniszewski’s special report from last April, is available on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/belanica.