Beneath Bits of Fresh Earth, Tales of Horror

Faik Fazliu looks puzzled when he’s asked for directions to the mass grave in his village.

“Which one?” he asks. “You have just passed one, and there are others ahead.”

He chooses the path that goes by where his brother and uncle were killed, leading the way through a bullet-scarred wooden gate, past a ruined home to a garage with an overturned car that was often used by Yugoslav police. The last time they drove it, they ran over the bodies of a man and a woman in the garage, Fazliu explains, and then set it ablaze. Bits of clothing and perhaps human tissue are fused to the car’s underside.

His brother Nahit and uncle Ibrahim were shot over there, he says almost casually, pointing to the bullet pockmarks in the back of the garage.

Around back, next to the bloated carcass of a brown cow: a bit of mottled earth that looks as if someone had been planning to plant a small garden. Four graves there.

Next, a path--almost a tunnel, with overhanging brush--littered with clothing, old suitcases, a mud-caked stuffed bunny. At the end, a larger disturbance of earth, this one sprinkled with old, torn identification documents. In the underbrush, another pile of clothing. In this grave, Fazliu says, are 22 bodies.

And so it goes throughout the village of Celina. As they unearth horror upon horror in the rolling hills of Kosovo, returning refugees have alerted war-crimes investigators to a series of mass murders they say were committed by Serbian forces in this community just off one of Kosovo’s main highways.

In an estimated 17 grave sites spread throughout the village, German peacekeepers say they have credible evidence of at least 119 bodies, making this placid farming community one of the worst killing fields of the Serbian rampage that forced more than 800,000 ethnic Albanians into exile.

On one hand, the killings should not be surprising. Other mass graves with scores of victims have been found in the village just to the west--Bela Crkva--and the one just to the east--Velika Krusa.

But it is dawning on investigators that almost every mound of disturbed earth in the 25-mile stretch between Prizren and Djakovica--and there are many--could represent a new tale of horror to be added to the list of crimes committed by Yugoslav forces in the bloodletting that started soon after North Atlantic Treaty Organization airstrikes began March 24.

In Celina, the number of those killed is provided by villagers, some of whom managed to sneak back into the village at night to bury their dead before fleeing to Albania. To back up their claims, many took photographs of the corpses at the time of the burials.

Investigators for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia have also been sifting through the stories and cataloging the grave sites. But for now they are short of manpower to carry out exhumations and detailed examinations of the bodies.

Every day, more reports of bodies and grave sites are being brought by refugees as they return and begin to look about, said John Bunn, a pathologist working for a British forensic team in the area gathering data for the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague.

In addition to those buried in Celina’s known mass graves, there are perhaps 110 men from the village still missing, said German Lt. Col. Dietmar Jeserich, a spokesman for the German peacekeeping contingent that is providing security in the area and cordoning off some grave sites.

Hope is dimming that all the dead will ever be tallied. Bodies are being masked by the fast-growing grass and wheat or being covered by mud in culverts, while packs of marauding dogs have made off with some remains, scattering bones across large areas.

What cannot be hidden is the pain and anger felt by the survivors.

“If this had happened to you, could you live with the Serbs?” Ilmi Doroku demands as he stands over the skull and scattered flesh and bones of an unknown victim moldering inside a half-finished building just outside Celina.

“We appreciate everything that NATO has done, but please don’t leave us with the Serbs again,” he pleads.

The speed and scale of the killings--which began in Celina only five hours after the first NATO bomb attack on Yugoslavia--show that it was not the work of a few rogue police but a calculated, planned operation, says Najdar Fazlici, a 70-year-old villager.

The first NATO bombing was at 8 p.m. March 24. By 1 a.m. March 25, a long convoy of Yugoslav army trucks and tanks had surrounded the village as well as neighboring settlements. At dawn, soldiers moved in and began shooting.

Fazlici says that he and many of the men escaped being killed because they had fled in the middle of the night for nearby mountains. Those who stayed or tried to run away later were chased around the village and into the fields, where they were immediately shot, he says--six here, a dozen there.

After three days in the mountains, most of the escapees were rounded up as well. The women were sent away to Albania immediately, according to Fazlici, but the men were forced to walk a gantlet, where they were beaten, and then had to crouch down and chant, “Serbia, Serbia.”

A few were shot even then. Fazlici says he was made to sit up to his neck in a creek while waiting for a Yugoslav army commander to decide whether they’d be killed there or allowed to flee to Albania.

The issue was decided when some empty trucks providentially turned up that could provide transport to the border, he says.

“I was thinking then that I was born again,” he says.

But being back in Celina is not the same, not with so many in the village killed.

“The people that I used to walk around with are not here any longer,” Fazlici says. “I miss them a lot.”