Kosovo Rebel Survived Serbs--but Not NATO’s Bullets

As Fari Bici, a 20-year-old soldier in the Kosovo Liberation Army, prepared Friday to go out and mark Kosovo’s first Freedom Day, he told his younger brother: “This is the night I have been waiting for all my life.”

Before the night was finished, however, Bici was far from celebrating. Instead, he lay sprawled on the pavement, dead--along with a companion--from NATO bullets.

It was a sad, ironic end for a young man who, for the past three months, had dodged Serbian shelling and gunfire in the mountains north of Pristina, the provincial capital, winning the respect of his comrades when he vowed that he would surrender his life before he would surrender his unit’s heavy machine gun.

According to his brothers and uncles, red-eyed from crying inside their house Saturday afternoon, no one in the province was happier than Bici when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization finally came to Kosovo.

The British paratroopers who killed Bici and his friend, Avni Dudi, 24, and wounded two others in their car said afterward that they had been forced to act in self-defense because the ethnic Albanians were shooting an automatic weapon as the car approached a government building where about 50 Serbs were being guarded by NATO forces.

“When KFOR soldiers feel their lives are in danger, they will respond quickly and robustly,” said Maj. Jan Joosten, a spokesman for the international peacekeepers known as KFOR, for Kosovo Force. “It is best not to put it to the challenge.”

Bici’s grieving family members gave a different account. They said Bici was not out to hurt anybody, especially not NATO soldiers.

According to his brother Driton, 17, who was in the Opel Cadet that the British troops fired on, Bici was the only one of seven people riding in the car with a weapon, and that was only a handgun, a gift from his uncle. Bici had fired it into the air about three times before he was killed, said Driton.

The teenager said his brother and their friends were caught up in a contagious euphoria that swept through Pristina as tens of thousands of Kosovo Albanians took to the streets, reveling in their liberation from Serbian domination.

“We were so happy, we were tearing our clothes,” Driton said. Since NATO arrived in Kosovo on June 12, its troops have shot and killed a handful of Serbs who dared to challenge them. But the shooting of Bici and Dudi was the first time that any of the province’s majority ethnic Albanians have been killed by the peacekeepers.

It remains to be seen how the ethnic Albanians in the province will react to the shooting, but there were murmurs of complaint on the streets of Pristina on Saturday.

“If they start to shoot Albanians that way, then what are they here for? Nothing,” said Veliu Shukri, the proprietor of the Extra Hamburger restaurant, a few steps from where the shooting took place at midnight Friday.

“We were paving the way for NATO, so NATO should not be killing Albanians in this way,” said Sylejman Gjonbalaj, a customer.

“I don’t mean the links between Albanians and NATO are going to break up, but this case could cool feelings toward NATO,” said Gjonbalaj, who expressed the gratitude of Kosovo Albanians to the Western alliance. “You have given us life.”

Joosten, the NATO spokesman, said the actions of the British troops were under review, as happens whenever a civilian is shot.

But he stressed that any soldier has the right to self-defense and said it is difficult to dispute the split-second judgments made by troops on the ground.

Despite the passage of a deadline for KLA soldiers to surrender most weapons, Joosten acknowledged that in many cases during Friday night’s celebrations, NATO troops did not intervene when revelers fired into the air because to do so could have sparked a confrontation that would have hurt bystanders.

KFOR does intend to disarm the populace, but gradually, as conditions permit, Joosten said.

Bici’s family said that firing guns in the air is a traditional way to celebrate in the Balkans and that the British forces should have known they were in no danger from the ethnic Albanian population grateful for its liberation.

“They were shooting because they were happy, they were free,” Driton said.

His brother and the others in the car had no sense of danger, he said.

“We weren’t worried at all. . . . We understood that it would be OK.”

At the scene of the shooting, there was a regular British checkpoint that had been augmented for the night by an extra patrol, for a total of eight troops, because Serbian civilians now living in a government building were afraid for their safety.

According to accounts by the Associated Press, the white Cadet in which Bici was riding had gone past the building three times emitting gunfire, and it was only on the third time that the British troops fired.

Bici and Dudi were on the hood of the car, while inside were five passengers. Bici’s cousin Mohamet Bici was shot through the jaw and remained in Pristina Hospital on Saturday in critical condition, said his father, Sabit.

After the shooting, the five survivors, including the bleeding Mohamet, were forced to lie on the ground for an hour with soldiers standing over them pointing guns, Driton said. He said he was kicked when he tried to beg them to get medical aid to his cousin.

Heartbroken at the death of his brother, who was married and had an 8-week-old son, Driton said he still could not believe what had happened to them.

“All through the war, I was too afraid to listen to the radio because I thought I might hear that he had been killed,” he recalled of his brother. “Now, he has died in front of my eyes.”

But Driton said he does not hate the soldiers.

“There is not a human being who does not make mistakes,” he said.

“We hope and pray that these killings will be the last.”