Freed Prisoner Describes Ordeal Under Serbs

On the day the NATO bombing ended, Enver Aziz Fazliu limped back from the dead.

Pale and gaunt, he struggled across Pristina in a daze from the city jail to his sister’s home. She heard the gate open and went to the balcony. He waved from under the apricot tree. She was speechless.

“No way I could believe that was my brother,” Elhame Osmani said later. “I was thinking: ‘That’s not the Enver I know.’ He was so thin and as white as a corpse.”

Thousands are believed to have died in the Serbs’ brutal purge of Kosovo this spring that sent more than 1 million ethnic Albanians fleeing to other countries or into the wilds of the province. Thousands more were jailed, according to refugees, and the prisoners are now emerging to describe some of the worst ordeals of the war.

Seized from a refugee convoy, separated from his wife and three children and given up for dead, Fazliu vanished into a cell where he was held incommunicado for six weeks. The 41-year-old farmer’s experience--the unfinished story of a family torn apart by the conflict--sheds light on the harrowing conditions endured by Kosovo’s wartime prisoners, some of whom emerged so weak that they could barely walk.

Life behind bars in Serbian-run Kosovo was always harsh. But the state of scores of inmates freed last week, exhausted and almost skeletal, indicates how sharply conditions deteriorated after March 24, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began bombing to drive Yugoslav forces out of the Serbian province and ensure a degree of autonomy for its ethnic Albanian majority. Serbia is Yugoslavia’s dominant republic.

Fazliu said he was denied food and liquid for the first 2 1/2 days of confinement at a driving school taken over by security police who kicked and beat him with truncheons while interrogating him about the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA.

Before the bombing, that kind of treatment was common for male prisoners in the first 72 hours of detention. But afterward, they were usually given warm meals, regular exercise and some access to visitors--but not always a defense lawyer--while awaiting trial.

NATO’s air assault ended any pretense of Serbian justice in Kosovo. Courts stopped functioning. Meal rations shrank, daily regimens tightened and visiting hours ended at the province’s six official detention centers. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitored prisons in Kosovo, closed its office here.

Serbian police, on the run from the bombs, set up additional, makeshift jails in schools, factories and fire stations as they attacked villages and refugee convoys, separating adult males from their wives and children and locking up many of the men.

As a result, thousands of ethnic Albanians--no one is sure how many--spent the war in hidden, hellish detention, with little or no information on how the conflict was unfolding, except for the noise of the bombs exploding. Then suddenly last week, with the defeated Yugoslav forces withdrawing and NATO troops about to move in, the jailers let most of the prisoners go; about 1,100 rebel suspects are believed to have been taken to Serbian jails outside Kosovo.

Fazliu said he was kept with as many as eight other male prisoners in a 16-by-8-foot cell that had one toilet. For the first three weeks he was there, they slept on a bare concrete floor--thin plastic mats came later--and were never allowed to wash or change clothes.

Paint on the cell’s windows blocked out sunlight, and the farmer was given just a half-hour walkabout and a brief cleanup assignment during his entire confinement. Twice a day, Fazliu was given salty water and one small piece of bread, nothing more.

On his third day in jail, Fazliu was marched out to sweep the courtyard and saw something that dimmed his hope of getting out alive--a pair of antiaircraft artillery guns. He would hear them almost every night, firing at NATO planes overhead.

“I gave up trying to survive,” said the farmer, who felt certain that he would be bombed by the pilots trying to save him--if he were not executed, or beaten, or starved to death, first by the Serbs who locked him up. Meanwhile, his family heard his name on a television broadcast of a list of victims allegedly massacred by Yugoslav forces.

Fazliu told his story sitting on his sister’s couch and wearing the same jeans and green sweater that he never changed while in prison. His sister washed the clothes and is nursing him back to health. Fazliu said he urinates blood and is often kept awake by the lingering pain of his beatings. A quiet, well-read man with 1,500 books in his library, he can no longer, for some reason, concentrate on a printed page.

His jeans are now 3 to 4 inches too big in the waist; he figures that he lost 40 of the 180 pounds he carried into jail on his 5-foot-6-inch frame. His thick, graying black hair was shaved to a prison crew cut.

But the most striking mark of his imprisonment is evident in his deep-set eyes, which show sadness even when he smiles. The sadness flows from a single instant April 30, when police pulled Fazliu away from 31 members of his extended family as they were fleeing in two tractor-drawn trailers from their burned and looted village, Bariljevo, 10 miles north of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo.

From that moment, he said, he expected to die, and that resignation helped him endure his imprisonment. What he could not bear, he said, was the memory of his sudden departure.

“I was deeply depressed that I had no chance to say goodbye to my family,” said the farmer, who left his 39-year-old wife, Shurrie, to drive the tractor pulling his sons--ages 10, 8 and 10 months--and other relatives. Neither he nor his sister knows what became of them.

The farmer spent the next three days denying to his interrogators at the driving school that he had ever been a member of the rebel KLA.

“In each room there were two prisoners and two policemen,” he recalled. “They would beat us and wait, then beat us again and wait. They asked me, ‘Where have you hidden your weapon?’ ‘Are you helping the KLA?’ ‘Were you trying to kill policemen?’ ”

Six days later, in the Pristina jail, they handed him a typed form with the results of the investigation. It said he was being held under Serbia’s anti-terrorism law “because of the founded suspicion that this person committed a crime, destroyed the evidence and might try to escape.”

He passed the rest of his captivity in boredom and despair, waiting to die. In mid-May, a new prisoner came into the cell with the only interesting news he was to hear until the very end--a vague report about possible peace talks.

When Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his generals finally bowed to NATO’s demands, word filtered into Fazliu’s second-floor cell in a roundabout way.

A busload of army deserters arrested in the waning days of the war were brought into the jail and ordered to beat up ethnic Albanian prisoners in cells on the ground floor. In the course of this punishment, some of the soldiers let it slip that peace was at hand. Later, two of the beaten ethnic Albanians were transferred to Fazliu’s cell.

Word spread that the prison, part of an Interior Ministry complex, was closing because of the peace accord. The guards gave Fazliu a plastic bag with two of his confiscated possessions, a belt and 2 dinars--about 11 cents--but kept his watch.

Still, he couldn’t quite believe his fate until a surreal passage at the prison gate, when the jailers smiled, shook the prisoners’ hands and said, “You’re leaving, and we’re leaving. Goodbye.”

That was last Thursday. Fazliu’s sister kept him indoors for three days so he could regain his strength. On Sunday, they ventured out to welcome British troops entering Pristina and check out a KLA “representative office” being set up at the school down the street. Three days later, NATO took over the Interior Ministry complex, including the jail where Fazliu was held, as headquarters for its peacekeeping forces in Kosovo.

Like every other ethnic Albanian in Pristina, Fazliu said he was overwhelmed by this historic shift as ethnic Albanians reclaimed the city. But he was soon to learn that the departing Yugoslav forces have yet to abandon the roads around his village, preventing any trip to search for family.

“Even though I had no hope for myself, I thought from the first day that the Serbs would be defeated,” he said. “Even if I die, I kept telling myself, my children will cherish freedom. . . . I will be certain of this peace only when I can see them.”