Prisons, Graves Hold Answers for Many Searchers

On their way out of Kosovo, Serbian security forces took prisoners with them and left ethnic Albanians to dig up shallow graves and wonder who might still be alive.

Many of those searching for the missing can only hope that by digging up unmarked graves in the fields and forests, they might find a relative’s body, to give it a proper burial and lay one more of Kosovo’s ghosts to rest.

But negotiators who made the peace deal with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic failed to include a clause guaranteeing the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all prisons to ensure that Kosovo Albanians didn’t disappear into Serbian jails.

The Red Cross is now talking with officials in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, and hopes to get permission soon to help search for missing people who may be in prison, agency spokesman Urs Boegli said over the weekend in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital.

“Unanswered questions are the germs of the next conflict,” Boegli said.

The list of the missing runs long, and it includes names such as Albin Kurti, a student leader whose father hasn’t seen him since May 29, the day they both got out of Lipljan prison after 33 days.

The Serbs set Kurti’s father, Zaim, his brother and a friend free, but they kept him. While no one has been able to find the activist yet, his family gets some strength from rumors that he is alive in a jail farther north in Serbia.

Three weeks after his release from Lipljan jail, Emrlla Zeka, 34, still has sunken eyes and clothes that hang loose from his once badly malnourished body.

His voice was steady Saturday as he described how, about 5:55 a.m. on April 27, 33 uniformed Serbian police and six secret police officers in plain clothes stormed the Kurti home in central Pristina.

Albin Kurti, a pacifist student leader who grew more sympathetic to the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, as Serbian repression worsened, was in hiding with his father, two younger brothers and Zeka.

“They pointed guns at our foreheads, and someone said: ‘Don’t make any suspicious moves. Just give me your ID cards,’ ” Zeka recalled in Pristina.

The police put each of them in separate rooms, and, within 10 minutes, someone was firing at the house. Police soon took Zeka and the three oldest Kurtis to jail, without charging them.

Friend Seen for Last Time

On May 29, as NATO’s airstrikes put more heat on Milosevic to surrender, the four men found themselves together again for the first time in a month, sitting in a police van heading to Pristina.

The van stopped at the capital’s central police station, where all but Albin Kurti, including five Serbian army deserters, were ordered to get out. The police then took Kurti inside the station and told the others not to raise their heads to look at him or to speak to him, Zeka said.

A Serbian guard later said that Kurti had appeared in front of Judge Danica Marinkovic, who has become well known for siding with the police when investigating massacres such as the Jan. 15 killing of more than 45 villagers in Racak.

At the thought of what might have happened to Kurti after the young man stood handcuffed in front of the judge, Zeka burst into tears. He repeated a promise he made to Kurti’s father after their release from Lipljan’s overcrowded prison, where antiaircraft guns fired each night at North Atlantic Treaty Organization warplanes.

“He told me to keep my mouth shut about what happened to us,” Zeka said as tears streamed down his hollow cheeks.

By Sunday, Besim Morina, 30, and Dukagjin Desku, 31, had been searching for their fathers for three days, following one lead to another and, when they thought they were close to their worst fear, picking up shovels and digging.

The men’s fathers, Rame Morina, 63, and Emin Desku, 60, both disappeared in the central Kosovo town of Klina on March 28 after local Serbian police led them away, witnesses said Sunday.

“Somebody told me my father is alive and his is dead,” Morina said as he and Desku continued their painful odyssey in search of graves just outside Klina. “Somebody told him my father is dead and his is alive. It’s all confused.”

On March 28, as Morina’s father was heeding a Serbian police expulsion order with six others in his car, a police officer arrived and told him that Klina’s local commander wanted to see him, his son said.

He headed to the police station about 1 p.m., and that was the last his family saw of him.

“It’s possible he is in prison, but day by day, there is less chance of that,” Morina said.

Two or three hours after grabbing his father, the police took away Desku’s.

They ordered him out of his car while Dukagjin, his mother, wife and two young daughters, 3 and 1, watched. They were driving in a column of about 5,000 refugees ordered to leave their homes and go to Albania, Desku said.

“If you ask my daughter, ‘Where is your grandfather?’ she will tell you: ‘The police took him away,’ ” Desku said. He wants to give her a more complete answer before she is much older.

Morina and Desku think the police singled out their fathers because they were wealthy merchants, but a local schoolteacher and human rights activist named Hamit Krasniqi went missing from Klina the same day.

As Italian troops moved into the town Sunday, and KLA guerrillas unofficially took charge of police duties, Morina and Desku sat in the shade of a tree, sipping thick black coffee, listening for new leads to chase down.

Klina was known for a particularly vicious strain of Serbian nationalism, but before they joined the mounting exodus from Kosovo, a few of the town’s Serbs quietly told ethnic Albanian neighbors where to search for their dead.

‘We Just Killed Your Neighbors’

Morina and Desku followed one such tip to the home of an ethnic Albanian villager after hearing that his children said they saw corpses lying next to the muddy Drini River.

The villager wasn’t very helpful.

“If you know anything, I need to know too. Don’t hold back,” Morina pleaded. “Tell me.”

But he got nowhere and drove farther along the dirt track to a friend of Desku’s family, Anton Maloku, a wealthy landowner with a large house surrounded by apple trees, rosebushes and high walls.

Maloku opened the steel gates to his compound for the two, invited them in for more coffee and listened quietly to their questions before giving them bad news.

Local Serbian police officers had visited one day and, apparently trying to intimidate Maloku, told him: “Good news. We just killed your neighbors.”

“They said they killed them and threw them in the river,” he added.

Maloku took Morina and Desku to a dirt road that led through a field into a forest next to the Drini River, where they carried two shovels and a pick and walked past a charred trash heap into the trees.

Bits of paper with charred edges lay among the ashes, along with five shells from bullets that had been fired from a handgun.

Morina kept the burned pieces of paper, which were remnants of police documents, along with the shell casings, and hoped to hand them over to investigators from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

He also wants them to see what he found next, when the men started digging at a spot where old tracks from a bulldozer suggested that a piled-up mound of dirt might be a grave.

About a foot down, the men struck a human body, fully clothed and lying on its side.

Wearing gas masks that members of the KLA found after taking over Klina’s police station, Morina and Desku dug harder, until they found a wallet buried next to the corpse.

There was no money in the wallet, but there was a driver’s license, belonging to Tome Berisha, born March 4, 1945.

Desku and Morina asked a local villager to inform his family and to carry on digging for what villagers said would probably be the corpses of a woman, her two children and four men.

No Identification on Man’s Body

Then Morina and Desku moved to another suspected grave site on a hilltop overlooking Klina, where a backhoe had cut a trench into the earth and left gouges with its teeth.

Artan Vrankaj, a 19-year-old Gypsy who lives nearby, told the men that he had seen a headless corpse that was badly decomposed lying on the dirt track long before some funeral company workers came from town and buried it in an unmarked grave.

Several pieces of a human skull were lying in the dirt about 5 yards away, and from Vrankaj’s description of the clothes, Morina thought the body might be that of his father.

Without a face to look at, there was no way to be certain as the men dug deeper and more of the body was exposed. The answer would come from inside the pockets of a winter coat the victim wore over a sweater and white shirt on the day he died.

There was no wallet this time, just a thick wad of Yugoslav currency. In another pocket, the men found a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a packet of tissues.

While the others continued digging, Morina sat on the hillside rubbing the glasses again and again with a tissue, and then another one, trying to remember if his father had ever worn such a pair.

He couldn’t recall for sure. But when he got to a phone that worked, Morina called his mother and asked her. Those were his father’s glasses, she told him. They had their answer.