Beloved Doctor’s ‘Crime’ Was to Help Her People

To the Serbian state, Dr. Flore Brovina’s orphanage, first-aid courses and even knitting classes were part of a terrorist plot.

They were crimes so serious that, before Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic gave in to NATO and pulled his forces out of Kosovo, his police moved Brovina, 49, from a provincial jail to another region of Serbia. For her, peace did not mean freedom.

As most Kosovo residents celebrate what they see as liberation by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Brovina and hundreds of other ethnic Albanians are locked away in jails elsewhere in Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic. Kosovo is a province of Serbia.

“I think these people are being held as hostages by Serbia to use them for bargaining,” Brovina’s husband, Ajri Begu, 48, said Tuesday.

Brovina, who is awaiting trial, has high blood pressure and is partially paralyzed due to the stress of her prison ordeal, said Begu, an economist and writer.

He has appealed to U.S. diplomats and the NATO-led peacekeeping force’s commander in Kosovo, British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, to help Brovina get medical treatment, but her case is only one on a growing list.

Brovina’s court-appointed Serbian lawyer, Zarko Jovanovic, told Begu that an estimated 1,500 ethnic Albanian prisoners were transferred to 10 Serbian jails outside Kosovo and remain behind bars, Begu said.

No one outside the Yugoslav and Serbian governments can be sure of the exact numbers because, in what the International Committee of the Red Cross considers a serious mistake, NATO did not insist that foreign monitors receive access to Kosovo Albanian prisoners as a condition for the peace deal it reached with Milosevic this month.

“We must recognize that in a political agreement like that, humanitarian issues are not on top,” Urs Boegli, a Red Cross spokesman, said here. “However, we do like them to be somewhere.”

Brovina, a pediatrician, is so famous among Kosovo Albanians for helping war orphans, the sick and the poor that everyone, it seems, knows whom you’re talking about when you say the name Flore. Her husband, who spent most of the war in Macedonia, cannot walk anywhere in Pristina without someone asking where she is.

Brovina’s orphanage in central Pristina, which once was home to about 25 children at a time, is empty. No one knows where the children, who lost their parents to the civil war, have gone.

Brovina’s husband was in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia and Serbia, when the bombing began, but she refused to flee Kosovo and leave the people who needed her more than ever.

Instead, she moved into a neighbor’s apartment on the second floor, hoping the police might find her home empty and think she and her husband were long gone.

The final entries in the doctor’s diary, which police left behind after looting one of her clinics in the Sunny Hill district of Pristina, are chilling descriptions of her last days of freedom.

“Yesterday, I couldn’t come [to the clinic] because walking the street after noon is very frightening,” Brovina wrote March 25, the second day of NATO airstrikes. “I visited a pregnant woman in Dardania [district] whose name is Arta.”

The diary, written on graph paper, ends with a terse entry that Brovina apparently made at her desk in the clinic’s front room on March 26.

“I came at 11:25 a.m. Nobody in streets,” she wrote. “People are waiting for bread--long lines. Telephone is disconnected--even here. Now I don’t have any connection with anyone.”

Two days later, Serbian police came knocking at her neighbor’s door, demanding to know where the doctor was hiding.

“They searched there and told [the friend], ‘If you are hiding her, we are going to execute you,’ ” Begu said.

Eight Serbian police officers in two cars returned April 20, then waited secretly in the stairwell and outside for Brovina to arrive. They grabbed her as she walked through the lobby door.

“All the time, she was working,” her husband said. “She wanted to help people. She never tried to leave.”

At first, Brovina was taken to a jail in Lipljan, about 10 miles south of Pristina, where several thousand men and women were crammed into cells and even into the guards’ sports complex, former inmates said.

But on June 9 or 10, while Milosevic’s government was negotiating final details of the Yugoslav withdrawal from Kosovo, Serbian police moved Brovina to Pozarevac prison near Belgrade, her husband said.

The charges against Brovina were filed in Docket No. 46/99 in a Pristina court, with investigative Judge Danica Marinkovic presiding. The judge is widely feared in the province for decisions viewed as biased in favor of the police.

The indictment accuses Brovina of “joining in enemy duties,” committing “criminal acts endangering the territorial integrity” of Yugoslavia and terrorism. The crimes of which she is accused date back to May 13, 1991, and continued until May 17 of this year, police charge.

Among other things, Brovina is charged with organizing “the making of pullover sweaters and also masks for members of the terrorist band KLA,” the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, and with “supplying food, shoes and clothing for the same people.”

In Count 1, Brovina stands accused of taking part “in creating a society whose purpose” is to win Kosovo’s independence. From the start of 1998, “she took part in creating terrorist gangs called the KLA,” the indictment adds.

The evidence? On Jan. 18, 1992, Brovina met with 30 other women in her Pristina apartment to form the League of Albanian Women, of which she was elected president.

The women’s “first assignments were organizing the hostile demonstration in Pristina [against Serbian rule] and gathering material means for the work of other illegal societies with the same purpose,” the indictment says.

Brovina further committed criminal acts by taking part in meetings in March of the Independent Federation of Trade Unions, the Islamic Community and the Humanitarian Society of Mother Teresa, the indictment adds.

She also allegedly served as the KLA’s “minister of health” and set up “war clinics” in the devastated Drenica Valley in central Kosovo for treating KLA members.

If convicted, Brovina could receive 10 years in prison. In denying bail, the judge said Brovina must be held while awaiting trial so the defendant cannot interfere with witnesses.

At the time of her court appearance in May, Yugoslav forces were deporting hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians into neighboring Macedonia and Albania.

Brovina’s husband does not have the key to the orphanage where she allegedly hatched terrorist plots. A younger man had to climb through a window Tuesday and unlock the door so he could see what remained.

There were still a few of the first aid pamphlets that she produced and distributed to about 20,000 ethnic Albanians, most of them villagers, Brovina’s husband said.

They have simple instructions under diagrams on how to treat such things as heart attacks, heat stroke, snakebites, broken bones and wounds.

As Begu gathered up his jailed wife’s photographs of malnourished children she had treated and of a visit by Santa Claus to the orphans’ Christmas party, he also collected some of the handicrafts she had taught village women to make.

They were tablecloths knitted from strips of plastic shopping bags. They were so beautifully made that several hung on the walls to brighten the rooms.

Begu had so much to preserve for his wife that he could barely carry it when he walked out of the orphanage, whose windows rattled ever so slightly because a NATO helicopter was passing high overhead.