Kosovo Returnees Pursue Clues to Fate of Loved Ones

In better times, Nazmi Hoxha was a university student working toward a degree in German. But of late, his life has turned macabre. Every day for the past week, he has risen early, mounted his bicycle and pedaled 10 miles to the city cemetery, to spend hours looking into graves.

He is searching for someone in particular: his brother Shuki, the baby of the family, who he has reason to believe is buried in one of about 200 unmarked mounds here.

Amid the horrors of Kosovo, Hoxha is not alone. All over the province so recently racked by war, returning refugee families uncertain about the fate of their loved ones are using shovels and hoes to scratch the earth for answers. Finding the body and giving it a proper burial is, they believe, their final obligation to the dead.

It is grim, ghoulish work. The corpses turning up in wells, destroyed homes, rivers, open fields and unmarked graves often are badly decomposed and terrifying to gaze upon.

Families Becoming Homicide Detectives

But when one is found and identified, it gives the family a sense of finality and the ability to move on with life.

Friends and relatives with a general idea of their loved one’s demise are becoming their own homicide detectives, seeking out witnesses and following clues and instinct until they come to the place where someone says a corpse is buried. Then they put on plastic gloves and dig.

“We do this because we have our tradition, and our tradition is that we have to find our relatives,” said Afrim Qarkaxhija, a civil engineer who had just dug up his first cousin Saturday in the Djakovica cemetery.

“He deserves more than this, but this is all that we can do.”

Nazmi Hoxha’s quest is typical. On the night of April 2, his parents and younger siblings were asleep in their home on the outskirts of Djakovica when Serbian police broke into the house and woke everyone up. The family was ordered to leave for Albania, he said, but the police--after studying Shuki’s 15-year-old face by the flicker of a cigarette lighter--ordered him to stay behind.

Sibling’s Search Leads to Other Graves

Before the other members of the family had gone too far, they heard gunshots behind them. From neighbors whom they met on the road, they learned that Shuki was dead in front of the house. The neighbors said his corpse looked as if he were sitting, staring at the stars.

“I stay day and night with open eyes, thinking where is he,” Hoxha said. “I mostly see in my dreams him telling me to find him.”

Hoxha’s father does not have the will to search, Hoxha said, so the job has fallen to him. He first was able to learn from city officials that his brother’s body was picked up and brought to the cemetery.

But no one seems to know exactly where in the long line of unmarked graves it can be found.

So with the assistance of the cemetery’s crew of Gypsy gravediggers, Hoxha so far has opened seven graves in the area where other bodies from early April have been found.

Fighting back tears, Hoxha and two of his sisters--who have waited, faces etched with anger, frustration and sorrow, as the search continues--said they would be able to identify the corpse by the black jeans and yellow jacket Shuki was wearing.

“Even though I am very angry that he was killed, I know that my brother died a brave man. He showed no fear to the police,” said Hoxha, 30. Shuki wrote poetry about democracy, which he believed would come to Kosovo from the West, he added.

Looking for the body in such a manner is horrible, Hoxha said, but he feels he has no choice. “Everyone who has a member of a family dead finds he must do this.”

For now, Hoxha is frustrated. He would like city officials to order all the unmarked graves in the cemetery opened and the bodies put on display for family members to identify and rebury. But so far, there is no real civil authority operating in the province to make such a decision--only NATO peacekeeping troops and Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas, who are in the process of being disarmed.

British officials have estimated that 10,000 Kosovo Albanians may have been killed by Yugoslav police, paramilitary forces or army troops between the March 24 start of NATO’s air war on Yugoslavia and the June 9 peace agreement.

In the southern part of Kosovo, in Prizren, Suva Reka, Djakovica and surrounding villages, it is still common for journalists to stumble across bloated bodies or skeletons that have not been buried. In the village of Damjan on Saturday, residents pointed to two headless corpses floating in a well. On Sadik Stavileci Street in Djakovica, six burned skeletons lay among the roof tiles of a burned-down house. In a wheat field in Suva Reka, the body of a naked woman, wearing red fingernail polish and a ring with a red stone, lay beneath a tarp, flies hovering over her rotting flesh.

In addition, almost every community has fresh graves. Some appear to be mass graves, dug with a bulldozer and large enough to contain many bodies. Others are single graves laid out in rows, often with wooden headstones but without any marking to show who is buried in them.

When a body is identified, the reburial ceremony that follows serves as an occasion for the whole community to shed tears and share a collective grief over all the suffering Kosovo has witnessed.

That happened Friday when Blerim Bardoniqi, a prominent and popular architect in Djakovica, was dug up in the cemetery by his brother-in-law Argim Fida and his friend Ismail Xharavina. As the rest of his family was being herded off to Albania on April 2, Bardoniqi, 38, was put up against a wall in his garden and shot.

Fida, who is a physician, and Xharavina, an architect, found Bardoniqi in the third grave they opened, recognizing him by his height and distinctive black beard, and laid him out on the grass. Within hours, they had organized a funeral, complete with coffin and a brick-lined grave, attended by about 100 people.

Bardoniqi’s wife, Dhurata, and 7-year-old son, Edon, wept inconsolably, the boy pounding the dark wooden coffin and begging his father to wake up. The dead man’s 2-year-old daughter was too young to understand but cried in confusion.

Afterward, the crowd quietly dispersed, each person lost in private grief.

The exhumation and reburial had to be done, Fida said. His sister would never accept her husband’s murder, but now “she feels a kind of peace. We have found the body, and he is resting here.”