Ashes, Bits of Bone Testify to Another Massacre

Schoolteacher Selim Feraj searched for three days from dawn until dusk, and on Monday he found what he was seeking: the remains of 20 men from his remote mountain village whom he saw machine-gunned by Serbian forces on the morning of March 25.

The discovery by Feraj, who lost his older brother that day, is the newest massacre site to be found along a horseshoe-shaped corridor of death in southern Kosovo province that stretches between Djakovica and Suva Reka. Soon after Feraj uncovered the scene, a team of human rights activists from Djakovica arrived to help document it.

Feraj made his find in a fire-gutted building that had been used to store hay. When he dug beneath the thick blanket of collapsed roof tiles, he found ashes, hundreds of pieces of charred bone, scraps of burned clothing and the rusted tobacco case of one of the victims.

“I know who it belongs to,” Feraj said. “His name was Sali.”

The remains were thoroughly burned, suggesting that they may have been set on fire more than once in attempts to erase evidence.

Feraj wept as he described the crime. At 8:30 on the morning after the first NATO airstrikes against Yugoslavia, Serbian soldiers who had already been in the village to guard the nearby border began rounding up villagers at gunpoint.

Most of the villagers were herded to one end of the settlement, but 20 men who had gathered at a house to attend a wake were taken in another direction. For reasons that are not clear to Feraj, they were the ones marked for death.

The 20 men were marched to the side of a barn and told to crouch down with their hands behind their heads. Feraj, who had watched in horror, demonstrated the pose. As the rest of the village population, including Feraj, was marched through a field to a house about 500 yards away, all 20 were mowed down by machine-gun fire.

Later, the soldiers who had carried out the execution joined the group holding the other villagers. Feraj said some of them had bloody hands and were wearing jackets they had stolen from the victims.

The dead included five of 11 teachers from the elementary school in Goden, a village of only 200 people. Feraj’s older brother, Ali, 41, was the principal of the school, which served the surrounding area.

The slain men also constituted two-thirds of the village’s adult male population, according to Feraj, making it unlikely that normal life will ever resume in Goden.

“There are too many women alone with their children,” he said.

The remoteness of Goden--it is reached by a small winding mountain track that is difficult for cars to negotiate--helped keep the remains from being found earlier. NATO forces have yet to visit Goden, although the area is pocked by craters left by NATO bombs that apparently targeted Yugoslav troops who continued to camp in the village after the population fled to Albania.

Because about 2,000 Yugoslav troops had been in and around the village for some time before the massacre, Feraj had met the Serbian captain in charge--a man named Popovic, who he said assured villagers that they would not be harmed by his troops.

After the men were killed, Feraj said, he asked the captain to kill him too, because there was no way that he would be able to take care of his own four children and his brother’s six children. According to Feraj’s account, Popovic responded that his orders had been to kill all the villagers that day but that he had decided not to follow those orders.

“For these men [killed], I could do nothing,” the captain told Feraj.

After the killings, the rest of the villagers were ordered to walk across the border into Albania. Feraj returned from a refugee camp there last week and has settled his and Ali’s family in Djakovica. Since Friday, he had searched through the ruined village for the remains.

Other villagers have trickled back--including Beshir Feraj, whose brother Metush was killed, and Gjevedet Morina, whose brother Valdet was killed. Their faces were grim as they sifted through the ashes and pieces of bone.

Beshir Feraj confirmed his cousin’s account of the killing.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” he said.

As they spoke, Zoja Osmanaj, the mother of another victim, arrived. She walked into the burned-out room where her son Bedri’s remains were incinerated and wailed: “My son, my son, my son.”

Selim Feraj had no difficulty reciting the names and ages of all 20 people killed in the tight-knit community.

Eight bore the surname Osmanaj: Sali, 67; Hamz, 41; Bedri, 27; Besheim, 24; Zymer, 40; Myftar, 50; Faik, 20; and Mehmet, 25. Eight were Ferajs, including four brothers, Ram, 43; Hysen, 40; Binak, 37; and Islam, 35; as well as Shaban, 60; Nishat, 44; Ali, 41; and Metush, 27. And four had the surname Morina: Vesel, 30; Blerim, 22; Valdet, 27; and Jonuz, 57.