Dead Men’s Names Tell Chilling Tale

To most of the world, Haxhi Batusha is just a name on a list.

It’s a long list, with 344 names numbingly tallied under the locales of seven massacres, a 13-page roster of the murders pinned on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, a legal document with no hint of the hearts and souls that the Serbian strongman is said to have extinguished.

Haxhi’s is the 21st of 103 names on the international war crimes tribunal’s record of “Persons Known by Name Killed at Velika Krusa--26 March 1999.”

“Batusha, Haxhi,” the list reads about midway down its fifth page. “Male,” it says, offering only one other guess at distinguishing detail: “Approximate age: 28.”

Real age: 29. Real life: machinist in training, weekend gardener, owner of a Mercedes-Benz and a two-story house with all the comforts. Husband of nine years to brave and indomitable Hermeta. Father of four girls under the age of 7, none yet aware that their father is dead. Son of Rasim and Gjyzide, who both painfully survive him. Brother of three, cousin of many and grandson of grief-stricken Hanemsha, the Batushas’ 74-year-old matriarch, who lost 22 male relatives in a single act of ethnic slaughter.

The fact that documentation of Haxhi’s death and those of most of the other men in his family might provide the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia with the “courtroom product” to convict Milosevic has been hailed by the U.N.-appointed prosecutors as a step on the long road to justice.

But his posthumous contribution to the outside world’s quest to punish the architect of Balkan sorrow offers little comfort to Haxhi’s survivors.

Bereft of their men, burned out of their houses and pushed out of their country in the Serbs’ feverish drive to expel ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, the women and children of the Batusha clan have their sights set on a less merciful end for a man who they feel certain sent the orders for each pull of the trigger.

“We don’t want to see him tried in a Western court--that would be too good for him,” Hanemsha says of the indictment of Milosevic for the massacre of her family, the remnants of which now huddle in two rooms of a crumbling tenement in this rubbish-strewn Albanian town full of windblown grit and industrial ruin wedged between towering mountains.

“We want him to see his son and daughter doused with gasoline and burned alive, the way they killed our men,” the wizened matriarch says with tearful venom. “After he has seen what that is like, I hope he is stabbed with dull knives and left to die slowly.”

Masked Police Seize Males in Family

The Batusha women and their young children were separated from the men and boys--the youngest, Haxhi’s cousin Lirim, was only 15--by masked Serbian police early the morning of March 26, two days after NATO warplanes had begun bombing Serbian positions in Kosovo. As one gunman thrust his automatic into Haxhi’s back to drive him away from Hermeta and their terrified daughters, her husband slipped off his wristwatch and handed it to her along with the recumbent form of Nalia, the 2-year-old blissfully unaware of the mayhem as she slept in her father’s arms.

“His eyes were like those of a blind man because he didn’t want to show us any fear,” Hermeta recalls of her last glimpse of her husband. “He didn’t say goodbye like the others. I think he didn’t want to scare me.”

But Hermeta says she knew that it was the last time she would see him. Haxhi’s uncle, Ahmet, crying and clutching his two teenage sons as his wife, Vezire, was being dragged away to join the forced march of women, shouted to her in defeated agony: “We are all finished.”

The Batusha women insist that there was no bad blood between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Krusa until the very day of the massacre. Unlike other villages, where Serbian authorities had long been mistreating the ethnic Albanians, Krusa was a rare enclave where the two peoples continued to live in peace.

Two of Haxhi’s uncles worked side by side with Serbs in the village factory that distilled the potent plum brandy drunk in copious quantities by both groups and called rakije in the Albanian language and slivovic by the Serbs.

Haxhi had only two days earlier returned to Krusa from his boardinghouse in Pristina, the provincial capital of Kosovo, where he was studying at a trade school to become a machinist. Usually he came home only on weekends, but he was in Krusa on that ill-fated Friday because tensions in Pristina had erupted when the NATO bombing started.

“We loved each other very much, and he wanted us all to be together in Kosovo,” Hermeta says in explaining why Haxhi was in his troubled homeland while his father and two brothers were living in Muenster, Germany.

Haxhi’s father, Rasim, and his two younger brothers, Adnan and Zenad, are the only adult male survivors of the Batusha clan--a saving grace that only fleetingly eases the sorrow of Hanemsha, who was mother, grandmother, aunt or cousin to all 22 Batusha men killed March 26.

“I never urged Haxhi to come to Germany because he told me the Serbs in our village had promised nothing bad would happen there,” says 51-year-old Rasim, who came to Albania to look for the rest of his family after hearing of the atrocities and expulsions.

Only the day before the massacre in Krusa, two Serbian brothers who had long served in the village unit of the national police force assured Haxhi and his uncles that they were safe. Everyone knew the Krusa men were unarmed and uninvolved with the rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Haxhi’s aunt Hakila recalls her husband, Zaim, saying after he went to see Dimitri and Rado Nikolic at Krusa’s police station.

Bombing Changed Relations in Village

But anger and fear consumed the Serbs, in Krusa as elsewhere, when NATO began its bombardments, the women say in explaining the sudden change in their village’s ethnic relations.

“They shouted at us that we wanted NATO to bomb them,” Hermeta says. “They were angry that they couldn’t fight back against NATO, so they took it out on us.”

The women and children of Krusa had already been herded out of earshot of the village when the shootings and burnings began. But several men who escaped the massacre caught up with the refugees in Kukes, Albania, on the border with Kosovo, a few days later.

Mehmet Krasniqi, one of the witnesses to the massacre that is now formally before the tribunal as one of Milosevic’s war crimes, told the refugees from Krusa that the men of the village were forced into one of the larger houses, mowed down with machine-gun fire, then soaked with gasoline and set afire so that the evidence of the massacre would be destroyed along with the house.

Krasniqi and four others reportedly escaped death by pretending to be felled by the gunfire and waiting motionless among the bodies until they could jump out a window as the fire took hold and the Serbian gunmen moved on to torch other houses. Krasniqi gave his account to the Batusha women as well as to tribunal investigators, providing the court with Krusa’s 103 known victims, says Ali Hoti, a refugee from Krusa now living in the Albanian capital, Tirana.

None of the Batusha women have been debriefed by the war crimes investigators, but their accounts match that of Krasniqi with chilling precision. Hanemsha rattled off the names of all 22 slain relatives, filling in the blanks of two first names unknown to the tribunal of a nephew and a grandson and correcting several misstated ages.

That the tribunal has compiled a list of massacre victims including their husbands, sons and fathers came as news to the Batusha women--and is of little concern.

“We’ll believe in justice when we see it,” says Hermeta, whose anger has won out over bereavement.

Women of Krusa Vow to Return

Despite the loss of everything that defined their lives--their homes and their families--the women of Krusa defiantly vow to go back.

“They thought they could get rid of us by killing our men and taking away any reason we would want to go back,” says Haxhi’s aunt Hakila. “But we will go back one day and live on our land again, even if it means living in a tent.”

But the Serbs who sought to expunge Kosovo of its ethnic Albanians will never again live among them, the Batusha women insist.

“We could have forgiven them burning our houses and pushing us out,” says Vezire, whose grief stands out among the other women’s overpowering anger and vengeance. “But why did they have to kill our husbands and sons? What did my 15-year-old Lirim even know about Milosevic or NATO?”