The Foe on the Inside in Kosovo

This village housing a few dozen extended ethnic Albanian families stands unscathed, as if the recent war, like a fickle Kansas tornado, skipped over its cluster of walled compounds.

But that doesn’t mean Osek was spared the agonies that seared the rest of Kosovo.

Here, the enemy came from within.

Osek is the home of Musa Jakupi, an ethnic Albanian who for a decade led a squad of about 15 police collaborators--including three of his own sons--who preyed on fellow Albanians in a campaign of extortion, arson and beatings, according to residents and human rights activists.

And as Serbian persecution of Albanians increased in the months before NATO airstrikes began in March, the Jakupis stepped up their own campaign, killing at least one neighbor and playing a suspected role in the disappearances of at least two other men, witnesses said.

Most chilling, however, is the reported role the Jakupis played in an infamous late April massacre in Meja, about 10 miles southwest of Osek, in which more than 300 Albanian men died.

The Jakupis served as selectors, separating men from their families and sending them to their Serbian executioners, charged Fuat Haxhibeqiri, president of the Djakovica branch of the Council for Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms, the oldest human rights group in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia.

“They were directly involved,” Haxhibeqiri said, citing scores of witness statements that his organization has forwarded to international war crimes investigators in The Hague. “[The father] led the children.”

The reports on Musa Jakupi and his sons Muharrem, Yusuf and Ibra highlight the often overlooked role that Albanian collaborators played in cementing minority Serbian rule in the separatist province.

Haxhibeqiri said his office has collected reports on about 50 Albanians suspected of working with Serbian police and paramilitary groups in western Kosovo, a large portion of them members of Jakupi’s police squad.

The fate of those collaborators remains a mystery. Many--including the Jakupis--apparently decamped with the retreating Serbian forces. Others, Haxhibeqiri said, were caught by Kosovo Liberation Army fighters and executed--in apparent violation of the Geneva Convention rules governing conduct during war.

Reporters’ attempts to find Musa Jakupi and his sons were fruitless, despite the cooperation of a relative who said the father, his Serbian wife and at least one of the sons had fled across the border to Berane, Montenegro, the smaller Yugoslav republic.

The ease with which the Jakupis seem to have slipped away indicates the difficulties confronting war crimes investigators in trying to bring such low-level suspects to justice.

More than 10,000 refugees--overwhelmingly Serb but joined by some ethnic Albanians--have fled to Berane, a bleak town of about 25,000 with a brick factory, a tire plant and a struggling paper mill.

Outside a Serbian Orthodox church on the edge of Berane, a Serb living in a small refugee camp said he had met Jakupi while serving in a military unit that worked with the police in Kosovo during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign.

But the man, who spoke on condition that he not be named, said he didn’t recall seeing Jakupi in Berane.

As he spoke, an elderly woman interrupted with a warning: Answering a foreigner’s questions could land him in The Hague. As she talked, she crossed her hands, as though handcuffed, while other refugees laughed.

A Yugoslav Red Cross official in charge of a refugee registry at Berane’s town hall said the Jakupis may have moved through town with a column of refugees fleeing Kosovo on the night of June 15, just three days after international peacekeepers arrived in the province.

The official said two men he met that night declined to register with the Red Cross even though they had relatives who needed aid.

One of the men said he didn’t want to get his family in trouble.

“The men said: ‘Don’t worry about us. We’re leaving in the morning,’ ” the official said. The next day, the men drove off.

Family a Focus of Hatred in Area

In a region defined by hatred, the burning emotion of ethnic Albanians around Djakovica toward Jakupi and his sons stands out.

How Musa Jakupi went into league with the Serbian authorities is the stuff of local legend. Haxhibeqiri said Jakupi was coerced into collaborating more than 10 years ago after Serbian authorities covered up his involvement in a double homicide.

Those circumstances could not be independently confirmed, however, and Yugoslav personnel records from Kosovo seized by U.N. officials overseeing the province were not readily available for review.

What could be confirmed is that Musa Jakupi and his sons abetted Serbian dominance in western Kosovo, whose population is overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian.

Here in western Kosovo, the Serbian campaign to rid the province of ethnic Albanians was particularly brutal. More than 1,000 people are believed to have been killed in Djakovica alone.

In late April, about midway through the NATO bombings, tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians were being herded in convoys to Kosovo’s border. One convoy near Djakovica stretched about 2 1/2 miles, a desperate flight from terror as Serbian police and paramilitary troops roamed its edges, picking people to rob and kill, witnesses said.

About 300 Albanian men from the convoy were slaughtered in a field near Meja.

“The women were separated from the men, and the men were taken away,” Haxhibeqiri said. “Witnesses mentioned Muharrem and Yusuf as among those doing the separating.”

Other witnesses said the Jakupis also acted as advance scouts, entering Albanian homes and evicting residents. Other police and paramilitary groups then set the houses on fire, said Haxhibeqiri, who was among those ordered out by the Jakupis.

Terror Began Before NATO’s Air Campaign

The terror began before the NATO bombs fell.

Zade Bajrami, 39, a mother of five from Osek, says she watched one of Jakupi’s sons kill her husband in late February.

At the time, Yugoslav forces were trying to roust rebel Kosovo Liberation Army squads in the region. More than 20 refugees from the fighting had gathered at the home of Sylejmon Bajrami, part of a compound in which the families of five Bajrami brothers lived, only a few hundred yards from the Jakupi family compound.

The Jakupis had been pressuring her husband to join their police unit, Zade Bajrami said. It is unclear whether the Jakupis knew that Sylejmon Bajrami was an active KLA supporter, helping move recruits and supplies to rebel fighters in the mountains on the Albanian border, just a few miles west of the village.

About 3 p.m. on Feb. 28, witnesses said, up to 200 Serbian police, paramilitary members and army troops crowded into the dirt lane outside the compound. Among them were Musa Jakupi and at least two of his sons, Muharrem and Ibra, the witnesses said.

Muharrem Sadiku, 71, a neighbor, said that earlier in the day, the elder Jakupi had seen several teenage boys near the main road. They fled when they saw Jakupi, who then went to Sadiku’s home and several other houses, saying the youths were KLA soldiers and demanding that residents reveal where they were hiding, Sadiku said.

When Jakupi returned about four hours later with reinforcements, he remained outside the Bajrami compound while the two sons entered, carrying AK-47s.

Zade Bajrami was washing clothes alone in the yard. She said the Jakupi brothers ordered her to call her husband outside.

As she moved toward the house to comply, Muharrem Jakupi stepped inside ahead of her. She and Ibra Jakupi followed, stopping in a front room where a dozen women and children were gathered. Muharrem Jakupi continued into the adjoining room, where six men were playing cards.

He ordered the men to stand up, said Ali Bajrami, 33, Sylejmon’s brother and one of the card players. As the men rose, Muharrem Jakupi punched one of them. Sylejmon Bajrami objected, the brother said.

“Muharrem, with the machine gun, pushed Sylejmon and said to get out,” the brother said.

As Sylejmon Bajrami turned, Muharrem Jakupi fired once, sending a bullet through the top of his head. He followed with another burst of gunfire above the heads of the cowering and screaming people, pocking the walls and ceiling with bullet holes before leaving the room.

Zade Bajrami, standing among the terrified children, saw Muharrem Jakupi’s face through the doorway as he shot her husband.

“He was angry, like a beast,” she said.

And she saw her husband fall.

“Our daughter went to him and said, ‘Father, look at me,’ ” the wife said. “He looked at her, and then he died.”

Arrangements Made to Leave as War Ended

As the war ended, the Jakupis made plans to leave Kosovo, a relative said.

Musa Jakupi was close to Branko Dukic, a top Yugoslav police official in Pec, near the Montenegrin border. Dukic helped arrange a truck to move the Jakupis’ belongings to a house that he owns in Berane, the relative said.

The relative, whose name is being withheld to protect his safety, said Musa Jakupi, who is ailing from an unspecified illness, lives there now with his wife and his son Muharrem, whose own wife stayed behind in Kosovo.

Muharrem Jakupi’s relationship with his wife and her family became strained after he was linked to the disappearance of one of his wife’s brothers, the relative said.

Yet the Jakupis couldn’t be found in Berane. It seems unlikely that they would have remained in Montenegro, where political leaders have publicly promised to cooperate with the prosecution of suspected war criminals.

There is even less information on the fates of the other Jakupi sons, Yusuf and Ibra. Two people, including the relative, said they believe that KLA soldiers caught Yusuf near the war’s end and executed him. Ibra’s whereabouts remain unknown.

The relative, acknowledging the violence with which the Jakupis allegedly were involved, said the family wasn’t all bad.

“It was because of the Jakupis that no houses in the village [of Osek] were burned,” the relative said.

At least not by the Serbs.

Days after the Jakupis and their Serbian protectors fled, the Jakupis’ sprawling white-walled compound went up in flames in the middle of the night, torched, neighbors said, by other local Albanians.

It was a small act of revenge that only touches on the vast reservoir of anger and hatred that remains.

“I’m afraid nobody will catch them,” said the widowed Zade Bajrami as one of her young sons, dressed in an imitation KLA uniform, banged on a pail with a stick.

“I would like it if somebody can catch them,” she said in an eerily level voice, “and then send a piece of their bodies to each [victim’s] family.”

Martelle reported from Osek and Djakovica and Watson from Berane.