Kosovo Tunes In to Milosevic Genocide Trial

Here in the heart of Kosovo’s Drenica region, where separatist guerrillas first took up the fight against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, tough men gathered around coffee shop televisions last week to watch in grim triumph as their defeated enemy went on trial.

When Milosevic, at the end of the second day, angrily assailed the war crimes tribunal in The Hague as illegitimate, one of the men watching ridiculed the onetime strongman by shouting a warning to the international judges and prosecutors.

“Milosevic will put all of you in prison tomorrow!” Pajazit Haliti, 45, a former fighter in the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, called out mockingly toward the TV set, prompting ripples of laughter from other tables.

“We never even dreamed of this,” Haliti later told a reporter. “Neither did he.”

Milosevic stands accused of genocide and crimes against humanity, in part for his forces’ conduct in Kosovo three years ago. Thousands were slain and hundreds of thousands driven from their homes in the province before NATO forces stepped in.

If there was a touch of swagger in the reaction of some ethnic Albanian men watching Milosevic’s trial, there was only aching sorrow in the village of Morin, where inhabitants say 45 people were killed by Serbian forces during the early days of the 1999 bombing campaign by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“Of course we feel satisfaction to see him in court,” said Rifete Mziu, 37, the widowed mother of four small children, taking a break from turning the soil of her fields with a shovel. But what Mziu really wants is to be able to bury the body of her missing husband, an elementary school teacher who never had any interest in being a fighter.

Imprisonment means that Milosevic will pay for what he did, Mziu said.

“But first of all, he should be asked to reveal where the missing people are,” she added, fighting back tears. “I want my husband’s body. . . . The children keep saying: ‘Daddy’s not dead. Milosevic just took him to prison. Maybe he’ll let him go.’ I don’t want to raise my children with the false hope that he’s still alive somewhere.”

Mziu’s neighbor, Mehreme Hoti, 70, said many in her family watched the live broadcast of the trial’s opening day, which included videotape of atrocities shown by the prosecution. Milosevic is charged in connection with crimes committed in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic.

“We all cried,” Hoti said. “The kids, us women, everybody cried while we watched it.” The trial may help the world understand the truth, but punishing or even killing Milosevic “won’t bring back the dead,” she said.

Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo believe that Milosevic bears command responsibility for massacres here--a key point that the prosecution will have to prove. Milosevic didn’t directly kill people in Morin, “but the people who killed, killed on his orders,” Hoti said.

The most widespread complaint voiced by ethnic Albanians in Kosovo is that there should be many co-defendants, from politicians and generals to low-level soldiers and police.

“It’s not enough to have just one Milosevic” on trial, said Mehmet Ismajli, 53. “We had 100,000 Milosevics here who committed crimes and massacres.”

Such comments in one sense echo Milosevic’s own defense, in which he stressed that he did not and could not act alone, arguing that the indictment against him was an indictment of the governments in Yugoslavia and Serbia, as well as the Serbian people. Though Milosevic uses this argument to proclaim his innocence, many ethnic Albanians use it to place guilt on large numbers of Serbs.

Ethnic Albanians, who make up more than 90% of the population of Kosovo, generally reject the core of Milosevic’s defense concerning the Kosovo charges: that he was fighting terrorism in his own country.

According to Yugoslav and Serbian law, Kosovo was and is a province of Serbia, despite being under U.N. administration since Milosevic’s forces withdrew in 1999. Kosovo is recognized as part of Yugoslavia by the United Nations, and most Western capitals oppose its independence.

But ethnic Albanians often assert flatly that Kosovo is not and never was a part of Serbia. Similarly, people here say that guerrillas who killed police and soldiers in the early days of warfare were freedom fighters resisting oppression.

“The KLA never fought just to have a fight,” said Sadije Hoti, 40, the daughter-in-law of Mehreme. “When the knife came to our throats, they decided to do something about it, and they saved a lot of lives, because at least we had some protection.”

A key founder of the KLA, Adem Jashari, was killed along with 19 members of his family in a March 1998 Serb assault on their family compound in the village of Prekaz. Also killed in three days of fighting were 36 neighbors and distant relatives. As the Milosevic trial unfolded on television, his nephew, Murat Jashari, 29, said in an interview that the family had decided to die fighting rather than yield to oppression by running away.

In the years before that battle, “we tried to give notice to the Serb regime that these are still our lands, and you can kill us, but you can never make us flee,” said Jashari, who was in Germany at the time. “The big truth is that even the smallest child in my family was psychologically ready that it was better to die at home than to die in the street or in another country.”

Jashari stressed that whatever the law might have said, “this was not part of Serbia.”

“We have a different language, different culture, different tradition,” he said. “Milosevic had no reason at all to defend his country here, because it was not part of his country.”

Whether they fought Milosevic’s forces or simply fled them, ethnic Albanian men--even those who lost many relatives--generally say that the sacrifices were worth it. Women--especially the widows--often seem not so sure.

Haliti, the man talking back at the television in the coffee shop, said he had lost a nephew, a noncombatant who was killed on the street by a Serb sniper in 1999.

“Freedom is much more valuable than all the lives lost,” Haliti said. “At least the people who survived will live free.”