Fire (14 page)

The empire didn't survive his own death, though; within decades the Turks defeated the Serbs at Kosovo Polje, and three hundred years after that the Turks put down another uprising so ruthlessly that most Serbs fled Kosovo. The void they left behind was filled by the Albanians, who drifted back down out of the mountains with their wild, hill people ways.

Traditional Albanian society was based on a clan system and was further divided into brotherhoods and
bajraks.
The
bajrak
system identified a local leader, called a
bajrakar,
who could be counted on to provide a certain number of men for military duty. In another era Adem Jašari and Ahmet Ahmeti might well have been considered
bajrakars.
That organization has fallen into disuse, but the clans—basically used to determine allegiances during a blood feud—seem to have survived.

Feuds in this part of the world inevitably break out over offenses to a man's honor, which include calling him a liar, insulting his female relatives, violating his hospitality, or stealing his weapons. Tradition dictates that these transgressions be avenged by killing any man in the offender's family, which creates another round of violence. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, one in five adult male deaths was the result of a blood feud, and in Albania today, it is said, a tradition still exists whereby you must kill one man for every bullet in the body of your dead kin.

Seen in the context of the code of male honor, the Serb police have violated just about every blood feud rule in existence, including the killing of women—a provocation above all others. It's no wonder they have such a hard time maintaining control of Kosovo.

The Kosovars were granted autonomy at the end of World War II, but then aspiring President Milošević had the autonomy revoked in 1989, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the recent war in Bosnia and Croatia, failed to address the issue of Kosovo's status. Inevitably, an independence movement was born, funded by a voluntary 3 percent income tax given by the Albanian diaspora and supported by groups in Albania proper.

The first armed clashes in Kosovo were reported during the summer of 1995, and within two years the KLA was strong enough to force a column of Serb armored vehicles to retreat from Drenica. After that the Serbs began a slow buildup of police and heavy weapons in Kosovo and on the Albanian border, culminating in the attack on Prekaz.

If anything, the massacres have radicalized the youth of Kosovo. The Serbs have already spent an estimated six billion dollars controlling the province. In some ways, they couldn't have engineered a worse domestic problem if they'd tried; in some ways, they fell right into the KLA trap.

 

T
he next morning dawned cold and gray, with a mean little wind blowing trash down the streets; the cafés in town were completely empty. We packed the car and drove out of the city by a different route, hoping to drive into Drenica over some dirt roads that skirted the Serb checkpoints outside Prekaz. We wanted to see the villages that were getting shelled. The Serb government had bowed to international pressure and agreed to resolve the dispute through diplomacy, but meanwhile it was hammering the villages with rocket and artillery fire.

We had no problems at the first checkpoint—just the usual guns in our faces. But at the second one a police officer in an army jump-suit stormed over and ordered us out of the car. He was young, clean-shaven, and handsome in the way that Serb men often are: black hair, light skin, pale blue eyes. “You journalists are all spies!” he screamed at Harald. “You always make Serbs look bad! If I had my way, I'd tear the skin right off your faces!” He ripped the passports out of Harald's hands and studied them while unloading a steady stream of hate. The guards were all standing around us with their machine guns leveled at our bellies. Finally the head cop came over and handed my passport back to me. “We know where you live,” he said darkly. “Write the truth or we'll find you and kill you.”

As checkpoints go, it could have been worse—far worse. Albanian translators have been arrested and beaten at checkpoints, and the day before the attack on Prekaz, Harald and three other journalists were punched, dragged into a bunker, and questioned for an hour. When the police saw that Harald lived in Sarajevo, they accused him of being a Muslim—the predominant Albanian religion—and Harald had to prove he wasn't by making the sign of the cross. Then the cops started going through Harald's notebooks, demanding a translation of every word that was written down.

At one point, a cop spotted the name Frenki Simatović in Harald's notebook, then turned to his friend and said, “Look, he even has the name of our boss in here.” Harald had no idea who Simatović was; he'd just written the name down during an interview and filed it away for future reference. Then they demanded to know if any of the reporters had ever been to a town called Prekaz. They kept asking over and over again: “Prekaz? Prekaz? Have any of you motherfuckers ever been to Prekaz?”

Prekaz is such a small town that before the massacre, people in PriÅ¡tina—a city half an hour away—had never heard of it. Harald just kept pleading ignorance, but when the Serbs finally released him, he called his editors and told them to be on the lookout. “I have no idea where it is; it's not on the maps,” he said. “But something's about to happen there. Just check the wires for a town called Prekaz.”

The next morning the first shells started to fall.

 

B
ack in 1991, as Yugoslavia began its descent into the hell of civil war, the newly elected Milošević had a somewhat delicate problem on his hands. He wanted to drive the Croats and Muslims out of large swaths of Yugoslavia, but he didn't dare send the Yugoslav Army to do it.

The solution he came up with was simple. First, he surrounded himself with a trio of rabid nationalists—Jovica StaniÅ¡ić, Radovan Stojičić, and Frano (“Frenki”) Simatović—known collectively as the Vojna Linija, or the Military Line. The Vojna Linija had little association with the Serb Army; it was a shadowy group within the Ministry of Interior Affairs, which was known as the MUP. After the Vojna Linija was established, MiloÅ¡ević began arming local Serb populations in Croatia and Bosnia, and training paramilitary forces. The weapons, distributed by Stojičić and Simatović, were taken from police and army depots. The paramilitary forces simply came out of the country's jails.

According to Marko Nicović, a former Belgrade police chief who later had a falling-out with Milošević, convicts were told that their sentences would be suspended if they went to the front lines. Many were only too happy to oblige. The best-known groups were the White Eagles of Vojislav Šešelj, a virulent conservative later named to the Belgrade government; the Red Berets of Frenki Simatović; the unnamed forces of Captain Dragan; and—worst of all—the Tigers of Željko Ražnatović. Arkan, as Ražnatović was known, was wanted by Interpol for bank robberies and murders committed throughout Europe.

In 1992 the Yugoslav Army officially withdrew from Bosnia, but Serb paramilitary forces, including Simatović's Red Berets, continued to operate there. That same year Šešelj and Arkan went to Kosovo to terrorize the locals into peacefulness, opening a recruiting office in Priština's Grand Hotel and putting snipers up on the rooftops. (They also made tremendous amounts of money on the local black market.)

Both men turned up around Srebrenica in 1993, “cleansing” the Muslims from the small towns in eastern Bosnia. The Dayton Accords left the paramilitary foot soldiers without much to do, so they either sank back into Belgrade's underworld or looked for other wars; some reportedly fought—and died—in the jungles of Zaire during the downfall of Mobutu Sese Seko. They didn't have to wait long for another war in their own country, though: by 1997 Kosovo had ignited.

 

H
arald and I had been in Kosovo about a week when things started to calm down; we could almost joke with the police at the checkpoints. The Serbs were still shelling the villages in central Drenica, though, and before leaving Kosovo, we decided to make one more stab at going there. We went in on a big, sunny day, the shadows of cumulus clouds sweeping across the Drenica hills and the fields mottled and bare in the early-spring sunlight. We were headed for Ačarevo, a town rumored to be the center of KLA resistance.

There were two ways to get in: walk six miles along some railroad tracks and hope no one shot at you, or drive down dirt roads across the central plateau and hope no one shot at you. The cops at the checkpoint warned us that there was a lot of gunfire on the road and suggested that we wear flak jackets. We thanked them and drove on, and as soon as we were out of sight we turned onto a dirt track that we thought led to Ačarevo.

The road climbed up onto a plateau, and we started across the highlands of Drenica, like some huge, slow beetle scratching across someone's dinner table. “I don't like this,” Harald muttered. I rolled down the window so we could hear gunfire more easily, and soon the landscape of war magically materialized all around us: bunkers and machine-gun nests and tanks on distant ridgetops. They emerged out of nowhere, like images brought out by a darkroom developer. But when I looked away, it took me a moment to find them again. They were there; then they weren't. “This is crazy,” Harald said. “The entire fucking Serb Army is watching us.”

He turned the car around, and we plunged back down the dirt road and went jouncing out onto the hardtop. It was difficult to see how the KLA could fight a guerrilla war in a land like this: no forests to hide in; no mountains to run to; no swamps to stop the tanks. Just open fields and brush-choked hills. It would be suicide to confront the Serbs openly on such ground, so the KLA's only choice is to carry on a war of harassment that may eventually cost the Serbs so much, in money and lives, that they have to pull out.

For their part, the Serbs have no stomach for a protracted fight in which farm kids from Drenica are popping out of the hedgerows with grenade launchers and AK-47s. A grenade launcher will easily take out a tank; a Molotov cocktail placed in its air intake will destroy one as well. The Serb population—largely spared the horrors of Bosnia but demoralized by massive inflation and a crippled economy—isn't going to stand for a war in which too many of its young men get roasted alive in their tanks.

For the Serb military, the only solution is terror. Every time a cop is killed, wipe out a family. Every time a police patrol gets shot up, level a village. Slaughter is a lot easier—and cheaper—than war, and it forces the young idealists in the KLA to decide whether they really want this or not. It's nothing for a twenty-four-year-old with no future and no civil rights to sacrifice his life in a guerrilla movement; it happens all the time. But for him to sacrifice his kid brother and two sisters and mother: that's another question entirely.

 

H
arald and I continued north on a small paved road until we topped out on another hill, from which, far away, we finally saw Ačarevo. It wasn't much, just a small white village shoved down between some hills. It rippled in the heat coming off the fields. We moved on, and around the next bend we found ourselves at a heavily reinforced checkpoint, with mortars by the road and bunkers dug into the hillsides. We stopped, and a cop came out cradling a machine gun. “Let me see your papers,” he said. He stood there studying them for a while as I sat sleepily in the passenger seat and Harald lit up a cigarette.

The sniper must have been waiting for a car to pass so the cop would have to step out into the road. He must have been lying there in the scrub oak, smoking cigarette after cigarette, completely wired with this new killing game, contemplating how he was going to escape when he finally lost his nerve and stopped shooting. The place was crawling with Serbs; he'd have only a few minutes to get out of there.

The first shot simply caused the cop and me to look at each other in puzzlement. The second one got Harald and me out of our seats. The third forced all of us—me, Harald, the cop—to dive behind the car. It's amazing how fast animosity vanishes among people who are suddenly getting shot at. One cop fumbled with his radio; the others shoved their guns over the tops of the sandbags as they tried to figure out where to return fire.
Pap…pap…pap.
The guy on the radio shouted for help while Harald and I scrambled across the road and into the bunker. The cop next to us struggled to put on his flak jacket with the resigned look of someone who had to do this at least once a day.

The shooting stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and a cop dismissed us with a wave of the hand. “Get the fuck out of here,” he told us. We got back into the car and drove out of the highlands, past a town called LauÅ¡a—shot to pieces in the offensive—past the Serb police headquarters in Srbica, and right up to the gate of the munitions factory. The dirt road to Prekaz crosses in front of the gate, and we drove down it slowly, not wanting to give the impression that we were trying to slip past anyone.

The paramilitary soldiers didn't stop us until we were right on the edge of town, coming at us out of a camouflaged bunker, with guns drawn and incredulous expressions on their faces, as if they couldn't believe someone was stupid enough to defy them. They looked as if they would have stopped even a regular police car; they looked completely uncontrolled by anyone but themselves. One of them shouted for our papers while two others circled the car, guns trained on us. “We were just shot at by the KLA,” Harald said out the window. “Now we understand why you guys are here.”