Rexhep Hoti, one of many of the extended Hoti and Duraku families in Velika Krusa, says the Serbs were without remorse. He watched dumbstruck as they singled out Kadri Duraku, 20, from the crowd. They accused him of being a member of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) because he was wearing an eagle pin. Duraku protested. Hoti says that when one of the troopers had heard enough, he lifted his pistol and put a bullet in the young man's head.
Abaz Hoti, 31, a cousin of Rexhep Hoti, was also pulled from the crowd. The Serbs made him kneel and beat him as his wife and daughter watched. He could smell liquor on their breath and feel the fire in their eyes. One finally put his rifle to the base of Hoti's skull and chambered a round. He demanded 200 marks, about $120, to spare his life.
"I thought, 'There is no hope for me,'" Hoti says, his hands still trembling at the retelling two months later. "I was living, but I was dead."
A neighbor handed his wife the money. In tears, she gave it to the Serbs. The trooper seemed unmoved. Another soldier, who Hoti says was called "Garko," intervened and told the first to let Hoti go, that he had paid the tax. The trooper relented with a grunt and kicked Hoti back into the crowd.
And so the terror went that day, all day, and into the night.
The difference between life and death Friday seemed only a matter of whim.
Corpses were everywhere. Xhevahire Hoti managed to get on a bus to Kukes, Albania, four days later, after being shuttled back and forth from house to house by the Serbs. Nightmares of the ordeal still haunt her.
"I can't count how many dead people I have now seen in my lifetime," she says.
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Tatters of village testify to ferocity
By Debbie Howlett, USA TODAY
VELIKA KRUSA, Yugoslavia -- This was once a beautiful place.
In summer, tomatoes grew fat and red in the fields. The honeysuckle-sweet blini blossoms perfumed the air. In winter, soup simmering on wood-burning stoves in rustic farmhouses warmed the cold and snowy nights.
Now, there is only devastation.
The village reeks of death. Rotted animal carcasses litter the roads, and at least 47 fresh graves have been dug in cemeteries, barnyards and overgrown hillsides. No house is unscathed. Most are burned to a pile of brick, ash and charred timber.
The only signs of life in the rubble are kittens too scared to approach visitors.
"Everything is gone," Fejzullah Duraku, the headmaster of the village's school, says as he stands at the center of the town. "Nothing is left."
But the destruction of Velika Krusa was not just part of some faceless military effort to wipe out a rebel stronghold or silence government opposition.
It was, in the end, the very essence of what is so horrifying about this latest war in the Balkans. It was, as villager Eqrem Hoti says, "Inhuman in a way I do not understand."
It was so brutal and so intense that the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, chose Velika Krusa as one of the first villages to undergo scrutiny by British forensic experts. They arrived here Sunday to gather evidence.
Velika Krusa is one of seven towns specifically cited in the war crimes indictment of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Serb forces came raging into this small farm town with the sole purpose of ridding it of every ethnic Albanian who lived here, villagers say. It was not enough to kill perhaps as many as 400 people, one of every five male villagers.
They pillaged and looted and burned. They so enthusiastically gutted the hillside homes, it is hard to imagine that anyone could ever live here again.
And then, when the soldiers left, they spray-painted Serb insignias on the charred walls, as if to boast about the authenticity of the destruction.
Bits and pieces of the misery inflicted on this small village have been reported for two months as refugees arrived in Albania. But now, for the first time -- thanks to an extensive review of documents, unfettered access to the town and interviews with villagers, international monitors and human rights advocates -- a clear picture can finally be drawn. Like all accounts of atrocities and killings in Kosovo, what happened here appears to refute statements from Yugoslav authorities that only terrorists were targeted during the military's campaign.
The siege of Velika Krusa began at 9 a.m. on March 25 with a barrage of mortar fire so intense it shook the red clay tiles off the rooftops.
The Serb attack was triggered by the start of NATO's air campaign during the night. Serb forces, primed for just such an assault, had been positioned for more than a week in the hills surrounding this fertile valley along the mountainous border with Albania.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an international monitoring group that had been policing the area for five months, had pulled out five days before as the tension escalated.
When that Thursday morning broke cold and rainy, frightened villagers packed into cars and tried to take a steep, rocky back road to the mountains deeper into Kosovo. They were met by shelling from the Yugoslav army.
A mortar exploded on one of the lead cars, blocking the road. Trapped on a steep incline, villagers abandoned their cars. The burned out hulks of Yugos and Ladas, their doors swung open, still sit in the middle of the road.
Artillery thundered all around as villagers ran toward the woods. Two men -- no one is quite sure who -- were hit by mortar fragments at the top of the ridge overlooking the town.
Faredin Hoti's response was immediate.
An obstetrician, Hoti was one of the village's most respected men. He was widely acclaimed as the best doctor between Prizren and Djakovica. It was only natural that he would grab his black bag and dash up the hill to help the wounded.
His son screamed for him to stop. It was pointless. Aqrim Hoti watched from 100 yards away as another shell exploded just in front of his father. Fragments ripped a gaping hole in the doctor's gut. As he lay mortally wounded in the rain and the mud, the doctor took sulfur and gauze from his bag and tried to stanch his own blood.
He died the next day, in the woods. His son buried him there.
"He tried to help a lot of people," Aqrim Hoti, 36, says as he stands in the same place where he had watched his father die. "He was a good man."
How many villagers reached the woods that day is unclear. Many returned to their homes during the mortar attack, hiding in basements or under tables. Others fled to nearby villages.
But the Serbs were not done. The next day, a paramilitary patrol began a house-to-house search of the 450 homes in the village. They ordered young boys to go into the woods and tell the people to surrender.
What happened after that was even more terrifying than the shelling. Those who survived say as many as 200 people died that day in the village or nearby. Several say they were sure the paramilitary in town was a brigade from the Tigers, Serb mercenaries who followed the lead of a notorious commander known as Arkan.
The patrol gathered people in the schoolyard at the center of town ostensibly to send them to Albania. As villagers arrived, the Serbs demanded their money and valuables. They terrorized the villagers with the butts of their rifles and milked every German mark they could from them.
Rexhep Hoti, one of many of the extended Hoti and Duraku families in Velika Krusa, says the Serbs were without remorse. He watched dumbstruck as they singled out Kadri Duraku, 20, from the crowd. They accused him of being a member of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) because he was wearing an eagle pin. Duraku protested. Hoti says that when one of the troopers had heard enough, he lifted his pistol and put a bullet in the young man's head.
Abaz Hoti, 31, a cousin of Rexhep Hoti, was also pulled from the crowd. The Serbs made him kneel and beat him as his wife and daughter watched. He could smell liquor on their breath and feel the fire in their eyes. One finally put his rifle to the base of Hoti's skull and chambered a round. He demanded 200 marks, about $120, to spare his life.
"I thought, 'There is no hope for me,'" Hoti says, his hands still trembling at the retelling two months later. "I was living, but I was dead."
A neighbor handed his wife the money. In tears, she gave it to the Serbs. The trooper seemed unmoved. Another soldier, who Hoti says was called "Garko," intervened and told the first to let Hoti go, that he had paid the tax. The trooper relented with a grunt and kicked Hoti back into the crowd.
And so the terror went that day, all day, and into the night.
The difference between life and death Friday seemed only a matter of whim.
Corpses were everywhere. Xhevahire Hoti managed to get on a bus to Kukes, Albania, four days later, after being shuttled back and forth from house to house by the Serbs. Nightmares of the ordeal still haunt her.
"I can't count how many dead people I have now seen in my lifetime," she says.
The BBC aired a nearly two-minute videotape of bodies strewn across the village. A refugee, Milaim Bellanica, apparently smuggled the tape out in the chassis of his tractor.
Sketchy accounts have suggested that the Serbs collected 100 or more bodies and burned them in a pyre of flesh and fuel and rubber tires in the nearby village of Bela Crka.
In part, the carnage was so rampant in the area because the Serbs established a police checkpoint at Velika Krusa early in the ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo. More than that, the once prosperous and politically radical village was a perfect symbol to terrorize refugees who could view the bombed and burned homes from the highway.
The relatively wealthy farmers of Velika Krusa were early supporters of the KLA. As many as 700 guerrilla fighters were housed in nearby barracks.
The village is famous in Kosovo as the hometown of Ukshin Hoti, a noted advocate of the province's independence from the rest of Yugoslavia.
Hoti created the first foreign ministry of Kosovo after the province won limited autonomy in 1974. His political activity has kept him in and out of Serb prisons since 1981. Last month, he was due to be released at the end of a seven-year sentence, though no one has heard from him since March.
"It is possible the killings were security force reprisals or 'revenge killings' for the village's suspected support for the KLA," Human Rights Watch said in a report in early April.
Rufus Dawkins, who oversaw 50 monitors in the area as leader of the Kosovo Verification Mission, a project of the OSCE, confirms that there was considerable support for the KLA in the village.
He argues, however, that though the generals and Milosevic might have targeted the village for political reasons, it hardly explains how or why rank-and-file troops could so enthusiastically destroy the homes of farmers, blow up the mosque with a dynamite charge or shoot a young man in front of his family.
The reason, he says, is far less complicated and more to the heart of the real issue in Kosovo, a province where the population had been 90% ethnic Albanian but where control had been in the hands of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant state.
"Serbs treat Albanians as second-class citizens. That's it in a nutshell," Dawkins says.
After the Serbs bombed and ransacked the village in late March, they took up residence in several of the nicest homes.
One, next to the bakery on the main street, belonged to Boski Stefanovic, one of the two Serb brothers whose family lived in town. They were the only Serb residents in the village. Both moved out last year, when tensions between Serbia and ethnic Albanians began to escalate. A third house belonged to Faredin Hoti, the obstetrician.
Serb troops camped in the courtyard of his compound, a quadrangle of office, home, barn and a house under construction. Ration tins and crumpled cigarette packs litter the grounds. Mattresses are strewn across the barn floor. A side mirror broken off the family Mercedes is set on an outdoor water basin next to a plastic razor and shaving cream. Swarms of flies buzz in the hot afternoon air, amid the stench of decaying flesh.
While the Serbs occupied Velika Krusa, villagers who weren't bused out hid in the same forests where some of the men worked as sawyers for the local lumber mill.
Ahmed Hoti, a gnarled 85-year-old with arthritic legs, is the only one who stayed. His ailing legs kept him from walking up most of the hills in town, let alone a mile or two to the bus. He hid behind a large lumber saw near the town center.
When the Serbs found him, one trooper kicked him in his bad leg and threatened to shoot him. But another trooper stepped in, warning Hoti to stay home or he would be shot. So Hoti lived in the basement of his family's house for weeks. One soldier brought him bread every day.
By April 1, a week into NATO's airstrikes, the village was empty. A few Serbs stayed to man the checkpoint on the highway, but most of the houses and shops had already been burned. The majority of Serb forces had moved on to other towns or to fighting at the border with the KLA.
That's when Nexhmedin Duraku crept back home.
He was shocked by what he found. He had no home left and he counted at least 47 bodies lying in the roads. As he sneaked around the village, Duraku found five bodies on the road where the Serbs had struck the convoy that first night. He grabbed a shovel and started burying them in a thicket beside the road. He had almost finished burying the fifth when a Serb patrol came walking up the hill. He fled without finishing.
In the days that followed, men would come from the woods to bury the rest of the dead. Duraku came, too, each time looking for the body of his father. He never found it. If his father, as he suspects, was killed, Duraku hopes someone buried him.
"There is a saying in Albania that somebody who is alive shouldn't risk themselves for somebody who is dead," Duraku says. "But if you see them lying in the street, you can't help it. The least you can give a man is his grave."
No one is sure how many men, women and children the ethic Albanians buried. Each grave is marked with a wooden stake. The bodies are wrapped in sheets. The names were written on sheets of paper with notes detailing the circumstances of the deaths. The paper was rolled up and inserted in plastic soda bottles, which were buried with the bodies.
Standing amid the wreckage of the convoy, Duraku, 25, starts pointing in different directions.
"Two are buried over there," he says. "Five here, seven there, two over by the barn, others down that hill. Some bodies are out there, too, but they are hard to find because the grass has grown over them."
The first few village families are coming back to their homes. Ferida Morina and her neighbor, Nasibe Kastrati, with 11-year-old Sadik Kastrati in tow, load the mattresses and cushions from their sofas onto a large truck. Not much else is worth saving, they say, so they will live with friends in a nearby town.
Morina, her dress blackened from the salvage work, isn't sure whether she will ever return, let alone when.
Up the hill from the town center, Vezire and Feim Mazereku return in the back of a tractor to check what remains of their centuries-old family compound.
The original house was built of golden bricks and mortared with a mixture of mud and hay. Five families lived in three houses on the compound, with its large tomato field and five-stall stable. When Vezire opened the front steel gate, it took her breath away.
The old farmhouse is a pile of stone, so thoroughly destroyed by fire that it looks like ancient ruins. The flames had been so intense they melted the plastic pins on the wire clothesline in her backyard 20 feet away.
She had left her brother to look after the place before the NATO airstrikes started, though he is nowhere in sight, and there is no sign he had been there.
She puts her hands to her face and sobs.
"Where is my family? Where is my house?" she cries. "Oh God. Where is my life?" |
