14 Serb victims buried in Kosovo
Earlier in the day, NATO troops rounded up five people for questioning in the massacre.
By Lori Montgomery
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
GRACKO, Yugoslavia - Under a pitiless summer sun, several hundred wailing mourners gathered in the farming village of Gracko yesterday to bury 14 Serb farmers, victims of the worst mass murder in Kosovo since NATO-led peacekeepers entered the province in June.
Determined to prove their ability to restore order to the war-scarred Yugoslav province, NATO troops raided four homes just before dawn yesterday and detained five men in connection with Friday's massacre, including at least one member of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army and his father.
The father, Ahmet Baftiu, 63, was questioned for five hours and released. The soldier, Blerim Baftiu, 17, remained in custody after British troops seized a Kalashnikov rifle and a hand grenade at his home, despite his family's protestations that he was not involved in the massacre.
Six other men - arrested late Tuesday in connection with an unrelated grenade attack in the Kosovo capital of Pristina - were also being questioned about the slayings, which have terrified Kosovo's dwindling Serb community.
Only about 500 people, mostly local villagers, turned out for the funeral - testament, Serb leaders said, to an intolerable level of fear among Kosovo's Serbs, who have never trusted the NATO-led peacekeeping force, known as KFOR, to protect them.
"The responsibility for this tragedy lays with KFOR," said Momcilo Trajkovic, president of the Serbian Resistance Party and a leading figure in the postwar Serbian community. "Although they have been present here for more than a month, they are allowing Albanian criminals to judge innocent people."
Throughout the late morning and early afternoon, widows and mothers draped in black wailed before 14 wooden coffins lined up on sawhorses on a concrete basketball court in the center of the dusty farming community. More than a dozen Serbian Orthodox priests chanted and dispensed incense across the sweltering court, as Patriarch Pavle, the Serb church's wizened leader, read a homily in memory of the dead.
"Even though our grief is deep, it would be deeper if they left this world as criminals. Instead, they were innocent victims," Pavle told the mourners, who included Bernard Kouchner, the recently appointed head of the U.N. mission in Kosovo.
"When 1,000 years pass, we can forget this," Pavle said. "But like our ancestors, we must try to find our way forward, so we can continue to live together here."
The killings occurred just after dark Friday, as the farmers returned from their hay fields. Thirteen of the men were gunned down in a group, their faces mutilated by automatic-weapons fire. The 14th was found 100 yards away, slumped at the wheel of his tractor.
British soldiers patrolling nearby heard the gunfire and quickly discovered the bodies of the victims, the eldest of whom was 63. The dead included four members of the Janicijevic family, including 42-year-old Mile, his brother Momcilo, 53, and Momcilo's son Novica, 18.
The slayings marked the single worst atrocity in Kosovo since NATO ended its air war against Yugoslavia in June and began to deploy 50,000 international peacekeeping troops in the southern Yugoslav province. The soldiers arrived with promises to make Kosovo safe for both the 1.5 million ethnic Albanians driven from their homes by Serb forces throughout the spring and for Serbs who chose to stay in Kosovo even as their sometimes vengeful ethnic Albanian neighbors returned.
The NATO peacekeeping force has had a difficult time making good on that promise. More than 140 people have been murdered in Kosovo in the last six weeks, about half of them Serbs.
"If this were an isolated case, if we faced only this situation, the Serbs could keep up with it," Zoran Andzelkovic, the Yugoslav government's representative in Kosovo, said of the Gracko slayings. "But there has been something new every day."
|
