A closer look at this war reported from the KLA side by an Italian journalist at their side. Quite horrific :
Electronic Telegraph
May 16, 1999 Janine di Giovanni
'It is impossible to tell who is killing us - the Serbs or Nato'
By Janine di Giovanni
'WHO'S bombing us? Who's bombing us?" the young soldier yells to one of the commanders. We are under heavy aerial bombardment - by both Serb planes and Nato, which is conducting the heaviest night of bombing since the campaign began - artillery bombing and sniper fire.
The KLA fighters with whom I am sheltering are taking heavy casualties, and the suspicion is growing among the commanders that Nato warplanes are as responsible for our casualties as those inflicted by the Serbs. The terror of being bombed by Serb planes is bad enough, but the possibility of being bombed by Nato provokes a mood of deep despondency among the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The suspicion that we are being bombed by our own side is particularly strong after Nato's confirmation that it was responsible for killing an estimated 100 ethnic Albanian civilians during an attack on the Kosovan village of Korisa. Everywhere there is chaos and confusion: every time a plane roars through the sky and drops a bomb with a terrifying dense thud, we do not know where it is coming from.
Several KLA fighters had been killed that day during an earlier bombardment. Among the dead was a 16-year-old boy who had been decapitated by the force of one bombs. The boy had volunteered to fight with his uncle, who was with him when he died. The uncle searched in vain for the boy's head. As he did so, one of the medics started to question precisely who was responsible for his death - the Serbs or Nato.
"The bombs are coming from everywhere, from the Serbs and from Nato. It is impossible to tell who is killing us." Another fighter tells me that the soldiers' who died earlier in the morning in their tents by the river bed were hit by Nato bombers. There is confusion about how many people are dead, how many people are wounded.
For two nights, we have slept in ditches on muddy downhill slopes covered in soldier's excrement, surrounded by wounded soldiers whose flesh has been ripped away by hot pieces of shrapnel. I had always thought of myself as squeamish. But when you are under this kind of intense fire, some things become irrelevant. I have been wet and cold and covered in mud for three days, but there are people around me dying on dirty stretchers: and these are young soldiers.
I ask one of the soldiers how old he is. "18," he replies. Then he adds, quickly: "Don't look at me like that. I know what you are thinking." I am travelling with Dardan, who used to work as a bartender in London. The 25-year-old fighter was so good at mixing cocktails that he was voted the fifth best barman in Britain by Loaded magazine. He is proud of this fact: he is also proud of the fact that he just finished his degree in broadcasting, that he got married two years ago to a beautiful Kosovar girl, that he has a big apartment in Vancouver,and that he paid his own plane ticket to arrive here at this frontline to fight with the KLA.
He never fired a gun before. Now he's in southern Kosovo - it would not be wise to give the exact location - and he's fighting with a Chinese Kalashnikov, defending his country against a heavy Serb offensive which has been going on for four days. To stay calm, Dardan and I are talking to each other as we lie in the ditch, as if we were meeting for the first time at a drinks party. It is a surreal conversation: talking about London, about Portobello Road, about emigration, about war. "I left Pristina in 1992," he says. "My whole generation left. We didn't want to get drafted by the Serbs and fight against the Bosnians. But I came back to fight for my country. To fight for freedom. To be an Albanian inside Kosovo is no life at all. That's why we're here - liberation."
His voice was drowned out by heavy machinegun fire. The Serbs are attempting to encircle our camp. There are eight soldiers at the end of our ditch, who are meant to guard us from an infantry attack. Later, I would find out from officials from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe that a Serb unit of 50 had entered northern Albania, killing two civilians. "Split up! Split up! Fifty metres apart! Move down the canyon!" shouted one commander who had taken control of the chaos. He tossed me an ancient helmet without a strap, which would do little good if I was hit by a grenade. I had no flak jacket: neither did the soldiers around me.
"Split up - if one of you gets hit, all of you won't die! I need all of you alive!" Next to me, a young soldier was crying. Another wounded soldier was squatting in the mud, motioning me to bring him water. He was weeping with fear and pain. I wiped his forehead, then threw myself back on the ground as another rocket landed. I was face down in the mud. Then I ran down the ravine, stumbling on rocks, and sat against a tree.
The attack began that morning. Five o'clock is a beautiful time of day in these mountains - until a MiG begins bombing you, followed by rockets and shells. The day was a continuation of the battle: but during a lull in the fighting, I wandered over some hills and found the parts of the plane that had (allegedly) been shot down by Nato. Then, near the river bordering our camp, I found the tents of the soldiers who had been killed by either friendly fire or the Serbs. Three were young soldiers; one was an older man with beard. I saw them taking one of the bodies away in a military jeep, to a morgue in a nearby town.
Walking over the mountains, I saw a cow with its hind legs blown off, covered in flies. Then a beautiful white horse, startled by the bombs, now dead of a heart attack, lying on the side of the hill. And everywhere I looked there were the holes made by the mortars and bombs that had landed that day. In the middle of it was a small, white idyllic farmhouse untouched: someone had left their washing out on a clothes line.
I wanted to walk up, deeper into the hills, to the active front lines, but the commander did not want to take me forward. "E pericoloso!" he screamed in Italian. It was very dangerous, he said, because of the battle going on, but also because the Serbs were allegedly using poison gas on that front. One of the frontline doctors told me that she had treated soldiers who claimed to have been poisoned by gas. But I went forward anyway, without a flak jacket or a mask. The soldiers, dug into their trenches and foxholes, were tired but strong, and I felt oddly confident of their ability, despite the fact that I got pinned down by a firefight for 15 minutes.
In an abandoned stable serving as a bunker, I stumbled on a unit of soldiers pumped up by a recent victory: they were high-fiving each other and hugging. Later, I was told that the KLA had managed to destroy two Serb tanks and kill 60 Serb soldiers. In a David-versus-Goliath war, which is what this is, that is a major victory.
That night, we ate soup for dinner. The tents were oddly and eerily quiet, different from before the bombardment, when soldiers sat up singing KLA songs. We sat in the tent with tension growing in our guts, knowing that the night ahead was going to be horrific. Someone laid out the plan: when the bombing began, we had to run out of our tents into the ditch, because the Serbs would be targeting our tents and could pick up body heat by infra-red lasers.
We were to run in the darkness, one by one and be prepared for aerial, artillery and possibly an infantry attack. "Be prepared for everything," one of the commanders told me. My fear was an infantry attack: what would the Serbs do if they found me inside the camp?
One senior commander, whom I knew from the war in Bosnia, sat up sketching offensive plans. Another, a devout Muslim, was praying. A third, a Swede for whom I had a tremendous affection, was cursing silently as he tried to fit his boots inside his sleeping bag. Someone else - one of the young soldiers - was snoring gently, and I could smell the breath of the soldier lying next to me. At around 1am, I drifted off, forgetting momentarily where I was.
We were woken at 3am by a bomb from the Serb planes. I was sleeping with my boots and clothes on. I fumbled to sit upright and get out of my sleeping bag. There was chaos inside the tent. "Journalist! Where are you?" called out the Swede. "Ten seconds and exit!" Even though I was prepared, I can not describe the fear that grips you when you are woken by the sound of a cluster bomb landing nearby.
My heart was pounding inside my chest as I blindly climbed down the ravine in pitch blackness. "No lights! No matches!" someone screamed. I slid down a hill and tried to get my footing: I have terrible night vision and there was no moonlight. "Get down! Get down!" someone hissed as we heard the jet engine of a plane. I threw myself down next to one of the commanders.
From 3am to 6am I lay awake, watching the sky lighten, watching the stars just brighter than the illumination of the bomb. As it got lighter, some soldiers built a small fire. I drifted off to a painful sleep on the muddy slope, covered by a blanket that one of the commanders placed over me. It did little to keep out the wet and the mud and the cold, but it was a kind gesture. He had run back into his tent while the bombardment was going on to get it for me.
As if in a dream, I saw an old village woman taking her sheep up to pasture in the middle of the bombardment. She was completely unfazed, talking to her herd in a bossy voice. I watched her with a mixture of horror and fascination - even in war, life continues. "You'd live longer if you had her life," one of the soldiers joked. By 7am, I woke from a troubled sleep to a shell landing nearby and saw Dardan, the young bartender, looking out into the sky that was bright-blue flecked with pink and orange. It looked like a Turner painting. It was perfectly, painfully beautiful.
Dardan was smoking a cigarette. I could see only his silhouette. He looked like a soldier from World War Two, with his old helmet and his Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. He was staring at the sky in amazement, his mind far away from the place, the time, the war. He was shouting to no one in particular: "Look! Look at that beautiful light, look at the light!"
Then he saw that I was awake and he turned to me. "Janine! Look at that sky! We're still alive! Isn't it wonderful - we're still alive!" |
