By IAN FISHER
KUKES, Albania -- They had no choice but to spend the night outside a warehouse off the highway in Korisa, Haxhere Palushi said Sunday. There were 700 Albanian refugees like herself, and Serbian soldiers herded them all inside the building's iron outer gates, promising that they would be allowed to leave Kosovo the next day.
Then, she said, one soldier clicked the gate shut with a padlock.
"One young guy said: 'Why did they lock us in? Something is happening,' " she said.
A few hours later, just before midnight on May 13, NATO planes again bombed the village, in southern Kosovo, killing what Serbian officials and survivors say were more than 80 Albanian refugees. Mrs. Palushi sat in a field all night watching her 4-year-old daughter, Diana, bleed from shrapnel wounds in her left leg and then, at dawn, die.
The attack on Korisa killed perhaps more Albanian civilians than any other in the two-month-old NATO air campaign, which has been criticized for its fatal mistakes. At the time, NATO officials said the village was a legitimate military target and was being used as a military camp and command post. The Serbian authorities, claiming that the refugees had merely stopped at Korisa for the night, said the incident showed why NATO should stop the bombing.
But three Albanian survivors -- women interviewed here today for some of the few witness accounts of the bombing -- said they had no doubt that they were put there intentionally.
"They used us as human shields," Mrs. Palushi said. "It was all planned."
While the accounts could not be independently confirmed, they appeared to give weight to similar allegations by the Pentagon and NATO that Serbian forces have placed civilians near sites, like bridges or military installations, that could be vulnerable to attack.
There is still no way to tell from these accounts how widely or systematically such a strategy might be used. Nor are they likely to quiet critics who say NATO's targeting procedures are not adequate on a battlefield where civilians are mixed with military targets.
But these accounts suggest that in Korisa, at least, the refugees had been calculatingly placed in harm's way, if not to deter a NATO attack, then to create the kind of civilian casualties that the Serbs hope could erode support for the air campaign. NATO officials say the planes had specifically targeted the building among other military sites in the town without knowing that civilians were there.
Mrs. Palushi described the bombing in one of the refugee camps here, at the door-flap of a tent that now sleeps 19 people, 10 of whom survived the attack. The survivors arrived in Albania only on Saturday, and many of them still show signs of their wounds.
Mrs. Palushi's older son, Driton, 10, pulled up his shirt to show a scar that runs from his navel to his sternum, from an operation to remove a piece of shrapnel that pierced his back and wedged near one lung. His cousin, Genci Ahmetaj, 4, still has a bandage on his right foot covering his own shrapnel wound.
Purple scars mark the face of Genci's mother, Zyrafete, 30, and, no doubt, there are emotional wounds as well.
The night of the attack, Mrs. Ahmetaj said she was sleeping under the tractor wagon that sheltered her two children, along with six other children and two adults. Huge explosions erupted. Tents caught fire. Bits of the tractors blasted through the compound. Children were shrieking, including hers.
"I didn't know what was happening," she said. "It was like I was crazy. I saw my mother, and I touched her but she was dead. My father, blood was all over his face."
She heard the voice of her 10-year-old son, Agon, from inside the wagon.
"My son was screaming, 'Look what they did to my legs,' " she said. "He started screaming: 'Mommy, my legs! Why don't you come get me?' He was only 10 years old. I could only take the little one."
"I wanted to go back and get him," she said. "But the other people wouldn't let me go back and take my son. The Serbs were shooting."
"But I know I left him," she said. "He was there, and he was alive."
She said she heard later that Agon died at 7 A.M., next to an old man who had found him and dragged him away from the flaming warehouse.
"He kept saying, 'Give me some water,' " Mrs. Ahmetaj said.
She wept. "I am worried that no one could give him water," she said.
She and others said Serbian forces opened fire on the refugees as they fled from the burning compound. Those who escaped made their way to Prizren, where some received treatment for wounds. On Saturday, they were bused out of Kosovo by the Serbs, apparently the first group of survivors from the Korisa attack to get to Albania.
They were among thousands of Albanian refugees fleeing the burning houses and looting by Serbian policemen and paramilitary forces near the city of Prizren. Mrs. Ahmetaj's sister, Sahadete Ahmetaj, 26, said hundreds of refugees had been living in the hills near Korisa for two months, waiting to go to Albania.
Weary, on May 13, after some in the group approached Serbian police officers, the refugees were promised that they could leave safely the next day. The police took some 700 people to a field for an hour, then moved them to a warehouse surrounded on three-sides by a chest-high concrete wall and a fence with an iron door. There they took everyone's name and birth date, Mrs. Ahmetaj said, saying they could move on the next day.
But they had to spend that night outside at the courtyard of the warehouse, she said. The Serbian soldiers did not indicate that they were being arrested.
"They said we could only stay in that place," Mrs. Ahmetaj said. "We were not allowed to go anywhere else."
The police officers then locked the refugees in and left the compound, the survivors said.
Just before midnight, four American F-16's dropped what officials said later was one 500-pound laser-guided bomb and seven other bombs. The women said 84 refugees had been killed, many of them burnt beyond recognition. A NATO official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that despite reports that all the police had left, some police guards appeared to be among the dead.
A spokesman for the Kosovo Liberation Army, the rebel group fighting the Yugoslav Army in Kosovo, said today that the general area around the warehouse was used to store tanks and ammunition, though they had no information about that particular building. The survivors said it appeared to be empty. The NATO official said intelligence reports before the bombing identified it as a command post, though he said it may have been vacated before the bombing.
The Ahmetaj sisters said they did not blame NATO for the attack, even if it was NATO bombs that killed their relatives.
"The Serbs are guilty," said Sahadete Ahmetaj. "NATO didn't know they attacked us."
Mrs. Palushi, whose daughter was killed, said she did not blame NATO either, though she said she exploded in anger when she took her son to a hospital in Prizren and a Serbian doctor told her: "You wanted NATO to help you. Look what they did."
"I was very upset, I was very nervous," she said. "I said, 'I didn't want NATO. I don't want you. I don't want the K.L.A. I only want peace.' "
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By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 30, 1999; Page A24
KUKES, Albania, May 29 - Serbian paramilitary forces apparently massacred at least 20 men and set fire to dozens of homes three days ago in an assault on a neighborhood in Prizren, according to refugees arriving here from Yugoslavia.
The refugees said the attack occurred about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday in the Tusus section of Prizren, the third-largest city in Kosovo, where Serbian police and militia units have been expelling ethnic Albanians since March 24. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic.
Numerous refugees arriving here today said in interviews that masked men awoke the Tusus neighborhood - a modern section in northwest Prizren that is home to many conservative Muslims - with a barrage of automatic weapons fire. The soldiers entered houses, told the women, children and older men to leave, and then apparently killed 20 to 30 young men, the refugees said.
The stories matched those given to United Nations and other border monitors Friday and today. Although no one has said they saw the killings, two refugees said they saw 20 to 30 bodies, including those of neighbors, in the Prizren Hospital morgue.
Ferije Rexhepi, 20, said she was working in her house at about 6:30 a.m. when gunfire erupted in the street. About 10 masked men barged in and went to the second-floor bedroom where her husband, Hajrim Arifi, 22, was sleeping, and dragged him downstairs, she said. The men beat the couple, who had been married for 10 months, and looted the house until about 8:30, when they ordered her to leave, Rexhepi said.
Rexhepi and other refugees described fleeing through the neighborhood with houses burning all around them and gunfire echoing through the streets. Rexhepi's father, Nefail Rexhepi, said he returned later that day and found blood in the street and a heap of smoldering ashes where the house had been. The next day, Thursday, he said he went to the morgue, and after paying guards about $44 "just to know if my son-in-law was alive or dead," he was allowed to enter.
Inside, Nefail Rexhepi said he found the "barely recognizable" body of his son-in-law among two dozen bodies strewn on the floor. He said he recognized about 10 bodies as those of his neighbors.
Rexhepi said he saw three gunshot wounds on his son-in-law's body, including one in the back of his head. And he said the body appeared to have been mutilated.
The account of the fires and the bodies in the morgue matched a similar report given to border monitors by a woman on Friday, according to the translator who conducted the interview.
The translator, who asked not to be identified, said at least four people from Tusus arrived in Albania Friday and described an early morning assault on their neighborhood about two days earlier, during which the women were expelled from their homes and dozens of houses were set ablaze.
According to the translator, one woman said she returned to her home several hours later and found the badly mutilated body of her son in the basement, where he had been hiding for several weeks. She said his nose had been cut off and his ear slashed.
The woman said she took her son's body to the morgue, where she saw 30 more bodies, including those of some of her neighbors, according to the translator.
"She was crying and hugging me, and waving her hands to show how all the faces had been slashed," the translator said.
Numerous refugees arriving in Albania in recent weeks have said that Serbian militia have slashed the ears of male refugees.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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IZBICA: U.S. offers massacre evidence
State Department says satellite images back up video of burials
By Andrea Mitchell, NBC NEWS
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WASHINGTON, May 19 Human rights groups say it is the worst massacre of the war: 150 Albanian men, many elderly, bludgeoned and shot in the central Kosovo village of Izbica, some time around March 29. A video of the alleged Serb massacre, smuggled out by the rebel Kosovo army, is supported by satellite photographs, the State Department said Wednesday. |
"TAPE EVIDENCE is very important because while Yugoslav troops can try to burn the bodies, they can try to rebury or move the graves, they can't erase the video tape," said Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch.
"These people were rounded up, taken outside the town; some of them were beaten and killed and others were shot and killed," said Ilir Zherka of the National Albanian-American Council.
The State Department held a briefing Wednesday afternoon to document evidence of the massacre.
"In our view, this is conclusive proof that this corresponds to the correct location as on the videotape," said spokesman James Rubin.
The United States said this was the first time it had satellite pictures to match video from the ground. The presentation of the video and satellite images were assembled and interpreted by the CIA.
Earlier this week, human rights officials said Serb troops had executed at least 5,000 civilians in 75 towns in Kosovo. Thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees who have fled Kosovo have told of executions in their villages. Their accounts cannot be independently confirmed, but they are viewed as accurate by NATO and human rights officials because the reports are so strikingly similar. NATO also has reported that it has evidence that Serbs have disposed of bodies in mass graves, only to dig them up and burn them to hide any evidence of massacres.
In April, MSNBC.com's Preston Mendenhall spoke to a young eyewitness to the aftermath of the Izbica killings. Ilirjana Osmonaj lived in Runik, about seven miles from Izbica. The Osmonajs were forced from their home by Serb police, so they stayed with some other family members in Izbica. When fighting became too intense a few days later, the Osmonajs moved further down the road and eventually into the surrounding hills. Ilirjana, an assertive 15-year-old told a story that would horrify any other girl or boy of her age. The Osmonajs heard that their cousin, Daf Ysini, had been killed in Izbica during the Yugoslav offensive. The family returned to the town for what they thought was a single funeral but found that more than 100 people had been killed, mostly male villagers.
The funerals went on for three days, almost nonstop, Ilirjana said. It was so chaotic. The days before the massacre, which she remembers to have taken place "at the end of March," Ilirjana said "guns were firing solid all day.
HOSPITAL TOUR The reports are a sharp contrast to the picture of the war put forth by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's public relations campaign. Yugoslavia's efforts have included selective tours, like one conducted Wednesday for NBC News, to the main Serb military hospital in Belgrade. There, in a neurology ward, a Serbian commander and a sergeant were both comatose with severe brain injuries.
The ward's patients were not all soldiers. Eleven-year-old Daniel, from Kosovo, said he was playing in a grassy field when he saw a bomb. Moments later it exploded. "He lost both legs in the field and lost his eyes," said Tamislav Mazenovic, a trauma doctor.
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