So it has been with the opening weeks of the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. Witness after witness has trooped to the stand, mostly Kosovar Albanians grimly recounting how their villages were burned, their families killed or driven from their homes by Yugoslav forces during the 1999 war. To each, Milosevic offers a pat cross-examination. Did you know that “terrorists” of the Kosovo Liberation Army were in the area? Did you help them, give them food or shelter, let them live among you, perhaps send your sons to fight?
The answers are inevitably a compromising blend of “yes” and “no.” For what Kosovar could not know of the KLA, in their small and tightly knit province? By implication, the presumed victims are in fact collaborators, part of the problem that needed to be attacked if Yugoslavia was to preserve itself. Indeed, this is the core of Milosevic’s defense. Everyone in the Balkans was guilty in the wars that engulfed them. Why blame only Serbs?
The argument plays well in Belgrade, where Slobo is again a star. “A real Serb,” they call him, a near majority awarding him marks of 5 of 5 for his performance, according to the NEWSWEEKly Nin. If coming to terms with history is a goal of the tribunal, as in Nuremberg, this is not an auspicious beginning.
Watching all this, I remember standing one sunny June day in a field in Kosovo, the year after the war ended. It was a beautiful and peaceful place–sprinkled with blue and yellow flowers, the trees deep green against white-tipped mountains to the west–save for the scraps of clothes and muddy shoes lying here and there, flattened by a winter under snow. On the morning of April 27, 1999, Serb forces began shelling and burning villages in the area. By midday, 10,000 people were on the move in a four-mile caravan of tractors, cars and horse carts, herded by the Yugoslav military toward exile across the nearby border with Albania. At the tiny village of Meja, Serbian police and paramilitaries separated 150 to 200 boys and men from the column and marched them into this field. There they were divided into groups of about 20. Some were forced to lie down on the ground. Others were made to sing Serbian songs and shout, “Long live Serbia” or “Slobo is great!” Then they were shot.
I know this from reports prepared by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, among others, which monitored Yugoslav atrocities during the conflict. As I stood in the field, listening to its ghosts, a sad-faced young man named Kalman came up, dressed in Nike running togs and a T shirt. “I lost my brother and six uncles,” he told me. He was in the exodus that day, driving a tractor, and saw the men being “selected,” including some as young as himself, then 15. “I knew them,” he said, meaning the Serb police, to whom he sometimes sold cigarettes in the cafes of nearby Djakovica. “Zlatko. Llazar. Milos.” As his tractor rounded a bend, he heard the gunfire. Perhaps some of his family are still alive, he suggested hopefully. Maybe in jail in Serbia?
Two old women, in their 70s, joined us. Maria Hasani wore the black shawl and white apron of the traditional Albanian peasant and lived across the road. Her husband, son and 16-year-old nephew had been taken into the field before she was carted away. “A black day,” she said, and pointed out dark patches where grass did not grow. “The acid in the blood,” my translator explained. “It kills the roots.”
Meja will surely figure at The Hague. Investigators have collected testimony. Some witnesses tell of seeing bodies too numerous to count. Others describe how they watched from the hill on the other side of the valley as trucks arrived late in the day to haul away the corpses. None of those taken into the field has been seen again, their ultimate fates largely a mystery. I say “largely” because some have apparently turned up in mass graves outside Belgrade.
Stories like this are commonplace in Kosovo. No doubt Milosevic will brush them aside. Such “collateral damage” is regrettable but inescapable, you can almost hear him saying, before reminding us once again that, in a war on terror, there are few innocents. Ultimately he will play his trump card, not altogether unjustly. Are we in the West not also guilty, he will ask–for example, by sponsoring the Croat offensive in the summer of 1995 that killed several hundred Serbs and drove more than 100,000 from their homes?
I find it helps, amid these sorts of mind games, to remember Meja–its brute gratuity and scope, the premeditated malevolence. A new book by Matthew McAllester, “Beyond the Mountains of the Damned,” catches this truth in the words of a Serb woman (not an Albanian) who emerges at the end of the war from the ruins of Pec, Kosovo’s second largest city. " ‘NATO did not do this,’ she says, looking at the rubble around her feet. ‘All this comes from the president. The big man, Milosevic’."
