The Irish Times 4/9/99
Serb tanks shrouded in straw, ragged refugees clutching their belongings walking a railway line - the wickedness of bombing a residential area. . . Lara Marlowe reports from the Kosovan capital, Pristina.
It takes a journey to the heart of darkness, through the depopulated land of Kosovo and its desolate, bombed capital, to grasp the reality of the war in Yugoslavia. US and European leaders loved Kosovo so much that they are now destroying it to save it. For the first time since journalists fled Pristina at gunpoint just before the war started on March 24th, the Yugoslav Defence Ministry allowed a few correspondents to return there this week.
There are two bridges over the river at Raca, the border between Kosovo and Serbia proper and, perhaps fittingly, the place where the war damage begins in earnest. The railway bridge is broken, a large crater in the sandy soil at its southern end. Although bombs have nibbled away at both ends of the road bridge, our bus carefully made its way across it. The northernmost part of Kosovo seems to be securely held by the Serbs. Soldiers and policemen at checkpoints appear unconcerned by NATO bombardments. Passing farm after farm, you must strain your eyes to see the military vehicles covered with hay, nestled next to houses and barns. No wonder NATO is finding it difficult to defeat the Serbs from the air.
At the largest checkpoint we encountered, a small table was laden with a portable typewriter, CocaCola cans and a bottle of Sljivovica plum brandy. Two of the interior ministry paramilitary police known as MUP, wearing purple-blue camouflage, stood around with eight soldiers. One policeman read a newspaper while a little Pomeranian dog played in the shadow of his armoured personnel carrier. Then the tension rose. In an almost atmospheric shift of mood, our Serb travelling companions fell silent. Serb farmhouses gave way to Albanian homes with walls around them. We were entering a "cleansed" region. There were burned out, roofless houses along the roadside and one of the Defence Ministry officials announced that "if something happens, if anybody starts shooting at us, it is very important not to panic". Two T-72 tanks suddenly emerged from a country lane. The Serb soldiers riding on top of the front tank waved a flag triumphantly, smiling.
We passed hundreds more destroyed bungalows, all of them bearing the same black stains above their windows, often slanted where the smoke had followed the direction of the wind. "It's only two or three houses out of 10," a Yugoslav official stressed. A few examples were obviously enough to persuade entire villages to flee. Colleagues who had left Kosovo before the war started on March 24th said many of these homes were sacked over the past year of fighting, but there were signs of more recent departures. One pretty white house in a copse of trees was still burning. Cows that looked well cared for had been tied up to graze on the grass outside other abandoned dwellings. Near Podujevo, known as a Kosovo Liberation Army stronghold in the past, we were joined by an armoured escort vehicle mounted with a heavy machinegun. For the last hour of our journey to Pristina, five Yugoslav army soldiers wearing body armour and US-style helmets kept watch from the vehicle, their assault rifles pointed towards the hills, rifle-fired flechette grenades stuck in their backpacks.
The Yugoslav government may have proclaimed an Easter ceasefire in Kosovo, but our escort was clearly worried we might be attacked by the KLA. Since last summer and despite NATO's bombardment, the strategic balance appears barely to have altered. Serb forces control the roads, while the guerrillas move about in the mountains. We did not see the armoured columns they talk about in NATO briefings, but a half-dozen tanks spread out over several kilometres, each protectively sheltered next to a house, or shrouded in dried corn stalks. So this is what war looks like in 1999 Europe: tanks next to middle-class villas, land-mine warnings by the roadside, broken Venetian blinds sticking like ribs out of shattered windows.
On the outskirts of Pristina, the Beopetrol storage depot shot violent bouquets of flame hundreds of metres into the sky. Another fire - we did not know what - burned perhaps 10 miles away on the other side of the city. As we entered the northern, Albanian, side of Pristina, there were more burned and roofless houses. In front of one home inhabited by Serb forces, green ammunition boxes were stacked higher than a man's shoulders. For perhaps five kilometres, we saw only soldiers and policemen in the streets, and our bus had to wend its way through barricades made of the red bricks the Albanians used to build their houses.
Grocery stores, pharmacies, restaurants, a fabric shop, a travel agency and a shoe repair had been pillaged. Discarded loot lay on the floor and pavements. Amid this desolate scene, we passed a dozen or more ragged people - gypsies or Albanians, we weren't sure - walking down the railway track, clutching their belongings. Had they been bombed out of their homes or an insane asylum, or were the Serbs chasing them away? One deranged-looking teenager made grimaces and gestures at us. The seven policemen sitting around their armoured vehicle at a crossroads checkpoint showed no interest in this human flotsam. A fat Serb woman in sneakers sat on a kitchen chair, smiling and chatting with the policemen.
They parked our bus in front of the Pristina Executive Council, once the seat of the Yugoslav government in this ill-fated province. The council, the neighbouring Montenegro Bank and the government pension and disability insurance building still stood, but dirty white curtains blew out of their broken windows and they were surrounded by shoals of broken glass, in some places more than a metre deep. From time to time, a chunk of concrete or a metal rafter would come crashing down. Set back from the street, the post and telecommunications building continued to burn, 12 hours after NATO bombed it.
The damage to these buildings was shocking, but the Serb officials who spoke to us, their voices cracking with emotion, gave the unpleasant impression that it was meant to outweigh the expulsion of the Albanians in our minds. It was only when we walked deeper into the residential and shopping quarter behind the post office, wading through broken glass, twisted lamp posts, fallen electricity and telephone wires and rubble, that we realised the wickedness of the attack. Ironically, the officers' club, a half-kilometre away, was untouched.
A huge crater marked one street corner, and the rubble of houses smouldered for 100 metres in either direction. At the outskirts of the area, neighbours told us how Masuc Casi, his wife Djijana and their three daughters died. The neighbours said they were Turkish immigrants, but Serb media later described them as ethnic Albanians. The body of an old Serb woman, Zlata Brankovic, was pulled from her home. Four other civilians died in the attack, but the toll will doubtless rise as the rubble is cleared. In Aleksinac, bombed on Monday night, the initial civilian death toll of nine has since risen to 17.
British Air Commodore David Wilby told a NATO briefing yesterday that "NATO has certainly not caused the widespread and random damage which we believe has been caused by Serb forces". Just as the Serbs absurdly accused the Albanians of setting fire to their own houses, NATO is now - obscenely - accusing the Serbs of bombing their own cities.
Valentina Jovanic and Mirjana Milosavljevic had no doubt who bombed their neighbourhood. As they cleared rubble from the ruins of their father's photography shop, the two women in their 20s spoke of the previous night's terrors, which they survived in a nearby shelter. The bombing started at 11 p.m., and was repeated at 1 and 3 a.m. "Every time the bombing starts, the terrorists from Podujevo and Granica come into the streets and start shooting," Valentina Jovanic said. "If Clinton continues, there will be neither Serbs nor Albanians left here."
So where were the Albanians? Officials claimed unconvincingly that most of Pristina's pre-war population of 200,000 are still in the city, living in shelters. In several hours in the ghost city, we saw at most a few dozen civilians. "Some of the Albanians are still here," Mirjana Milosavljevic said. "The Albanians who are loyal to the Serb state are still here." Another man we met amid the ruins of central Pristina, Milan Djivkovic, insisted that his people had not expelled the Albanians. "They couldn't live with us, so they left," was his simple explanation. Flakes of ash floated earthward. The air we breathed was hot and smelled of burning rubber. Looking north, a minaret was framed against the red roofs of the empty Albanian sector and two balls of fire, two setting suns. One was real, the other only a burning petrol depot.