The horrible convoy of death
On the scene, NBC's Jim Maceda sees a horrible irony A body lies in a crater where, according to Yugoslav authorities, a convoy of refugees was struck near the town of Djakovica in southern Kosovo Wednesday.
By Jim Maceda NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT
PRIZREN, Yugoslavia, April 15 - The scene before us was one of utter destruction. It was nightmarish. Along with dozens of other foreign journalists, we arrived from Belgrade by Yugoslav Army bus to the scene of Wednesday's bombing of the civilian column in southwestern Kosovo. Immediately, it became clear that these displaced ethnic Albanian civilians - the very people for whom NATO had gone to war to protect - had taken direct hits from at least three bombs.
WE WERE TAKEN to three sites, and at each the crater from a bomb bore testimony to a direct hit in the center of the roadway this column of refugees was plying Wednesday. The refugee victims, who apparently had been traveling as they often do in tractors or inside farm trailers, were literally strewn all over the highway. Body parts littered a six- or seven-mile stretch of the main highway between Djakovika and Prizren.
We knew very well that the Yugoslav authorities were milking this for all its propaganda value. We had no real way of settling the main question: had any of it been staged. Was all of this devastation caused by a NATO mistake?
But the reality was frightful. In one place, we saw blood on the road, we saw bits of shoes, towels, fruit-juice boxes, canned food. And it got much more gruesome than that about a mile or so further down the road, where tractors and trailers were blown to bits and bodies had been carbonized - one driver still at the wheel of his tractor-trailer. Behind him in the trailer, body parts, arms and legs hung over the sides. And on the side of the road, a crater and beside it a piece of bomb casing marked, MK-82. The Mark 82 is the U.S. Air Force's standard laser-guided bomb.
We also saw shrapnel cuts in the road as if struck by artillery. And yet there was absolutely no indication of anything but civilian damage. No indication of a military presence, of damaged military equipment or dead soldiers. At the third of the locations we visited, in Prizren, we encountered the worst of the damage. At least six bodies in a field, two of them decapitated. Again more carbonized bodies in a tractor. Body parts, again, everywhere.
We asked why these body parts and corpses were left out in the open. For the benefit of our cameras, we suspected. But our question brought no answer from the Yugoslav authorities.
We then went to the hospital in Prizren, about a 10-mile drive down that same road. There we saw six more bodies in a morgue, 11 seriously wounded in hospital. We spoke to one man, a father, he told us he was at the front of this line.
It was a column of ethnic Albanian refugees moving of their own volition, he said, away the war zone in the north to the relative safety of of Prizren in the southwest. The man said as a line of 100 or so people walked along the highway, a warplane flew over and then there was an explosion. He lost his sister-in-law, his brother, and two of his children on the tractor itself.
Another man said he was moving with his family back home now that the Yugoslav offensive in Kosovo had ended. They were not being forced out of their homes. His version coincides with what the Yugoslav authorities in Belgrade were telling us - that these were not people driven from their homes but people heading back to them.
Another irony in what appeared, at least from the ground, to be a series of horrible ironies. NATO mistakenly hitting the very people it was meant to save in this country.
NBC Correspondent Jim Maceda is on assignment in Belgrade.