With brutal military precision and crude propaganda, Yugoslav President Milosevic emptied the province of Kosovo. But what does Kosovo really mean to the Serbian people? Why did war break out? Can there ever be lasting peace there again?
Kosovo is a Southern province of Serbia. The republics of Montenegro and Serbia make up what is left of today’s Yugoslavia.
Until a few years ago, Kosovo was a place most of us had never heard of. In 1999 it would become the target of both ethnic cleansing and the biggest NATO bombardment since World War II. Across the world, Kosovo became synonymous with hell-on-earth. Images of ethnic Albanian refugees streaming by the hundreds of thousands out of Kosovo to a tenuous safety were seared into our minds. (PAUSE) Old or young, no-one was spared Slobodan Milosevic's cruel hand.
In the refugee camps, survivors told stories of brutal treatment at the hands of Serbs, who broke down their doors and told them to leave.
Dulja: When they go into a house and they see a woman with gold they say: ‘Come on, take it off!’ And they take it. ‘In two minutes I don’t want to see you in the house any more’. We didn’t take anything with us except the clothes we were wearing.
Lina, refugee: And they said why are you waiting so long, the trains and the buses are already ready for you. They're waiting in Kosovo Polje to take you out, so leave as soon as possible. Lucky for us they didn't kill anybody. They had big, big guns, they had black masks, and black clothes, and they had bloody knives’.
Adriatic, refugee: From that moment on we were refugees. All these refugees walking through the centre of the city were thrown with stones, with glasses, with who knows what, from the Serb part. These civilians, some of them went out into the streets and shouted, go to hell. This is what you deserve!
No-one could deserve the fate that befell this woman. Mihane Sinanaj recounts the death of her two grandchildren, as they awaited deportation from Kosovo’s largest town, Pristina.
Mihane Sinanaj, refugee: I heard someone saying: ‘A child is dead, a child is dead’. He was my son’s child.
The second child in her care was crushed to death in the crowd.
Mihane Sinanaj, refugee: Someone in the crowd said ‘Hang on, hang on, he’s still alive’. The police were kicking his body backwards and forwards. They said ‘Don’t bother to come closer. Just feed it to the dogs because he’s just another Albanian kid and the Albanians have plenty of kids, but the dogs are hungry. Feed it to the dogs’.
Towns like Pristina were emptied street by street, women were raped, the Albanian men taken away. A familiar pattern was emerging.
Imihan: They planned it long before, you know, because we heard that this part of Pristina – because the telephones were still working – that part was expelled, then another part. So we even knew our turn.
In a safe-house in Macedonia, women and children speculate on the fate of their missing husbands and fathers and describe how they were ethnically cleansed by the Serb paramilitaries.
Kastrati, refugee: Everywhere the Serb police gathered the women and children together from the four corners of Pristina, to the centre. They were always kicking us, pushing us around. Even in our own houses they used to storm in, beat us, swear at us, see us fall and make us get up again, watch us in the bathrooms and a lot more which I’m too ashamed to say.
It was this systematic barbarity which spurred NATO’s intervention.
Philip Reeker, 1st Asst. US Embassy, Macedonia: You determine that there is insurgent force in a village, so you drive the people out, burn the village, shell their house, kill their cattle, chop down their fruit trees. I mean it's really a sort of Medieval approach to things.
To understand how this Medieval approach resurfaced, how Milosevic whipped up such anti-Albanian hatred, we must turn to the past. For Kosovo was the heartland of medieval Serbia. Although Kosovo today is 90 percent ethnic Albanian and largely Muslim, its mountains enclose some of the oldest and most beautiful of the Serbian Orthodox Christian churches.
In a 14th century Serbian monastery images of Turkish brutality towards Christians adorn the walls. The Ottoman Turks achieved a strategic European victory by defeating the Serbs at Kosovo Field in 1389. Serbian nationalists today view Kosovo as a kind of Serbian Palestine. The Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo insists there can be no question of Kosovo being separated from Serbia.
Serbian orthodox Bishop Artemije Radosavljevic: For a couple of years we have been going around the world, to Europe, Russia and America, telling people Kosovo is the cradle of the Serbian people, of Serbian culture and spirituality.
For more than 1,000 years the church has been in this region. In Kosovo there are more than a thousand churches and monasteries that our forefathers have built from the twelth century up to today.
Milosevic began to awaken dormant Serbian passions for Kosovo as he rose to power in the late 80s. He is known to rely closely on the advice of his wife, Mira Markovic, herself no friend of free society.
Mrs Milosevic: Our biggest wish is for all people in Yugoslavia to live together – to live in equality and harmony.
Meanwhile the Serb propaganda machine was busy exploiting Serbia’s historical link to Kosovo.
Radmila Milentievic, Former Serbian Information Minister: We can’t imagine the Serbs – and I am a Serb – I cannot imagine my own definition of what I am as a Serb, without having that reference, and that is Kosovo.
The message struck a chord with ordinary, rural Serbs living in Kosovo, and feeling outnumbered.
Moma Trjkovic: Look, all these parts – as far as your eye can see – up to the mountains… all this is Serbian land. There are Serbs living here – Albanians never lived here. And even today, Serbs are under pressure to emigrate and leave this land where they have lived for centuries.
Moma Trjkovic is the manager of this collective farm, bringing his workers a beer. In the late 1980’s Trjkovic was deputy president of Serbia. He went on to lead the Serbian Resistance Movement in Kosovo. Serbs, he said, would never be defeated.
Trjkovic: The stubborn insistence of Albanians… for a new Albanian state on this Serbian territory means nothing else, but leads towards war. For us, we are strong enough at the local level to give the Albanians an answer.
Many Serbs like Moma still believe they are the last bastion against Islam. Milosevic exploited the church’s links with Kosovo to mask his ultra-nationalist agenda. But parts of the Orthodox church are long standing critics of Milosevic – even calling on him repeatedly to resign.
Serbian orthodox Bishop Artemije Radosavljevic: I believe we have to work on changing the regime in Serbia in order to have a democratic solution.
Yugoslavia has always been a fragile concept because its borders have so frequently changed. It was mapped out by the leaders of Europe after World War I. World War I itself was started, when a Bosnian student assassinated the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarejevo in June 1914. Instability and ethnic strife arrived. Croats, freed from Austrian rule of the Hapsburg Empire, fought Serbs, who were not long free from Ottoman rule.
Then came the Second World War and more political chaos in the Balkans. Hitler partitioned Yugoslavia, establishing the Nazi puppet state of Independent Croatia. There the Serbs suffered ethnic cleansing.
After World War II, General Tito reorganized Yugoslavia as a federation under Communist rule. Tito established six republics: the biggest – Serbia - Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia. He gave them all some form of self-government, as he did the Serbian province of Kosovo. The development stirred resentment among Serbs.
The boundaries of the republics were not always consistent with the populations living there. Bosnia had the greatest mix of populations. For 35 years, Tito held the competing interests together with a strong army, and a Communist ideology that promoted Yugoslavism above historical differences. This glue held Yugoslavia together until after his death.
But after communism fell in 1989, various ethnic groups began vying for power across the region. Rioting broke out in Kosovo when Milosevic stripped away the autonomy of the Albanians in 1990? The Kosovar Albanians were a target for long-suppressed nationalism.
Old Serb woman: We think our country has never been able to trust them and never will. They’re a nation of smugglers, black-marketeers and drug traffickers. They trade in drugs. They lie and cheat. Their sole aim is to destroy and plunder Serbs and nothing more. And Serbs have always strived to educate them.
In the early 1990’s, chaos spread through the Balkans, as Yugoslavia’s republics sought independence, and politics partitioned along ethnic lines.
In Bosnia, that meant the Croatian Catholic, the Serbian Orthodox and the Muslim.
Before the genocide in Bosnia these three ethnic groups were intermingled and a third were intermarried. But nationalism was on the rise in neighbouring Serbia and Croatia. And ethnic tensions in Bosnia worsened when Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia.
In February 1992, the Muslim government of Bosnia also voted in favour of independence, the Serb population largely boycotting the referendum. The main Serb party of Bosnia, led by a psychiatrist, Dr. Radavan Karadzic, encouraged a national neurosis that Bosnian Serbs were under threat.
Bosnian Serb rebels went to war. President Milosevic sent his army to help them. The world would later discover that neighbours had become executioners.
Borislav Herak, Serb soldier: I never had anything… German Marks.. gold. I never knew what that’s like. I wanted all that… and I saw the others doing it so I followed in their footsteps, the killing, rape and looting. I saw others do that and I just went down the same path because I thought I’d have a little something after the war…
Survivors of such terror campaigns in Bosnia were separated and packed into prison camps. Television pictures of these camps revived images of the second world war and film cameras were promptly forbidden by the Serb authorities.
The Dayton peace accord brought the Bosnian war to a close. Bosnia-Herzegovina was to be split into two camps: a Muslim-Croat Federation administering 51 percent of the land, and a Serb Republic within Bosnia comprising 49 percent.
30,000 NATO peacekeepers still police the 4km division between the two entities. Milosevic had failed to assert Serb supremacy in Bosnia, but he had helped unleash Serb nationalism.
And there was no room in Milosevic’s grand plan for democracy or dissent. Four years of war throughout Yugoslavia had brought Serbia nothing but sanctions and a recession. When Milosevic cancelled opposition election victories, students galvanised 50,000 people to stage four months of marches in the Serbian capital Belgrade in late ‘96 and early ‘97. The people knew they were just pawns in a political game.
Miroslav: Foreign media kept on saying that Serbs are war criminals, Nazis etc. Then you here on your media that Serbs are victims, the ones who defend their country and so on, and people would rather believe that than what they hear on foreign media. That’s why most of us didn’t do anything against this war like protests. But now people are realising that war is not only fighting for freedom, country or something, war is much more than that. It is achieving some political goals, and we are being used in that achievement as what we call cannon meat.
But students’ heckles and whistles were no match for Milosevic’s henchmen, who responded with truncheons and teargas.
Protester: I want freedom! I want to be free! He’s a killer! Milosevic is a killer! He’s killing us!
When cameraman Lazar Lalic was filming the protest, he felt the full force of what he had been shooting.
Lazar Lalic, cameraman: He just took his stick and hit me in the head. And then the other guys started kicking me. I was trying to explain to them to stop beating me – but it doesn’t help when you’re on the ground. They’re kicking and beating you like mad dogs. I saw a couple of my colleagues and they had heads like this! It was a very unpleasant experience for everybody.
Throughout his reign, Milosevic has strangled all press which is critical of him.
Dnevni Telegraf!
The Dnevni Telegraf was one such thorn in Milosevic’s side. To masque his intensifying oppression of Kosovo, he tightened his grip on the media. The Dnevni Telegraf is printed outside Serbia, since its offices in Serbia had their computers and presses seized. Just before the war with NATO broke out, the editor of this paper - one of Milosevic’s fiercest press critics - was silenced once and for all. In one of his last interviews, Slavko Curuvija described the efforts of the Serb authorities to stop his paper being published.
Slavko Curuvija, former editor Dnevni Telegraf: This morning they stopped a train coming from Podgorica – in the southern part of Serbia – and confiscated the whole circulation intended to be distributed all around Serbia and Belgrade. Yesterday they did the same thing at the airport. I am losing every day this whole amount of money, all my reserves are running out.
In April 1999 Slavko Curuvija was shot dead by masked gunmen as he left his home.
But when he addressed the nation on New Year’s Eve 1996, Milosevic blamed outsiders for the months of protests. It’s an excuse he still used during the war with NATO.
Milosevic New Year’s Eve 1996 TV address: Even if we take into account the external and internal interferences we’ve been exposed to in the past months, I think we can say we’ve done very well in the past year.
After four months of protest, the opposition was split and the Serbian people were tired. Nationalist elements were surfacing amongst the protesters on the streets of Belgrade. Despite Milosevic’s failure in Bosnia, many still saw violence as the way forward for a greater Serbia.
Once NATO air-strikes on Yugoslavia began, the Serbian people abandoned their anti-Milosevic rhetoric and backed him in his campaign against the pro-Albanian west. It showed just how easily nationalist feelings can richochet through a primed population.
Inside Kosovo, life for ethnic Albanians had been deteriorating since they lost their autonomy in 1990. Milosevic had sent his security apparatus into Albanian institutions to throw them out of their jobs. Hospitals, the media, all professions were targeted.
Kiro Gligorov, Macedonian President: I think the basic blame for this situation lies with President Milosevic. Exactly ten years ago he took away all the rights which Albanians acquired in the former Yugoslavia.
From then on, the Serb army and police would be in charge of law enforcement in Kosovo. (PAUSE) Albanians have been running a kind of parallel state inside Kosovo ever since, with schools and even a free medical service.
None of the staff in this Albanian hospital are paid. In fact, outside Kosovo, their qualifications are not even recognised.
Nurse: It’s too hard now. It’s three years we work here without money. But I don’t want to go any place, another place. I want to work here.
Q: Do you think you’re doing something for your people?
A: Yes, of course. We do that all the time, because we are human. We want to help people, my people first.
Even an Albanian wedding became a symbol of protest. The groom’s father in this case was killed in Serbian police custody. His friends and relatives claim he was tortured to death, because he ran Albanian language schools.
Fehrim, friend of dead father: He was brought to the police station. He was there it seems an hour or two… alive. And he died at the police station.
So here, a portrait of the groom’s murdered father was displayed alongside the happy couple, as if the marriage itself were an act of revenge.
The father had been the regional Director of Education.
A rough, unfinished building in Pristina, served as the ‘Albanian university’. Here students could learn in their own language. Under international pressure Serbia finally conceded that Albanian students could return to the actual Pristina University and be taught in their own language. But only in shifts. Student leaders dismissed the offer as continued discrimination.
SYNC Albin Kurti, Student Leader: The Albanian and the Serbian students are going to be taught in two different shifts, which is unacceptable for us, because from our point of view, that is a sort of apartheid.
So even before the ethnic cleansing began, Albanians had been forcibly frozen out of their own society. But an armed Albanian resistance movement was emerging, the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, despite all Serb attempts to intimidate the population into staying away from it. (PAUSE) Serbian repression in Kosovo had only strengthened Albanian identity.
Brikenda, wedding guest: I respect my nation, and I’d like my family, my children to be Albanians. Clear Albanians, not mixed with some other nation.
By May 1998 the ethnic lceansing had begun. The Serbs massacred 41 ethnic Albanians in the Drenica region, claiming they were searching for members of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The village of Prekaz was tear-gassed, the houses shelled to pieces.
Bahtije Jashari, Drenica survivor: There were 36 or 37 of us in the house. Children were screaming, and they started shooting with tear gas. And in front of the house they started setting things on fire. There was a lot of wood around the house.
As Serb choppers continued to circle overhead, the refugees moved into the schoolhouse. The survivors denied that there were any gunmen in the compound. The village was only 500m from a Serb police base: an unlikely place to set up a guerrilla camp. Local support for the KLA was growing.
Drenica survivor: I believe that the KLA exists. I think it should exist and we should all be soldiers of Kosovo until independence.
In the eyes of the Serbs, the KLA were terrorists, determined to break up Serbia. The Albanians called them freedom fighters.
Adem Demaci is known as the ‘Nelson Mandela of Kosovo’, since he spent 28 years in prison campaigning for Albanian independence. He argues that Albanian acts of violence have been committed purely in self defence.
SYNC Adem Demaci, Albanian politician/the ‘Nelson Mandela of Kosovo’: Our policy, the policy of my party, is not to support violence. But we don’t condemn it, because we know that Albanian violence is in self defense. It is not violence against Serbian people. But the violence of the Serbian regime is a terrorist regime, and that violence is in order to rob us.
It’s an argument which is obviously shared by the KLA themselves. Just three days before, this man, a Battalion Commander with the Kosovo Liberation Army, had been on the front line. Now recovering from a wound inflicted by an enemy hand grenade, he describes a battle where he says the KLA directly saved Albanian lives.
‘Axha’, KLA Commander: There were over 30,000 people, women, children, old and young people located in a valley between Radobrav and Reti. On the first day of their offensive the Serb forces tried to massacre these civilians. There were two battalions. One on foot, the other in vehicles coming to carry out the massacre. But the KLA attacked the Serb forces to prevent this massacre.
But it was the Racak massacre of 45 villagers in January 1999 which finally galvanised international opinion to stop Milosevic’s crusade in Kosovo. What had been considered a civil war was now an international matter. International observers were refused entry into Kosovo as the survivors fled
Sali Beqaj: They lined up the men in groups of twenty-four. They told them to put their hands on their heads and they told them to run down to another village. But then police came from another direction and they shot them.
Although very few of these eye witness accounts were emerging in the Serbian media, NATO began an aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia on March 24th 1999.
NATO’s objectives sounded clear: the withdrawal of Serb troops from Kosovo; the deployment of an international peacekeeping force; and the return of those Kosovar Albanians who had already fled to their homes. Although the principle goal of the strikes was stated as humanitarian, the protection of people on the ground was something NATO could not achieve. Civilian casualties were inflicted by NATO’s own bombs.
And as the strikes continued into the second or third weeks, a secondary aim of an early surrender by Milosevic was also way off mark.
Thousands of Albanians had fled Kosovo before the bombing began, but 800,000 - nearly half the Albanian population of Kosovo - left after it started.
Refugees: …if you know the road called Vllaznim Bashkim there are a few people on the road.
Q: What about the new housing development?
A: The new development… most people have gone.
Q: What about Grava, on that side, do you know anything?
A: For Grava, no. Because our army holds it.
Q: Where are the people?
A: They’re in the Vllaznim Bashkim. Some are in the mountains.
Q: What about in Grava?
A: They are still there.
Q: What about Kachanik?
A: Kachanik is emptied. Nobody’s there.
The mass exodus of refugees to Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro led to allegations that NATO had colluded in ethnic cleansing.
Jonathan Eyal, Royal Services Institute: There’s no doubt that President Milsoevic was planning for ethnic cleansing. About 25,000 ethnic Albanians were kicked out of Kosovo in the ten days before NATO’s air campaign began. So the trend was there. But equally there is no doubt that it was precisely the air campaign of the alliance, originally designed to prevent ethnic cleansing, which actually triggered off the biggest ethnic cleansing.
But those who flocked into the refugee camps were not speaking of their fear of NATO’s bombs, but a Serb clampdown designed to rid Kosovo of all Albanians.
Arsini: It’s not true that Albanian people were afraid or scared from air strikes. We were only scared and afraid of policemen and these paramilitary forces, Serbian forces.
NATO’s bombing campaign also met with immediate protest from Russia, Slavic brothers of the Yugoslavs. And when NATO’s bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by mistake, China and Russia were thrown together in an ideological alliance not seen since the cold war.
But the air strikes continued. Much of Serbia’s infrastructure was destroyed. After 78 days of bombardment, Milosevic finally agreed to NATO’s preconditions for peace.
As the Albanians began to return home, Kosovo’s Serb population fled to escape reprisals. Many doubted if the two communities could live with eachother again.
Gazmend, refugee: I speak for myself and maybe 70% of the people. I’m not any kind of representative, but I couldn’t live with the Serbs again. How could I live with them after they killed my family, even if it was my neighbour, I couldn’t.
The next battle over Kosovo will be to determine the region’s shape. The Americans pushed for unity, not partition.
Philip Reeker, 1st Asst. US Embassy, Macedonia: Independence for Kosovo is not on the table. It’s not something that we see as a benefit to anybody. We have enough borders in the Balkans and we don’t need to create any more.
But the peace deal agreed at the end of the air strikes actually meant that Albanians could have a referendum on independence after three years. Many fear the eventual outcome of this war will be an enlarged Albania.
Jonathan Eyal, Royal Services Institute: The reality is that the outcome of this war will be an ethnically pure Kosovo, the creation of a new state in Europe and the re-drawing of the frontiers, precisely what nobody wanted when this operation began. This is the horrible logic of this whole war, that what history put together, war is now taking apart.
So if peace entailed the risk that Serbia would one day lose Kosovo, what inspired Milosevic to surrender to NATO? Was it his indictment as a war criminal?
The UN War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yuglosavia and Rwanda was established in 1993 in the Hague. It was the first court of its kind since World War II.
Here are stored the testimonies which may one day bring to justice those already indicted for crimes against humanity in Bosnia. But the indictment against Milosevic was historic (door slams) in that he was a serving head of state. Kosovo, the tribunal argues, could have been avoided.
Justice Louise Arbour of the International War Crimes Tribunal: This is to a large extent the price we pay as an international community for not having given ourselves the means to challenge the impunity and unaccountability of the worst offenders amongst us, the people who oppress and kill their own people.
Thousands of men, women and children were taken away to their deaths in front of UN troops when the ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica in Bosnia fell. Indicting Milosevic meant the UN was not seen to be standing by and letting ethnic cleansing happen, as it had done then.
But would the Hutu extremists calling their countrymen to arms in Rwanda have been dissuaded by this kind of international pressure? Could genocide in the world’s other trouble-spots be avoided by indicting the instigators whilst they are still about their vicious business?
Michael Ignatieff, author and Balkans expert: Nobody in this world has happy, harmonious pasts. The past is almost by definition painful. But there is no place it’s more painful than in the former Yugoslavia, and the key moment will be when a Serbian democracy puts Mladic and Karadjic on trial for those crimes, and a Serbian court convicts them of those crimes. And in Croatia – a Croatian court puts on trial the people who evicted the Serbs from Croatia in 1995. Those are the trials that’ll really draw a line under this vicious past.
The Serb nationalist dream lay in ashes after Milosevic’s successive loss of the Serb-populated parts of Croatia, Bosnia, and then Kosovo. Rebuilding Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia will be a lengthy and costly process. NATO-led peacekeepers could be there for years. War crimes prosecutors have a huge task ahead to unravel the massacres which took place. After the war Milosevic declared ‘We never gave up Kosovo’. No-one yet knows what will happen if the Albanians do not give up their demands for independence. But Yugoslavia will only prosper when it is a multi-ethnic democracy.
For many of the victims of Kosovo’s ethnic cleansing, life will never be the same again. Many will never even go home.
Mihane Sinanaj, refugee: Where? I have no one, no place to go. Nothing left. Everything is burned, even the land.
As a new millenium is born, Serbia remains mired in the past. If the peoples of the former Yugoslavia want the democracy and prosperity of other former communist countries, they need to bury their historic animosities. The next generation will have to learn to forget and forgive.
Kosovo is a Southern province of Serbia. The republics of Montenegro and Serbia make up what is left of today’s Yugoslavia.
Until a few years ago, Kosovo was a place most of us had never heard of. In 1999 it would become the target of both ethnic cleansing and the biggest NATO bombardment since World War II. Across the world, Kosovo became synonymous with hell-on-earth. Images of ethnic Albanian refugees streaming by the hundreds of thousands out of Kosovo to a tenuous safety were seared into our minds. (PAUSE) Old or young, no-one was spared Slobodan Milosevic's cruel hand.
In the refugee camps, survivors told stories of brutal treatment at the hands of Serbs, who broke down their doors and told them to leave.
Dulja: When they go into a house and they see a woman with gold they say: ‘Come on, take it off!’ And they take it. ‘In two minutes I don’t want to see you in the house any more’. We didn’t take anything with us except the clothes we were wearing.
Lina, refugee: And they said why are you waiting so long, the trains and the buses are already ready for you. They're waiting in Kosovo Polje to take you out, so leave as soon as possible. Lucky for us they didn't kill anybody. They had big, big guns, they had black masks, and black clothes, and they had bloody knives’.
Adriatic, refugee: From that moment on we were refugees. All these refugees walking through the centre of the city were thrown with stones, with glasses, with who knows what, from the Serb part. These civilians, some of them went out into the streets and shouted, go to hell. This is what you deserve!
No-one could deserve the fate that befell this woman. Mihane Sinanaj recounts the death of her two grandchildren, as they awaited deportation from Kosovo’s largest town, Pristina.
Mihane Sinanaj, refugee: I heard someone saying: ‘A child is dead, a child is dead’. He was my son’s child.
The second child in her care was crushed to death in the crowd.
Mihane Sinanaj, refugee: Someone in the crowd said ‘Hang on, hang on, he’s still alive’. The police were kicking his body backwards and forwards. They said ‘Don’t bother to come closer. Just feed it to the dogs because he’s just another Albanian kid and the Albanians have plenty of kids, but the dogs are hungry. Feed it to the dogs’.
Towns like Pristina were emptied street by street, women were raped, the Albanian men taken away. A familiar pattern was emerging.
Imihan: They planned it long before, you know, because we heard that this part of Pristina – because the telephones were still working – that part was expelled, then another part. So we even knew our turn.
In a safe-house in Macedonia, women and children speculate on the fate of their missing husbands and fathers and describe how they were ethnically cleansed by the Serb paramilitaries.
Kastrati, refugee: Everywhere the Serb police gathered the women and children together from the four corners of Pristina, to the centre. They were always kicking us, pushing us around. Even in our own houses they used to storm in, beat us, swear at us, see us fall and make us get up again, watch us in the bathrooms and a lot more which I’m too ashamed to say.
It was this systematic barbarity which spurred NATO’s intervention.
Philip Reeker, 1st Asst. US Embassy, Macedonia: You determine that there is insurgent force in a village, so you drive the people out, burn the village, shell their house, kill their cattle, chop down their fruit trees. I mean it's really a sort of Medieval approach to things.
To understand how this Medieval approach resurfaced, how Milosevic whipped up such anti-Albanian hatred, we must turn to the past. For Kosovo was the heartland of medieval Serbia. Although Kosovo today is 90 percent ethnic Albanian and largely Muslim, its mountains enclose some of the oldest and most beautiful of the Serbian Orthodox Christian churches.
In a 14th century Serbian monastery images of Turkish brutality towards Christians adorn the walls. The Ottoman Turks achieved a strategic European victory by defeating the Serbs at Kosovo Field in 1389. Serbian nationalists today view Kosovo as a kind of Serbian Palestine. The Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo insists there can be no question of Kosovo being separated from Serbia.
Serbian orthodox Bishop Artemije Radosavljevic: For a couple of years we have been going around the world, to Europe, Russia and America, telling people Kosovo is the cradle of the Serbian people, of Serbian culture and spirituality.
For more than 1,000 years the church has been in this region. In Kosovo there are more than a thousand churches and monasteries that our forefathers have built from the twelth century up to today.
Milosevic began to awaken dormant Serbian passions for Kosovo as he rose to power in the late 80s. He is known to rely closely on the advice of his wife, Mira Markovic, herself no friend of free society.
Mrs Milosevic: Our biggest wish is for all people in Yugoslavia to live together – to live in equality and harmony.
Meanwhile the Serb propaganda machine was busy exploiting Serbia’s historical link to Kosovo.
Radmila Milentievic, Former Serbian Information Minister: We can’t imagine the Serbs – and I am a Serb – I cannot imagine my own definition of what I am as a Serb, without having that reference, and that is Kosovo.
The message struck a chord with ordinary, rural Serbs living in Kosovo, and feeling outnumbered.
Moma Trjkovic: Look, all these parts – as far as your eye can see – up to the mountains… all this is Serbian land. There are Serbs living here – Albanians never lived here. And even today, Serbs are under pressure to emigrate and leave this land where they have lived for centuries.
Moma Trjkovic is the manager of this collective farm, bringing his workers a beer. In the late 1980’s Trjkovic was deputy president of Serbia. He went on to lead the Serbian Resistance Movement in Kosovo. Serbs, he said, would never be defeated.
Trjkovic: The stubborn insistence of Albanians… for a new Albanian state on this Serbian territory means nothing else, but leads towards war. For us, we are strong enough at the local level to give the Albanians an answer.
Many Serbs like Moma still believe they are the last bastion against Islam. Milosevic exploited the church’s links with Kosovo to mask his ultra-nationalist agenda. But parts of the Orthodox church are long standing critics of Milosevic – even calling on him repeatedly to resign.
Serbian orthodox Bishop Artemije Radosavljevic: I believe we have to work on changing the regime in Serbia in order to have a democratic solution.
Yugoslavia has always been a fragile concept because its borders have so frequently changed. It was mapped out by the leaders of Europe after World War I. World War I itself was started, when a Bosnian student assassinated the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarejevo in June 1914. Instability and ethnic strife arrived. Croats, freed from Austrian rule of the Hapsburg Empire, fought Serbs, who were not long free from Ottoman rule.
Then came the Second World War and more political chaos in the Balkans. Hitler partitioned Yugoslavia, establishing the Nazi puppet state of Independent Croatia. There the Serbs suffered ethnic cleansing.
After World War II, General Tito reorganized Yugoslavia as a federation under Communist rule. Tito established six republics: the biggest – Serbia - Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia. He gave them all some form of self-government, as he did the Serbian province of Kosovo. The development stirred resentment among Serbs.
The boundaries of the republics were not always consistent with the populations living there. Bosnia had the greatest mix of populations. For 35 years, Tito held the competing interests together with a strong army, and a Communist ideology that promoted Yugoslavism above historical differences. This glue held Yugoslavia together until after his death.
But after communism fell in 1989, various ethnic groups began vying for power across the region. Rioting broke out in Kosovo when Milosevic stripped away the autonomy of the Albanians in 1990? The Kosovar Albanians were a target for long-suppressed nationalism.
Old Serb woman: We think our country has never been able to trust them and never will. They’re a nation of smugglers, black-marketeers and drug traffickers. They trade in drugs. They lie and cheat. Their sole aim is to destroy and plunder Serbs and nothing more. And Serbs have always strived to educate them.
In the early 1990’s, chaos spread through the Balkans, as Yugoslavia’s republics sought independence, and politics partitioned along ethnic lines.
In Bosnia, that meant the Croatian Catholic, the Serbian Orthodox and the Muslim.
Before the genocide in Bosnia these three ethnic groups were intermingled and a third were intermarried. But nationalism was on the rise in neighbouring Serbia and Croatia. And ethnic tensions in Bosnia worsened when Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia.
In February 1992, the Muslim government of Bosnia also voted in favour of independence, the Serb population largely boycotting the referendum. The main Serb party of Bosnia, led by a psychiatrist, Dr. Radavan Karadzic, encouraged a national neurosis that Bosnian Serbs were under threat.
Bosnian Serb rebels went to war. President Milosevic sent his army to help them. The world would later discover that neighbours had become executioners.
Borislav Herak, Serb soldier: I never had anything… German Marks.. gold. I never knew what that’s like. I wanted all that… and I saw the others doing it so I followed in their footsteps, the killing, rape and looting. I saw others do that and I just went down the same path because I thought I’d have a little something after the war…
Survivors of such terror campaigns in Bosnia were separated and packed into prison camps. Television pictures of these camps revived images of the second world war and film cameras were promptly forbidden by the Serb authorities.
The Dayton peace accord brought the Bosnian war to a close. Bosnia-Herzegovina was to be split into two camps: a Muslim-Croat Federation administering 51 percent of the land, and a Serb Republic within Bosnia comprising 49 percent.
30,000 NATO peacekeepers still police the 4km division between the two entities. Milosevic had failed to assert Serb supremacy in Bosnia, but he had helped unleash Serb nationalism.
And there was no room in Milosevic’s grand plan for democracy or dissent. Four years of war throughout Yugoslavia had brought Serbia nothing but sanctions and a recession. When Milosevic cancelled opposition election victories, students galvanised 50,000 people to stage four months of marches in the Serbian capital Belgrade in late ‘96 and early ‘97. The people knew they were just pawns in a political game.
Miroslav: Foreign media kept on saying that Serbs are war criminals, Nazis etc. Then you here on your media that Serbs are victims, the ones who defend their country and so on, and people would rather believe that than what they hear on foreign media. That’s why most of us didn’t do anything against this war like protests. But now people are realising that war is not only fighting for freedom, country or something, war is much more than that. It is achieving some political goals, and we are being used in that achievement as what we call cannon meat.
But students’ heckles and whistles were no match for Milosevic’s henchmen, who responded with truncheons and teargas.
Protester: I want freedom! I want to be free! He’s a killer! Milosevic is a killer! He’s killing us!
When cameraman Lazar Lalic was filming the protest, he felt the full force of what he had been shooting.
Lazar Lalic, cameraman: He just took his stick and hit me in the head. And then the other guys started kicking me. I was trying to explain to them to stop beating me – but it doesn’t help when you’re on the ground. They’re kicking and beating you like mad dogs. I saw a couple of my colleagues and they had heads like this! It was a very unpleasant experience for everybody.
Throughout his reign, Milosevic has strangled all press which is critical of him.
Dnevni Telegraf!
The Dnevni Telegraf was one such thorn in Milosevic’s side. To masque his intensifying oppression of Kosovo, he tightened his grip on the media. The Dnevni Telegraf is printed outside Serbia, since its offices in Serbia had their computers and presses seized. Just before the war with NATO broke out, the editor of this paper - one of Milosevic’s fiercest press critics - was silenced once and for all. In one of his last interviews, Slavko Curuvija described the efforts of the Serb authorities to stop his paper being published.
Slavko Curuvija, former editor Dnevni Telegraf: This morning they stopped a train coming from Podgorica – in the southern part of Serbia – and confiscated the whole circulation intended to be distributed all around Serbia and Belgrade. Yesterday they did the same thing at the airport. I am losing every day this whole amount of money, all my reserves are running out.
In April 1999 Slavko Curuvija was shot dead by masked gunmen as he left his home.
But when he addressed the nation on New Year’s Eve 1996, Milosevic blamed outsiders for the months of protests. It’s an excuse he still used during the war with NATO.
Milosevic New Year’s Eve 1996 TV address: Even if we take into account the external and internal interferences we’ve been exposed to in the past months, I think we can say we’ve done very well in the past year.
After four months of protest, the opposition was split and the Serbian people were tired. Nationalist elements were surfacing amongst the protesters on the streets of Belgrade. Despite Milosevic’s failure in Bosnia, many still saw violence as the way forward for a greater Serbia.
Once NATO air-strikes on Yugoslavia began, the Serbian people abandoned their anti-Milosevic rhetoric and backed him in his campaign against the pro-Albanian west. It showed just how easily nationalist feelings can richochet through a primed population.
Inside Kosovo, life for ethnic Albanians had been deteriorating since they lost their autonomy in 1990. Milosevic had sent his security apparatus into Albanian institutions to throw them out of their jobs. Hospitals, the media, all professions were targeted.
Kiro Gligorov, Macedonian President: I think the basic blame for this situation lies with President Milosevic. Exactly ten years ago he took away all the rights which Albanians acquired in the former Yugoslavia.
From then on, the Serb army and police would be in charge of law enforcement in Kosovo. (PAUSE) Albanians have been running a kind of parallel state inside Kosovo ever since, with schools and even a free medical service.
None of the staff in this Albanian hospital are paid. In fact, outside Kosovo, their qualifications are not even recognised.
Nurse: It’s too hard now. It’s three years we work here without money. But I don’t want to go any place, another place. I want to work here.
Q: Do you think you’re doing something for your people?
A: Yes, of course. We do that all the time, because we are human. We want to help people, my people first.
Even an Albanian wedding became a symbol of protest. The groom’s father in this case was killed in Serbian police custody. His friends and relatives claim he was tortured to death, because he ran Albanian language schools.
Fehrim, friend of dead father: He was brought to the police station. He was there it seems an hour or two… alive. And he died at the police station.
So here, a portrait of the groom’s murdered father was displayed alongside the happy couple, as if the marriage itself were an act of revenge.
The father had been the regional Director of Education.
A rough, unfinished building in Pristina, served as the ‘Albanian university’. Here students could learn in their own language. Under international pressure Serbia finally conceded that Albanian students could return to the actual Pristina University and be taught in their own language. But only in shifts. Student leaders dismissed the offer as continued discrimination.
SYNC Albin Kurti, Student Leader: The Albanian and the Serbian students are going to be taught in two different shifts, which is unacceptable for us, because from our point of view, that is a sort of apartheid.
So even before the ethnic cleansing began, Albanians had been forcibly frozen out of their own society. But an armed Albanian resistance movement was emerging, the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, despite all Serb attempts to intimidate the population into staying away from it. (PAUSE) Serbian repression in Kosovo had only strengthened Albanian identity.
Brikenda, wedding guest: I respect my nation, and I’d like my family, my children to be Albanians. Clear Albanians, not mixed with some other nation.
By May 1998 the ethnic lceansing had begun. The Serbs massacred 41 ethnic Albanians in the Drenica region, claiming they were searching for members of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The village of Prekaz was tear-gassed, the houses shelled to pieces.
Bahtije Jashari, Drenica survivor: There were 36 or 37 of us in the house. Children were screaming, and they started shooting with tear gas. And in front of the house they started setting things on fire. There was a lot of wood around the house.
As Serb choppers continued to circle overhead, the refugees moved into the schoolhouse. The survivors denied that there were any gunmen in the compound. The village was only 500m from a Serb police base: an unlikely place to set up a guerrilla camp. Local support for the KLA was growing.
Drenica survivor: I believe that the KLA exists. I think it should exist and we should all be soldiers of Kosovo until independence.
In the eyes of the Serbs, the KLA were terrorists, determined to break up Serbia. The Albanians called them freedom fighters.
Adem Demaci is known as the ‘Nelson Mandela of Kosovo’, since he spent 28 years in prison campaigning for Albanian independence. He argues that Albanian acts of violence have been committed purely in self defence.
SYNC Adem Demaci, Albanian politician/the ‘Nelson Mandela of Kosovo’: Our policy, the policy of my party, is not to support violence. But we don’t condemn it, because we know that Albanian violence is in self defense. It is not violence against Serbian people. But the violence of the Serbian regime is a terrorist regime, and that violence is in order to rob us.
It’s an argument which is obviously shared by the KLA themselves. Just three days before, this man, a Battalion Commander with the Kosovo Liberation Army, had been on the front line. Now recovering from a wound inflicted by an enemy hand grenade, he describes a battle where he says the KLA directly saved Albanian lives.
‘Axha’, KLA Commander: There were over 30,000 people, women, children, old and young people located in a valley between Radobrav and Reti. On the first day of their offensive the Serb forces tried to massacre these civilians. There were two battalions. One on foot, the other in vehicles coming to carry out the massacre. But the KLA attacked the Serb forces to prevent this massacre.
But it was the Racak massacre of 45 villagers in January 1999 which finally galvanised international opinion to stop Milosevic’s crusade in Kosovo. What had been considered a civil war was now an international matter. International observers were refused entry into Kosovo as the survivors fled
Sali Beqaj: They lined up the men in groups of twenty-four. They told them to put their hands on their heads and they told them to run down to another village. But then police came from another direction and they shot them.
Although very few of these eye witness accounts were emerging in the Serbian media, NATO began an aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia on March 24th 1999.
NATO’s objectives sounded clear: the withdrawal of Serb troops from Kosovo; the deployment of an international peacekeeping force; and the return of those Kosovar Albanians who had already fled to their homes. Although the principle goal of the strikes was stated as humanitarian, the protection of people on the ground was something NATO could not achieve. Civilian casualties were inflicted by NATO’s own bombs.
And as the strikes continued into the second or third weeks, a secondary aim of an early surrender by Milosevic was also way off mark.
Thousands of Albanians had fled Kosovo before the bombing began, but 800,000 - nearly half the Albanian population of Kosovo - left after it started.
Refugees: …if you know the road called Vllaznim Bashkim there are a few people on the road.
Q: What about the new housing development?
A: The new development… most people have gone.
Q: What about Grava, on that side, do you know anything?
A: For Grava, no. Because our army holds it.
Q: Where are the people?
A: They’re in the Vllaznim Bashkim. Some are in the mountains.
Q: What about in Grava?
A: They are still there.
Q: What about Kachanik?
A: Kachanik is emptied. Nobody’s there.
The mass exodus of refugees to Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro led to allegations that NATO had colluded in ethnic cleansing.
Jonathan Eyal, Royal Services Institute: There’s no doubt that President Milsoevic was planning for ethnic cleansing. About 25,000 ethnic Albanians were kicked out of Kosovo in the ten days before NATO’s air campaign began. So the trend was there. But equally there is no doubt that it was precisely the air campaign of the alliance, originally designed to prevent ethnic cleansing, which actually triggered off the biggest ethnic cleansing.
But those who flocked into the refugee camps were not speaking of their fear of NATO’s bombs, but a Serb clampdown designed to rid Kosovo of all Albanians.
Arsini: It’s not true that Albanian people were afraid or scared from air strikes. We were only scared and afraid of policemen and these paramilitary forces, Serbian forces.
NATO’s bombing campaign also met with immediate protest from Russia, Slavic brothers of the Yugoslavs. And when NATO’s bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by mistake, China and Russia were thrown together in an ideological alliance not seen since the cold war.
But the air strikes continued. Much of Serbia’s infrastructure was destroyed. After 78 days of bombardment, Milosevic finally agreed to NATO’s preconditions for peace.
As the Albanians began to return home, Kosovo’s Serb population fled to escape reprisals. Many doubted if the two communities could live with eachother again.
Gazmend, refugee: I speak for myself and maybe 70% of the people. I’m not any kind of representative, but I couldn’t live with the Serbs again. How could I live with them after they killed my family, even if it was my neighbour, I couldn’t.
The next battle over Kosovo will be to determine the region’s shape. The Americans pushed for unity, not partition.
Philip Reeker, 1st Asst. US Embassy, Macedonia: Independence for Kosovo is not on the table. It’s not something that we see as a benefit to anybody. We have enough borders in the Balkans and we don’t need to create any more.
But the peace deal agreed at the end of the air strikes actually meant that Albanians could have a referendum on independence after three years. Many fear the eventual outcome of this war will be an enlarged Albania.
Jonathan Eyal, Royal Services Institute: The reality is that the outcome of this war will be an ethnically pure Kosovo, the creation of a new state in Europe and the re-drawing of the frontiers, precisely what nobody wanted when this operation began. This is the horrible logic of this whole war, that what history put together, war is now taking apart.
So if peace entailed the risk that Serbia would one day lose Kosovo, what inspired Milosevic to surrender to NATO? Was it his indictment as a war criminal?
The UN War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yuglosavia and Rwanda was established in 1993 in the Hague. It was the first court of its kind since World War II.
Here are stored the testimonies which may one day bring to justice those already indicted for crimes against humanity in Bosnia. But the indictment against Milosevic was historic (door slams) in that he was a serving head of state. Kosovo, the tribunal argues, could have been avoided.
Justice Louise Arbour of the International War Crimes Tribunal: This is to a large extent the price we pay as an international community for not having given ourselves the means to challenge the impunity and unaccountability of the worst offenders amongst us, the people who oppress and kill their own people.
Thousands of men, women and children were taken away to their deaths in front of UN troops when the ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica in Bosnia fell. Indicting Milosevic meant the UN was not seen to be standing by and letting ethnic cleansing happen, as it had done then.
But would the Hutu extremists calling their countrymen to arms in Rwanda have been dissuaded by this kind of international pressure? Could genocide in the world’s other trouble-spots be avoided by indicting the instigators whilst they are still about their vicious business?
Michael Ignatieff, author and Balkans expert: Nobody in this world has happy, harmonious pasts. The past is almost by definition painful. But there is no place it’s more painful than in the former Yugoslavia, and the key moment will be when a Serbian democracy puts Mladic and Karadjic on trial for those crimes, and a Serbian court convicts them of those crimes. And in Croatia – a Croatian court puts on trial the people who evicted the Serbs from Croatia in 1995. Those are the trials that’ll really draw a line under this vicious past.
The Serb nationalist dream lay in ashes after Milosevic’s successive loss of the Serb-populated parts of Croatia, Bosnia, and then Kosovo. Rebuilding Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia will be a lengthy and costly process. NATO-led peacekeepers could be there for years. War crimes prosecutors have a huge task ahead to unravel the massacres which took place. After the war Milosevic declared ‘We never gave up Kosovo’. No-one yet knows what will happen if the Albanians do not give up their demands for independence. But Yugoslavia will only prosper when it is a multi-ethnic democracy.
For many of the victims of Kosovo’s ethnic cleansing, life will never be the same again. Many will never even go home.
Mihane Sinanaj, refugee: Where? I have no one, no place to go. Nothing left. Everything is burned, even the land.
As a new millenium is born, Serbia remains mired in the past. If the peoples of the former Yugoslavia want the democracy and prosperity of other former communist countries, they need to bury their historic animosities. The next generation will have to learn to forget and forgive.