Dance of the Dead

A certain construction material warehouse is situated one kilometre away from Srbica, on the road to Glogovac. Reporters who got there on Tuesday, March 10, previously avoiding a number of road blocks and police checkpoints, came across one of those sights that make you want to quit and move to a remote Pacific island. In the warehouse lay 49 bodies of different ages and sex, neatly arranged as if they were being exhibited. There were 12 women, 13 children between the age of three and 15, five old men and 19 men between the age of 16 and 60. Some had died from a bullet, some from shrapnel and some had been killed with a knife. Three bodies were burnt beyond identification. A ten-year old boy had a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead and no other visible wounds. According to an official statement released by the Serbian Interior Ministry, these people killed in the night between Wednesday and Thursday in the village of Donji Prekaz near Srbica were terrorists.

Most of the bodies had been brought from the Srbica morgue the day before. The remainder arrived from Pristina, Pec and Mitrovica. The police ordered the families of the deceased to bury their dead within 24 hours, threatening to do so themselves otherwise. That's where the problem came up, because some bodies could not be identified. Furthermore, the male relatives of some of the victims wouldn't come forward to identify them, fearing they would be arrested. The Democratic Alliance of Kosovo asked ethnic Albanians to bury no one before an autopsy could be conducted, preferably by a group of foreign experts. So the bodies lay in the warehouse for two days and one night. Fortunately for the living, a cold front and a snowstorm hit Kosovo during the night, preventing an epidemic which would surely have broken out had the unexpected March heat lasted a day longer.

On Tuesday evening, the police lost patience: a fire brigade appeared, put the bodies into coffins and buried them. However, the ethnic Albanians of Prekaz are Muslims and their religion says that the dead are not to be buried in coffins, but sheets with their heads pointing towards Mecca. New graves were dug on Wednesday, the dead were exhumed and buried again. Many people turned up for the second funeral, but no patriotic speeches were heard. Probably because the mourning friends and relatives of the victims were accompanied by two police officers ready to use their automatic rifles.

On Wednesday, a source close to the interior ministry told Vreme's reporter that the police had nothing to do with the first burial and that the ethnic Albanians, in fact, buried their dead twice because no foreign television crews turned up the first time round. When asked to explain the presence of coffins on Tuesday, the man we spoke to looked very confused but said: "They must have prepared the whole thing in advance. You don't know what they are like". Pro-regime media in Serbia claim that the women and children of Prekaz were killed by their own brothers and fathers, terrorists who would rather kill their loved ones than let them surrender, conveniently blaming the massacre on the Serbs. Stories like that one make it difficult to create a credible picture of what's going on in Kosovo. The other side is lying too: people who claimed to have witnessed the Prekaz massacre turned up at the warehouse in Srbica, saying their relatives were among the dead. They somehow couldn't remember their names, but did so with the assistance of local political activists. Upon returning from a picturesque Drenica village and checking the map, a foreign reporter realized that his ethnic Albanian guide had taken him to a spot thirty miles away from where he thought he went. The provincial information ministry doesn't even bother to stop reporters going to Drenica, the police escort them back to Pristina when they are done. Reporters traveling to Drenica do so at their own risk. At this time, it is impossible to get a realistic picture of what is going in villages still under siege by Serbian police looking for "what is left of the terrorists groups". Unofficial sources say occasional skirmishes are still going on in the vicinity of Laus, Vojnik and a few other villages, adding that Serbian police have not entered them yet. The independent Pristina daily in Albanian, Koha Ditore, writes that police snipers deployed around Laus have already killed five people in the village. The police, on the other hand, said last Saturday that all anti-terrorist missions in Drenica were successfully accomplished. Four days later, they said the mission was still on and that it was never aborted. Some policemen willing to talk to Vreme said the situation in Kosovo reminded them of early fighting in Slavonia and Bosnia. "As we prepare for attack, we get orders to back off. We return to base and then get orders to attack again. It's like a vicious circle", one of them said. Many sources say the original plan was to finish the job in Drenica in four days, from March 5 to 8, with a "fierce and a surgically precise assault". However, police troops are not surgeons, and they needed two days just to enter the village of Prekaz, where resistance was much tougher than they expected. Meanwhile, things became a bit complicated on the diplomatic front too: Serbian police can't leave the job unfinished now, but they can't launch a full scale offensive either, because the world would surely regard that as a new ethnic cleansing episode.

The most accurate and probably the most sincere assessment of the situation came from a Kosovo Serb official, who wished to stay anonymous. "We are stuck, brother, and we are in shit up to our necks. Even if all the Prekaz victims were terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK), their annihilation wasn't worth the consequences it brought", he said.

The world is once again swarmed with pictures of dead women and children. It will take something special to explain their death without incurring substantial political damage. On Tuesday, the Serbian government issued a statement to the effect that "an international Red Cross team should visit Kosovo to help determine the truth". On Wednesday, a Red Cross official who took the statement seriously was stopped and sent back at the Komoran checkpoint, and had his personal belongings searched in Pristina although he was in possession of a diplomatic passport. Later that day, ICRC and UNHCR offices were shut down and the staff was evacuated because of persistent crank calls and death threats. UNHCR and ICRC staff declined to say in what language they were threatened, but that is beside the point. The point is that they no longer feel safe even with Serbian police around. So what safety is there for both ethnic groups in Kosovo, the Albanians and the Serbs, who have started moving their women and children to safer locations? The people have gotten used to seeing heavily armed police troops, what scares them is the sight of mud-stained foreign television land cruisers, so reminiscent of the scenes from the Bosnian war. The problem is not the mere presence of BBC and CNN crews, but the fact that pictures of dead women and children have been implanted deep into the minds of all ethnic Albanians. One needs to remember how the Serbs reacted to similar pictures from Croatia brought by Serbian television, and what followed. A half-hearted call for a dialogue by the Belgrade authorities won't help all that much, neither will diplomacy. "We don't know what this call means", said Ibrahim Rugova, adding that his party always wanted a dialogue in the first place. Rugova didn't yield even to US special envoy Robert Gelbard, who tried to persuade him to denounce terrorism. "The confidence between the two sides is virtually non-existent, the only way out could be secret diplomacy", Gelbard told reporters after his meeting with Rugova. He looked like a man trying to stay optimistic in spite of the fact that he had failed completely. The general ethnic Albanian feeling about Gelbard was perhaps best described by Zekerijah Cana, who stood by the bodies of the Drenica victims and told reporters: "Gelbard is an idiot. He allowed Milosevic to do this, and he should be sent to the Hague tribunal for it".

There is another photograph strongly influencing ethnic Albanians: that of Adem Jasari, when he posed for the newspapers armed to the teeth. Jasari said he would never let the Serbs catch him alive, and kept his promise as he turned out to be one of the Drenica victims. He is already a legend among his compatriots, as well as a subject of mystic tales about his heroic death. Serbian government-controlled media said Jasari fought the police with his heavy machine gun until his final breath, only adding to the myth. Having described him as some kind of super human and the commander of the UCK force in Drenica , the pro-regime media accomplished exactly what they have been pinning on their independent counterparts: they made terrorism popular worldwide.

Observers well informed about the situation in Drenica say the late Adem Jasari never held a very high rank in the UCK. "He was a local hustler, looking to make a name for himself as a romantic hero. Thanks to the Serbian police, that's exactly what he did", one of the observers said. One minor detail tells a different story: the wounds on Adem Jasari's body clearly show the man had his throat cut with a knife.

The Kosovo crisis is quickly and surely turning into a disaster. An independent investigation to determine who killed the Drenica civilians might be the only measure that could turn the situation around. The investigation will be conducted sooner or later by the Belgrade authorities or, more probably, the Hague tribunal for war crimes. That is when the Prekaz victims will be exhumed for autopsy once again, and buried for the third time. In Kosovo, not even the dead can sleep peacefully these days.