Malisevo in Blue

At dusk, two hours after the state electronic media announced on Tuesday, July 28, that Malisevo fell, a strong, cold wind began to blow through Pristina, which had been suffering under a heat wave during the previous days.  What everyone expected to happen only after a lengthy, difficult battle, happened too quickly and too easily.  Too quickly and too easily, when compared with what the Vreme reporter saw on Monday, July 27, when he passed along the Pristina-Pec Highway, from Pristina right up to Kijevo: villages in which several hundreds of armed Serb villagers and members of MUP remained longer than two months under partial or total siege from armed Kosovo Albanians.
COWBOYS AND INDIANS: The jeep which carried the Vreme reporter had a punctured tire, three hours following the battle’s end and one hour before dark enveloped the Kijevo-Lapusnik Highway.  The air was thick with smoke, while houses still burned, with mortar holes measuring three feet across in their walls, and haystacks were on fire.  We were the second to last in a convoy of around ten reporters’ vehicles which were coming back from a visit to liberated sections of the highway that was organized by the Pristina Media Center.  The colleagues who drove behind us did not have time to wait for us.  They drove a colleague from Radio Novi Sad who was with us and who promised to inform the police at the first control point near Komoran.  One American, an Albanian, and a Serb who were in the jeep jointly got down to the business of changing the one mentioned tire.  Admittedly, the cooperation did not yield results, but soon help arrived in the guise of a police vehicle and a Yugoslav Army truck.

“How can we be of help,” asked cordially (really and truly!) a heavyset, sunburned policeman.  We said, “Just keep our fear at a healthy level.”

The policeman merely sighed heavily and waved his head in a dissatisfied way.  As we got off so lightly (Zika the mechanic jumped out of the truck and solved all our technical problems with lightening speed), things did not look quite so that bad--we did not even believe a policeman at the Komoran checkpoint who told us that we were being shot at.  Even though we heard shots in our proximity several minutes and kilometers before we noticed the punctured tire, neither the vehicle, nor any of us were hit.  We supposed that it was merely policemen who were shooting in the air, and we ascribed the tire puncture to speedy crossing of the remains of stone barricades and to sharp tractor parts which lay sprawled across the bridge between Kijevo and Balinac.

Half an hour earlier, after driving through the burned and ruined villages on a road in which we only came across several police combat vehicles, ten free, but confused cows, and one herd of disinterested sheep, we had arrived in the village of Kijevo.  The village is located south of the highway.  On the northern, Drenica side of the highway there are only some industrial buildings, and on the highway itself there is a restaurant.  The one story building is riddled with bullets — we were told, from sniper fire.  The village is full of policemen.  The police occupy the school building and the healthcare station.  Lots of activity, many trucks.  They are all carrying backpacks — some are coming, others are leaving, singing “De-jo, Deee-jo...”  In general, spirits are running high.  In blue uniforms, with red and yellow bandannas around their necks and foreheads, sunburned and sweaty, they look like they just came out of the film Soldier Blue.  One youth, with a careworn face and an automatic gun hanging over his shoulder, appeared profoundly moved by the appearance of a convoy of journalists.

“You don’t know how happy I am just to see people, cars...”
“How long is it you haven’t seen any,” a colleague asks.
“A very, very long time,” he answers.

“The highway is free along its entire length, which you will soon find out,” police Lieutenant Bozidar Filic told us at the first station in the village of Lapusnik.  Still, we were not convinced because we were told in Kijevo that we are only going as far as Dolac, where the highway veers off to Klin, with the convoy being turned back only hundreds of feet on the way out of Kijevo, and directed toward Pristina.  Darkness was approaching all too quickly, so we were unable to see the third neuralgic spot along this famous highway, the village of Iglarevo.

“It’s ten times worse there than anything we saw thus far,” a member of the Media Center told us.

Three hours after our departure, Kijevo was once again attacked.  There were no wounded in the village.

The counteroffensive between the police,  the  army,  and KLA began on Friday afternoon, while battles were still in progress on the hills surrounding Orahovac.  According to Media Center announcements, the counteroffensive was provoked by simultaneous attacks by armed Albanians on Yugoslav Army convoys near Komoran and the village of Kijevo, in the evening of Friday, July 24.  According to the same source, early on Saturday morning, attacks began on a police station in the village of Zborce, which is located on the Crnoljevo Mountain, as well as on a Yugoslav Army convoy several miles south of there at the Dulje Junction of the Pristina-Prizren Highway.  Battles lasted all day, late into the night.  On Saturday afternoon the police reinforcements, which set out from Kline to the twelve mile distant Kijevo, managed to break through.  On Sunday, the police went on a counteroffensive from the direction of Komoran toward the village of Lapusnik, the most important highway control point in the region of Metohija.

CHERRY PICKING: As any further strengthening of KLA and broadening of the “liberated territory” would make it entirely impossible for the regime to keep the state within its official borders, and as the Albanian side still continues to sit down to the negotiating table, the Serb authorities decided, with evidently silent consent from the international community, to exploit the first KLA action after the harvest and to take the initiative on ground.  Namely, both sides organized harvesting campaigns in which combine workers were being protected by armed men.  Everything that could not be harvested was burnt.  One company from Pristina even looked for cherry pickers in the “liberated territories”.
Initially, in the battle for Orahovac, KLA’s serious attempt at broadening the “liberated territory” of Malisevo to the south, and across the Milanovac Mountain was stifled.  By taking Orahovac, the KLA would force its way into the Valley of Belog Drima, which leads to the most accessible route from Kosovo to Albania, thus gaining the opportunity of arming bigger, mobile units and in this way taking the insurgence into its next phase in this battle season.  After the successful defense of Orahovac, around which battles waged all through the weekend (on the Orahovac-Malisevo road a Yugoslav Army officer was killed on Saturday), the army and the police carried through a counterattack.
All through last week, Albanian media kept announcing the arrival of large army and police convoys into Pristina and Urosevac.  On all main highways in the region, as well as on throughways, checkpoints appeared for controlling passengers, in a campaign which is the most adamant since the beginning of the conflict.  Since July 22, the border belt toward Albania has been broadened to five kilometers (prior to this, the breadth of this belt extended to only a couple of hundred meters), so that the village of Junik, near Decani, where smugglers cross the border most frequently, often with artillery support from this and surrounding villages, has also come under the army’s jurisdiction.  Since Sunday, the village itself has been completely surrounded by the army and the police, and since Tuesday, after two days of cease-fire, Serb forces are being shot at from surrounding villages.

SHAKY CONSOLIDATION: On Sunday afternoon, Serb forces took the village of Lapusnik, where the Mountains of Kosmac and Crnoljevo, respectively from the North and South, come together.  In the past months stories have been circulating about “thousands of armed Albanians who were digging connected trenches tens of kilometers long on those slopes, and segmented the highway with several ten-feet wide channels and barricades.”  Reality is slightly different.  In the forests on the slope south of Lapusnik we saw a trench several kilometers long, about three feet deep, with a soil barrier in front.  Following the mountain road, the trench goes right to the top of the hill.  In several places bunkers were built from earth, branches, and sandbags.  From the trenches and bunkers, from where there is an open view to several kilometers of highway and the valley, there were no signs of battle, except for a burnt bush in the forest.  But the houses in the village are heavily damaged.  It appears that the armed Albanians did not know how to defend those painstakingly dug trenches which permitted them to keep the police at a distance.  They preferred the traditional technique: they barricaded themselves in their houses.  They allowed Serb artillery to take the hills, so that they were driven out of their homes with relative ease.  Neither was the Pristina-Pec highway dug up, nor could the remains of any kind of barricade be seen in Lapusnik, that is if we exclude a thoroughly bullet-riddled bus.

NAILS IN A WATER HEATER: After it established control over the highway, the police continued its progress from Kijevo and Lapusnik in the direction of Malisevo.  This community, “one of the poorest in an otherwise impoverished Kosovo”, as Paljoku Berisaj, coordinator in the “Mother Theresa” Albanian Humanitarian Society, described it in an interview with Vreme, has been under KLA control in the past two months.  As the only community center under the control of rebel leaders, this town became the unofficial capital of the “liberated territory”.  Albanian civilians who fled from Klin and Pec scurried to Malisevo and the surrounding area, with the latest wave of refugees who came to this area occurring during the battle for Orahovac.

“Initially, two months ago, people from the area surrounding Decani fled partly to Albania and partly to Orahovac.  When conflict broke out in Orahovac, the refugees also fled to Malisevo,” states Gordana Milenkovic from the Belgrade Office of the International Red Cross.  No one knows precisely how many refugees are presently residing in the area around Malisevo.  Estimates differ greatly, from ten to forty thousand.  It is also not known what the actual population of this community is.  In the latest census, that figure stood at 30,000, but it is certainly far higher now.

“There is general chaos in Malisevo,” says Gordana Milenkovic.  “Our team took food and hygiene products there on Tuesday (July 21) and Thursday (July 23).”
Paljoku Berisaj, who was also in Malisevo last week, says that there is no water and electricity in the town, “People are drinking water from wells and the River Mirusa, which is not exactly clean.”

On Tuesday the police announced that around five o’clock in the afternoon it entered Malisevo and that the surrounding area is under its complete control.  Journalists, who visited this place under the auspices of the Media Center, state that villages along the Lapusnik-Malisevo road offer the same picture as the one in Kijevo.  The only significant resistance to the police forces appears to have occurred in Dzamijka Mahala, a small village immediately after the highway junction to Malisevo.  There the police discovered improvised mines made from water heaters filled with nails and dynamite.  One police transport vehicle was damaged by an artillery mine.  Along the way no people were visible — only abandoned cattle.  There were no evident barriers on this road either.

Malisevo itself is completely unharmed, with the exception of the gasoline station at the entrance to the town where marks of grenades are evident.  In a city which had tens of thousands of citizens, the only civilians left are an eighty-year-old Albanian and two Gypsies.  In the building which served as the KLA headquarters, maps, uniforms, half-eaten porridge, and big stores of food, milk, coke, juice, and mineral water have been left behind.  The town was evidently deserted in a hurry.  Even though some houses are solidly locked and barricaded, many stores were left open, while the goods remain untouched.  According to the Daily Telegraph reporter, who spent the weekend in Malisevo, the evacuation was organized, but a large number of people had to be transported.  A good number of refugees who fled to Malisevo from the Orahovac region while battles were being waged there are now returning to their homes.  The other part of the Malisevo refugee colony is now fleeing across the Milanovac and Crnoljevo Mountains.  It appears that Malisevo and the surrounding area have truly been thoroughly cleansed of KLA soldiers.  The police is far more relaxed here than on the Pristina-Pec road.  On the other hand, KLA clearly made the wise decision not to defend the “liberated territory”, because that would certainly have placed them in an impossible position.  On Saturday the army and police force movements from Suva Reka toward the villages of Blace and Dulja successfully closed off the path which leads to the south between the Milanovac and Crnoljevo Mountains.  However, as this article is being written, there are no indications that the occupation of the area around Dulja has managed to prevent armed Albanians and the many refugees, who are probably following them, from fleeing across Sar Mountain down to Albania and Macedonia.  On the contrary, it appears that on both sides of that mountain very bloody battles have taken place in the last six days.  In the village of Crnoljevo in the Stimlje Community, on Saturday 11 armed Albanians were killed on the northern side of the access road, according to the police, while two soldiers were killed near the village of Blace on Sunday.  No one knows the actual number of victims.  Already on Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. a large group of armed people attempted to cross into Albania at the Breznik watchtower on Koritnik Mountain, the continuation of Sar Mountain.

KLA mostly left snipers behind in the areas of conflict.  Nearly all killed and wounded soldiers and policemen in the last week were victims of sniper fire.
“You see that man over there,” asked a young policeman in Kijevo, pointing to a middle-aged man who was guarding cattle some sixty feet away from us, the only civilian we saw between Lapusnik and Kijev.  “He’s an Albanian and looks after cattle here every day.  He has never been shot at.  And until yesterday, you could not even leave this restaurant without being shot at.”

PORRIDGE IS BETTER: The MUP of Serbia must be credited with trying to realize its objectives in the past several months with minimal casualties, especially civilian casualties.  Given the extent of the operation, it could be said that it is mostly managing to do this.  Silent, international support probably depends on this number of victims.  Because of this sudden professionalism on the part of the police, many people thought that they would simply separate Malisevo from Drenica, put a seal on these areas and wait for KLA to stew in its own sauce, together with the refugees who would deplete their food stores.  It was calculated that this would quickly bring the KLA to the negotiating table, where there would certainly be something to sink one’s teeth in.  The regime evidently calculated that it could immediately continue further, right up to the complete annihilation of the armed movement of Kosovo’s Albanians.  With the coming of autumn, “the liberated territory” would be ever less and less accessible, while the eventual human catastrophe would certainly sway the international political positions of Serbia, which has only just begun to get back on its feet in that area.  Still, will it all go as smoothly as it appears to be going at the present?  What can the KLA do now?

First of all, it evidently intends to transfer as many of its members as it can across the border into Albania.  It will need to employ the same tactics that it used in March of this year for getting back into territories which were under its control.  In some places, not even that will be possible.  Perhaps they will need a little time to regroup, and will then try to organize a revolt in the Kosovo Valley, which has been relatively peaceful up to now, and will try to establish new supply lines across the Yugoslav-Macedonian border.  Conflicts between Macedonian border patrols and Albanian arms smugglers are already a daily occurrence.  The open plain of Kosovo Valley would certainly force the KLA to concentrate its activities in cities like Pristina and Gnjilane, and city fighting might begin quite soon in order to facilitate crossing over into Albania.  In any case, different commanders of this military formation kept announcing that they will soon enter Pristina.  In the latest “Political Declaration No. 5", issued on Tuesday, KLA states that Pristina will not “enjoy peace as if some African tribe is fighting in Drenica.”  Pristina is ever more and more ready for the appearance of KLA.  Tension is growing, and not only because of the many policemen who say that Albanians are night people.  Namely, Serbs claim that patrols in the Albanian districts of Dragodan, Veljanija and Suncani Breg are the result of the appearance of night watches with KLA banners in those parts of town.  Even though everything here is possible, it is hard to imagine that after everything the KLA leadership would bow its head to Ibrahim Rugova, who is only surviving on the political scene because of foreign support, and would accept the offer to enter into the new “government”, thus completing the Albanian presidency, which is the basis of the present efforts of Western diplomats.  This possibility was refused on Sunday by the spokesman of this organization, Jakup Krasnici.  Perhaps KLA might be successfully stifled with present pressures coming from all sides: last week police arrested several tens of people in Urosevac and Kacanik, accusing them of KLA membership; in Switzerland, on July 27, the bank account of the organization “The Homeland Calls”, which collected funds for the KLA, has been blocked; in Pristina police entered the premises of the official Crisis Headquarters of the “Republic of Kosovo”; under the same suspicions, even the police in the Republic of Albania confiscated around four tons of weapons in the last ten days, and arrested two Egyptians who channeled contributions made by the Islamic world.  If this works, then nothing will happen.  There is only one certainty: no one is greatly worried about the tens of thousands of civilians in the forests of Malisevo.