Slamming Doors

Whoever thought that the horror of Kosovo was nearing its conclusion, on Tuesday, had occasion to realize that the opposite is true.  Namely, that day, news arrived of the discovery of eighteen corpses in the village of Donja Obrinja in Drenica, while in the neighboring Gornja Obrinja in Golubovac, thirteen more were found.  Most of the victims are clearly civilians; all eighteen found in Donja Obrinja have the same surname: Delilaj.  The youngest is Valjmir, eighteen months old, who got a bullet to the head.  The oldest is Fazlji, aged 94, who could have died of “natural causes”, from the cold or lack of water (he was an invalid).  And the remaining victims are mostly women, children and elderly men, refugees who had settled there temporarily.

The corpses were initially discovered by journalists, with diplomats from the observers’ mission and representatives of human rights organizations following close behind.  Everyone later describe the same image of horror: corpses in tents, ditches, fields, houses...  “I saw seven of them in the woods.  In one ditch I counted seven women and two children — it seems that they were killed while fleeing.  I am not a pathologist, but it appears to me that each one of them got a shot to the head from close range.  Some of them were clearly massacred with knives.  I am sorry to say this, but one woman’s belly was ripped wide open,” stated Fred Abrams who is with the Human Rights Watch.  Diplomatic sources confirmed this description.

From the seat of the Human Rights Watch in Washington, an official announcement has been released in which the massacre is ascribed to the “Serb armed forces.”  The words of an anonymous witness — who said that on Saturday, September 26, around ten o’clock in the morning, he saw Serbian security forces entering the forest near Donja Obrinja — are cited in this announcement.  Immediately after this, the witness claims that shrieks and gunfire could be heard coming from the forest.  As far as Golubovac is concerned, the story is somewhat different.  Several days before, some two hundred people fled from that village in front of the police.  On Saturday, the police found them and forced them, at gunpoint, to go back to their homes.  The men were separated from the women, and then fourteen of them, supposedly all men ranging in age from thirty five to fifty five, were killed after some physical abuse.

Bozidar Filic, Spokesman for the Ministry of Domestic Affairs in Kosovo, immediately discounted these accusations.  “I refuse every possibility that our men committed this massacre,” stated Filic.  However, he could not provide any details in support of his words, admitting that the massacre was “not reported” and that the police learned about it from the newspapers.  “Measures are being taken to find out the truth,” he stated, which should probably mean that an investigation is in progress.  We hope that this time there will actually be an investigation.  An investigation had also been announced after a similar massacre in Likosani, at the end of February of this year, but it appears that it was never carried out, or at least nothing could be learned about it.  The worst possible thing would be for the government to be satisfied by releasing into the public a version according to which everything had been invented by the Albanians.  Whoever believed that in Srebrenica Muslims killed each other in enormous numbers is likely to believe this also.  On the other hand, everyone who wishes to see guided missiles flying over Belgrade must have heard their heart skip a beat.

Unfortunately the Human Rights Watch version for now sounds more convincing.  On September 26, the police suffered relatively high losses in that area, and it is not unimaginable that a reaction ensued.  Besides that, even policemen must have known on that day that the offensive which lasted for three months had come to its conclusion, and that Milosevic’s diplomacy was stepping in from then on.  Perhaps someone decided to slam the door heavily on their way out.  But the house could fall apart from such slamming.