Controlled Bleeding

Heavy snow is falling in Pristina these days, while several Santa Clauses, Snow-white and Donald the KLA are posing with children for photos at 40 dinars per photograph. Schools are closed in Podujevo, so is the municipal building, outside which petrified and revolted Serbs are staging protest rallies.

However, a bloody incident occurred even in the complacent Kosovo capital. Two policemen were wounded last Tuesday evening in the center of Pristina.

A series of massacres started on Monday, 14 December, when six young Serbs were killed in a Pec cafe. The violence continued with the execution of the Kosovo Polje municipality Vice President. Milic Jovic, a state security inspector, was killed last Monday morning in Podujevo. Armed incidents occurred in two Kosovo towns last Tuesday evening.

In a Kosovska Mitrovica cafe, an unidentified assailant wounded a local security guard, Ljujzim Ademi, and his friends Naser Haziri, when he opened fire from an automatic rifle as he burst in at around 7 p.m. The assailant fled while the two wounded men were taken to the Pristina hospital immediately. Haziri died the next morning, while the police sealed the area where the incident occurred and are reportedly still "searching intensively" for the assailant.

Three hours after this incident, someone opened fire at an unmarked police vehicle in Pristina's suburb of Velanija, where Ibrahim Rugova's house is located. Miodrag Nesic, one of the police officers in the vehicle, was wounded badly, while his unidentified colleague got away with minor injuries. Both officers were taken to Belgrade by helicopter, while many of Pristina's inhabitants panicked after seeing the chopper flying very low at around 11 p.m.. Police are "searching intensively" for the perpetrators of this attack too, but not as intensively as in Mitrovica, because Velanija was sealed for a very short period.

Inspector Jovic was killed in Podujevo when he was on his way to work. He lived in one of the two buildings next to the town's first aid station. A narrow lane from that area leads to the center of Podujevo and to three Serb schools. Jovic was accompanied by Milijana Pantic, an employee of the local Public funds department. Two assailants, armed with an automatic rifle and a revolver, shot Jovic from the back. The officer had fifteen wounds in the back and the head. A pool of blood and pieces of tissue were still on the scene when Vreme's reporter got there four hours later. Judging by the other, smaller pool of blood, the attackers shot Milijana Pantic in the legs when she tried to run away. Then they ran.

Jovic was still alive, so the first aid station workers put him in a car and took him to Pristina. His pulse went flat minutes before they reached the Pristina hospital. Attempts to resuscitate him were fruitless, while Milijana Pantic is recovering from the wounds she sustained.

Police found the body of Zvonko Bojanic, the President of the Kosovo Polje municipality, on Friday morning along the Pristina-Pec road near a village called Careva cesma. Bojanic was shot in the chest and the head, after which a vehicle ran over him. It is still uncertain whether Bojanic's executioners ran over him or another driver accidentally hit him after he was already dead. Bojanic's family says that he was kidnapped the previous evening at around 10 p.m. from his Slatina home, close to Pristina airport. Five armed men wearing masks came looking for him by name. They also took away his wife's jewelry when they abducted him.

On Tuesday, 15 December, the morning after the murder of six young Serbs in the Panda cafe, the police launched an extensive search which - according to the local DSK branch, was still in progress on 21 December. On 16 December, police arrested Gazmed and Dzevdet Bajrami and Vlaznim Verdjejaj of Pec. The next morning, the Pristina Media center quoted the Pristina police headquarters as saying that the task force had sealed off Pec's Kapecnica area and the Glodjane village in the search for the killers, after which thirty persons suspected of complicity in the murders were arrested.

The names of the suspects were revealed, and the police also said that they were looking for two men known by their nicknames Skeljzen and Fatah. Later that day, police killed two men wearing KLA uniforms after repelling another attack, and arrested 11 people in Kapecnica. By the evening, a total of 34 persons were arrested in Pec and Glodjane. The Media center said that all the arrested were members of a notorious gang led by Ramus Haradinaj of Glodjane. A number of charges have been pressed against Haradinaj for crimes against arrested Serb civilians and police. Police operations continued the next day. Ethnic Albanian sources reported many beatings. William Walker, the head of the OSCE verifying mission, told a group of reporters on Saturday that his men in Pec had heard similar stories but denied seeing a single beaten suspect. The Pec district court pressed charges against six suspects in the Panda cafe case, but declined to reveal their names "in the interest of the investigation".

On Friday, police sealed the village of Vasiljevo in the search for Zvonko Bojanic's killers. Police told the Media center that they were looking for a gang led by Suljeman Selimi, a.k.a. Sultan. Police troops entered Vasiljevo, but did not find Sultan and his boys. The search in Podujevo has so far been futile as well.

Adem Demaqi, the KLA political representative, told a press conference last Tuesday that Bojanic spoke fluent Albanian, that he did only good to Kosovo's ethnic Albanians and that not one ethnic Albanian could say anything bad about him. "These facts have led us to believe, and be 100 percent sure, that Bojanic was not killed by an ethnic Albanian hand", Demaqi said. He distanced himself from the Pec massacre once again and blamed "Serb secret police" for both atrocities.

Jakup Krasniqi, the KLA spokesman, spoke to Lawrence Rosin, the State Department's director for Southeastern Europe, in the KLA's Dragobilje headquarters last Tuesday. Krasniqi said that the KLA had distanced itself from the atrocities committed against the civilians, regardless of whether they were Albanian, Serb or others.

"Bojanic's ties with the ethnic Albanians probably led to his execution. It's the ideal way to discourage and prevent others from trying to bring Serbs, Montenegrins and ethnic Albanians closer together", Demaqi said. According to him, Bojanic's murder was aimed at persuading the world that ethnic Albanians were killing innocent people who had nothing to do with the fighting.

"We are convinced that this is a part of the Paracin script, masterminded by General Daljevic and others", Demaqi said. "Aziz Keljmendi was killed on that occasion although this could have been avoided. A Serb, a Croat, a Macedonian and a Bosnian were killed in the darkness of the barracks that night. The next morning the press came up with headlines that "Yugoslavia has been shot", said Demaqi.

"According to Demaqi, the recent murders are another attempt to alarm the Serbs by organizing atrocities. "Both the Pec massacre and Bojanic's murder was masterminded by someone who wants to alienate the ethnic Albanians from the world", Demaqi said, and added there was no reliable information on inspector Jovic's murder. "There was another attempt to assassinate Jovic a few months ago, when his car was riddled with bullets. He got away that time. Now, he wasn't so lucky. You will get more information from these people carrying arms. I am sure they will claim responsibility if they are responsible", said Demaqi.

Every single ethnic Albanian will tell you that they know nothing about these crimes.

Perhaps it's unwise to take unofficial police sources for granted, but this time they did reveal quite a few intriguing details to the weekly Vreme. All three cases have one thing in common. Police know a lot more about those who probably ordered and organized the murders than about the assassins. Police arrested one of those involved in the Pec massacre on the day of the murders, but he reportedly "refused to speak until 9.30 in the evening", until he was sure that the job was done.

Rumors in Pec have it that another gang, led by Daut Harandaj, Ramus's brother, has come to Pec with the assignment to carry out a few more hits like the one in which six Serbs were killed. That's why so many people were arrested after the massacre.

The Serbs spoke of Bojanic and his reputation the same way Demaqi did. Bojanic started as a police officer and became a successful businessman. Around 200 mainly ethnic Albanian worker were employed in his furniture factory. He had no ethnic prejudices in anything, especially not his business. Although some KLA members told a US diplomat who preferred to stay anonymous that Bojanic "got what he deserved", the police got unconfirmed reports that Sultan himself had ordered an investigation into Bojanic's murder. Reportedly, the investigation revealed that the hit was organized by one of Sultan's own men with a heavy police record. Allegedly, the motive was robbery and the man who did it has been executed.

The late inspector Jovic spoke fluent Albanian too. His colleagues say he could trick quite a few ethnic Albanians about his nationality. The first attempt to assassinate him happened in his native village Krimpej, near Podujevo. "He definitely wasn't killed by someone he knew. There's no way anyone we know can get close to us", his colleagues said. The problem is that the possible masterminds of these murders are in the woods, out of reach for the police. "They are accompanied by several hundred armed men, meaning that a serious attempt to apprehend them would require a kind of operation that isn't allowed at the moment", a number of police officers said. Ramus Haradinaj allegedly has 400 armed comrades with him.

There is no doubt that the KLA made full use of the break resulting from the Milosevic-Holbrooke agreement and the harsh Balkan winter. "First, they obtained more weapons. Second, they reorganized themselves. They are now led by officers trained in the former JNA. They now have territorial defense and operative units", said a police officer.
Indeed, the ethnic Albanian newspapers closely following KLA activities (which the Serbian Information Minister Aleksandar Vucic never mentioned when he started threatening the Serbian media) are full of stories about various KLA brigades, interviews with their commanders, deputy commanders and so on.

Dan Everts, an experienced head of the OSCE mission in Kosovo, confirmed there were quite a few changes within the KLA ranks. "The KLA is still carrying out extensive preparations for war in the north", Everts told the Reuters news agency. He said the KLA leadership was now a lot more professional than before, adding that they’ve started forming their own civilian authorities. Ethnic Albanian newspapers sometimes quote Sabahudin Cena, an Orahovac professor who calls himself the manager of the KLA's "public administration sector".

"The KLA was in the hills when the verifying mission agreement was signed. Then they came down and started digging trenches, each of them closer to the town", the president of the Podujevo municipality executive board, Srboslav Bisercic, told the weekly Vreme. Bisercic said that a KLA member recently took away a hunting rifle from a local worker because the latter allegedly "trespassed into the KLA operative zone".

Fresh trenches can be seen on the outskirts of Podujevo, less than half a mile from the motorway to Pristina.

The situation was very tense on Monday in the villages around Podujevo. We ran into a US KDOM team when we went to see the trenches, Bisercic mentioned. The US team was getting out of there in a hurry. They said they saw six tanks and that Serb troops were "very nervous because of that morning's murder". We too turned around and went back as the tank approached and the ethnic Albanians fled in panic.

Podujevo was crammed with OSCE verifier and diplomatic observers last Monday. "There are so many of them now, but they were nowhere when we asked them to come here and protect us", Bisercic said. When we left town that afternoon, we came across several police checkpoints that hadn't been there only two hours earlier. Those coming from Belgrade were being searched by the army only an hour later. Colonel Bozidar Filic, an interior ministry spokesman, told the Beta news agency that evening that police had Podujevo under control.

Jeers and Evacuation

The Serb and Montenegrin inhabitants of Kosovo Polje expected Serbia's President Milan Milutinovic to arrive on Tuesday. Dobrica Lazic, the municipal chairman, told the Belgrade daily Blic that Milutinovic wasn't coming. He failed to turn up on Monday too, although the locals demanded that he addresses them. Instead of coming himself, Milutinovic sent Vlajko Stoiljkovic, the Serbian interior minister. Stojiljkovic was accompanied by Vojislav Zivkovic, the president of Kosovo's socialists, and the president of Kosovo's temporary governing body Zoran Andjelkovic.

The Serbian interior minister was jeered when he said that "we have succeeded in the struggle against terrorism" and that "we should continue to work on security in cooperation with the international community". He was jeered when he said that the police force was an independent institution, but the protesters were especially offended when he said that the police were doing a good job in securing communication as well as the safety of Kosovo's citizens and their property.
Dobrica Lazic asked the protesters to go on with their daily routine when Stojiljkovic finished. Bosko Budimirovic, one of the founders of Kosovo's Serb resistance movement asked the protesters to stay after accusing Lazic of deceiving and betraying the town. The protesters nevertheless dispersed. Some protesters told reporters that Serbs have organized night watch in Kosovo Polje again.

"The best thing to do is to evacuate all these people to a safer location, especially those in Podujevo", the weekly Vreme was told by Momcilo Trajkovic, the president of the Serb resistance movement.