Massacre Of Albanians By Servian Terrorists From Belgrade

[Barry S. Marjanovich]

March 15 1998
EUROPE
THE SUNDAY TIMES (London)
Š
No mercy: the flattened remains of Jashari's
homes
Kosovo's silent houses of the dead

by Marie Colvin
Prekaz, Kosovo
ALL 11-year-old Basorta Jashari knew was that
the artillery shells had stopped crashing into her
house. For hours, the noise had been unbearable.

As she had hugged herself tightly beneath the
table which her mother used to prepare bread, the
ceiling had collapsed and the walls had appeared
to explode. Now it was the silence that was
terrifying. Choking on smoke and dust, she
screamed for her mother.

Weeping as she crawled through the rubble, she
found her sisters, Lirie, 10, Fatima, 8, and
seven-year-old Blerina. She tried to shake them
awake and was covered in blood by the time she
realised they were dead.

Then Basorta saw her brothers: Selvete, 20, Afeti,
17, Besim, 14, and Blerin, 12. They had always
seemed so strong. Now, all were dead.

Finally, there was her mother, Ferida, whose dark
shiny hair and beautiful voice Basorta had
cherished, lying with her limbs protruding at
impossible angles. She would never again
respond to her daughter's cry of "nene"
(mummy).

The pause in the shelling was to prove all too
brief. Basorta would spend the night and the next
day alone, with her family dead all around her, as
the Serbs' rockets came again and again,
smashing into the whitewashed house with
red-tiled roof that had once been home.

A bright, happy pupil at school, Basorta was the
sole survivor of an attack that can now be
revealed as nothing less than a calculated,
cold-blooded massacre.

The house in Prekaz, a village in a pastoral
landscape of neatly tilled fields and rolling hills
that might be mistaken for Somerset, had
sheltered 22 members of the families of two
brothers, Hamza Jashari, Basorta's father, and
Adem Jashari, her uncle - ethnic Albanians in
Kosovo, the southernmost province of what
remains of Serb-ruled Yugoslavia.

Their deaths were no accident of war. I pieced
together the horror last week from the account
Basorta - now in hiding with a family in the
nearby town of Srbica - gave to relatives who
managed to escape from other homes in Prekaz. I
saw the gaping holes in the roofs and walls of the
three Jashari homes in the compound - one for
Basorta's grandparents and one each for Hamza
and Adem - and the brown pockmarks left by
close-range machinegun fire on the walls.

In the muddy farmyard lay strewn the detritus of
domestic life: a little boy's shredded sports bag,
postcards from relatives in Germany and a
satellite dish dented by bullets. The nose cones
and tailfins of two rockets were scattered amid
the debris.

There is little doubt that the Jashari brothers were
connected to the Kosovo Liberation Army
(KLA), a militant force that emerged last
November dedicated to fighting for the interests
of the ethnic Albanians who make up 90% of
Kosovo's population.

They had grown impatient with the policies of the
mainstream Kosovo Democratic League. The
league advocates passive resistance to the
strong-arm tactics of Slobodan Milosevic, the
nationalist Serbian president of Yugoslavia, who
revoked the province's autonomous status and
ousted Albanians from all but their farms and
family jobs.

However, this was not the killing of suspected
terrorists in a firefight nor the ambush of
dangerous outlaws. It was a military assault on
three family homes without warning: on men,
women and children asleep in their beds.

The Serbs shelled the Jashari compound until
they thought that everyone was dead. In military
formation, they then moved inside, machineguns
blazing, just to make sure.

Perhaps they had had their fill of killing when they
found Basorta. Perhaps they thought she was too
young to accuse them. Or perhaps they could not
look a terrified schoolgirl in the eye and shoot
her. But she is the reason the truth can be told.

Yesterday, all that moved in the Jashari farm
compound that once teemed with children were
two black and white cows and a flock of
chickens pecking at the rubble. On the other side
of the dirt road that runs in front of the Jashari
compound were 51 fresh graves with mounds of
dark earth and wooden crosses. They were the
final resting place of the 22 Jasharis who died in
the house, four relatives who were killed nearby
and neighbours who got in the way of the Serbian
forces.

The operation against Kosovo - actually an
assault on the Drenica valley, a region of farming
villages that is the stronghold of Albanian
resistance - began on February 28, the day after
four Serbian policemen were killed in an ambush
as they chased KLA guerrillas. The Serbs moved
first against the village of Llaushe, killing 24
Albanians. Then they prepared to attack Prekaz,
where the Jasharis were the principal family.

Jetish Durmishi, a bus driver, was alerted to
danger when a friend telephoned from his home
near the local police station in Mitrovica with the
warning that a convoy of buses full of Serbian
police was moving towards Prekaz.

Durmishi escaped to the woods, leaving his
family behind; in the past the Serbs had targeted
only men. He saw what happened from the
woods above the Jashari compound.

"Within minutes it seemed, the police came and
the village was surrounded by a cordon of
Serbs," Durmishi said. "They were standing
about half a yard apart all along the road and up
across the hills."

The artillery fire came at 6am from the Serbian
base. There was no warning. The first to die were
the Agas, members of a gypsy family who
panicked and tried to flee their house.

The mother, a small boy and a girl were gunned
down in their garden. The next victim was Nazmi
Jashari, who ran a kiosk in Prekaz, selling
cigarettes and sundries, and lived opposite the
main family compound.

He tried to carry his elderly mother, Naile, out of
the back door, and was shot in front of her. The
signal was clear. Anyone seen leaving their home
would be a target for Serbian snipers.

The Jasharis had no chance. They faced gunfire if
they came out, or bombing if they remained
inside. The last Basorta remembers of her family
is that her uncle, Adem, was singing Albanian
folk songs above the noise of the shells to keep
up their spirits. He often sang at local weddings.
The extended Jashari family gathered in what they
thought would be the safest room, which had a
new brick wall. But the shells came through the
roof, then the walls.

Basorta remembers the moment her uncle
stopped singing. Then, for 26 hours, she recalled,
there was only the sound of the bombs. She said
that before the Serbian police entered the house,
they marched on it, firing machineguns. They
threw grenades into each room ahead of them.

"I heard them come into our room," she told her
uncle Hilmi. "I tried to pretend I was dead but
one of the soldiers put his hand on my chest and
he felt I was alive."

Still dressed in her red shirt and black trousers,
by now covered with blood, she had to step over
the bodies of her family to leave the room,
surrounded by Serbs. She was taken to a military
base above her house and interrogated for three
hours.

"They asked about my father and about Uncle
Adem," she said. "I told them nothing, nothing."

The Serbs dumped her on a road in Mitrovica
and she ran to the home of a school friend. She
was still there last night, traumatised, shocked
and finding it increasingly difficult to speak.

Unbeknown to Basorta, the bodies of her father,
mother, uncle, aunt and all her cousins were lined
up by the police at a bus depot in Mitrovica last
week.

When nobody from the family turned up to
identify them and friends tried to insist on
postmortem examinations, the Serbs dumped
them in the graveyard they had dug opposite the
remains of their house, the coffins poking
through the earth. The surviving villagers came
back in the night to finish the job with respect.

All that remained of Basorta's family was a pile of
black bin bags at the bus station, each with a
number stuck on the bag, each filled with the
bloody clothing they had been wearing when they
died.

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