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Adona
Pseudonym
for all of
the Kosovar children
and their families.
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On his way, the 36-year-old father
of two was caught in a
roundup of 400 men, held prisoner for three days and two nights,
tormented mentally and physically, robbed and denied food and
water. He was used as a human shield. By the time Millaku
reached Albania on Saturday night, he was in shock.
"We did not hope to be alive again," he recounted.
Serbian authorities have claimed that the ethnic Albanians fled
Kosovo because they feared NATO bomb attacks. But the experiences
related by Millaku and other refugees arriving in Albania tell a
different and far more sinister tale. His story may shed light on
possible war crimes committed by Serbian forces in recent days.
What follows is his first detailed account of an ordeal in which,
he says, an old brown coat saved his life.
The trouble began in Millaku's hometown, Glina, in northern
Kosovo. It is a community of 6,000 people, more than 80% of them
ethnic Albanian. He had been teaching basic electronics and
computers until he landed a job earlier this year as a guard for
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which
was involved in peace monitoring in Kosovo until it pulled out in
late March. "Conditions were very bad before that, but then they
got worse," said Millaku, sitting on an air mattress in a tent in
northern Albania where he and eight family members have been
living since Sunday. Three days after the monitors left, the
Serbs began a military offensive and shelled four villages near
Glina, sending displaced people streaming into the town. Serbian
police trashed or burned shops owned by ethnic Albanians. "The
other Serb shops were kept open, but only for Serbs," Millaku
said. "They did not allow Albanians." At this time, Millaku and
his family--his wife, Mirdita, 26, and their daughters, Dafina,
3, and Medina, 10 months--became virtual prisoners in their own
house, he said. "We could not go outside--everywhere there were
police and security forces. . . . You could be killed or
massacred." One of his neighbors was wounded just looking out the
window, Millaku said. Houses on the edge of town were emptied and
set on fire, and Serbs moved in tanks and heavy guns. "We were
waiting for them to come for us," said Millaku, a rangy man with
light brown hair. To prepare, he took an old sack and cut two
holes in it as a carrier for Medina.
The police came Tuesday, March 30. Five of them knocked on the
door of the Millaku house, strode in and took away their
passports and identification cards. They were given five minutes
to take whatever they wanted. When Millaku and his family left
the house with their luggage--accompanied by five of his wife's
relatives--they found out that they weren't allowed to drive
their car. The police ordered them to walk to the center of
Glina. "There, we saw many of our Serb neighbors looking from
windows, laughing at us, even clapping," Millaku said. "They were
mostly women and children because the men had gone into the
Serbian [paramilitary] forces." There, Millaku and his family
were crammed "like sardines" into a truck that was labeled
"Humanitarian Aid" in Serbian.
The truck took them for a mile and then dumped them on the road.
After walking for hours in the direction of Albania, the refugees
were diverted by nearby Serbian shelling to a mountain village
called Kraalan, where they were to remain pinned down for the
next two nights. "We slept in an unfinished building . . . on the
cement. There were no blankets. Everything was dusty," he
recalled. After the second night, Serbian forces started
targeting Kraalan itself. Panicked refugees retreated to a
schoolyard. Many young men, fearing that they would be massacred,
took off overland up the mountains. The rest of the refugees and
villagers wanted to surrender. They tied white bedsheets to their
tractors, Millaku said.
The Serbian troops rolled into the village and lined up on both
sides of the road. "They had tanks, armored cars and other
weapons, but we did not dare even to look at them," Millaku said.
There was a variety of uniforms: army, police, armed civilians,
men in masks. The refugees were ordered to walk between the lines
of troops. Millaku was carrying Medina on his chest in his
makeshift infant carrier and had Dafina on his back. But a
Serbian soldier told him roughly to put them down. Dafina cried
and clung to his legs. She refused to let go. But at this point
the Serbs were separating all the men, about 400, from the women,
beating them with rifles and kicking them. Millaku himself was
kicked and told Dafina to go to her mother, he said. "She was
crying, of course," he said. "The families were hysterical.
Everyone was crying." The men were marched into a field and told
to sit on the ground, eyes cast down and arms folded on their
heads. They were ordered to take off their shirts and coats.
Despite their efforts to remain in the village, the women and
children were pushed away by the troops, who chased after them
with a tank. "I heard the voice of my daughter crying out,
calling me," Millaku said. But, trapped in the field, he could do
nothing. "It was getting dark and starting to rain, and the wind
was blowing." The men sat with their arms above their heads for
four hours, Millaku said, and some of them were beaten. They were
threatened as well. "They had lined us up in four lines, and they
brought a tank there and said they would run over us," Millaku
said. "I heard some soldiers saying they needed a mass grave."
Around midnight, all the coats and shirts were brought back in a
heap in front of the captives. Two men at a time were allowed to
go to the pile and take two items each--in the dark they could
not see well enough to pick out their own. Some men ended with
clothes too large for them and some too small. Millaku made a
lucky choice. It was a beaten-up brown coat, unfashionable but
practical, lined with sheepskin. It was two sizes too big, and in
it he looked older than his 36 years. Later he would say: "I
think this is the main reason that I am alive now." The night was
cold and sleepless, but the second day as a captive was worse.
The Serbian forces were firing their tanks at a hill on the other
side of the valley, where Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas were
dug in. The KLA was shooting back. The return-fire bullets were
whistling among the men. During this time, Millaku said, two of
the ethnic Albanians were wounded. "This lasted all day. We were
begging them, 'Please let us go.' But they did not allow us. And
they did not give us food or let us drink water for two days and
two nights." The Serbs would offer only one loaf of bread for the
400 men. "They were laughing, just to see what we might do,"
Millaku said. "But we shared." During the day, the Serbs demanded
the captives' remaining money from their pants. The cash that had
been in their shirts and coats had already been stolen. One of
the Serbs told a spokesman for the prisoners: "The game is not
over yet. We're just getting started." During the second night, a
military truck appeared, and the Serbs culled the oldest and
sickest of the prisoners and took them away. They would later
turn up safely at the Albanian border. "The night was very, very
cold--icy. They did not allow us even to light a fire," Millaku
said. "This was the coldest night I have ever experienced." In
the morning, the captives were begging for bread, he said. Some
of the men said they had food in their tractors, still parked
nearby. "We said, 'Please just let us take some food.' But
instead they burned the tractors." Shaking his head, he said,
"They burned our bread in front of us when we were starving."
On Saturday, the third morning of their captivity, a Serbian major
appeared. He stood before the prisoners and railed about NATO.
"He told us: 'You can see that NATO is very dangerous. . . . Now
you can see that NATO is very dangerous for you and for us,' "
Millaku said. But that was untrue, Millaku said. "We knew what
NATO was doing. We knew that NATO was not bombing the Kosovar
Albanians. We couldn't wait for NATO to come and bomb them. But
there, we could not speak." While the major was talking, some
Serbian soldiers behind the prisoners began to walk among them
and pick out the young men. Then the whole group of captives was
made to walk between two lines of Serbian soldiers. "They picked
out people they wanted," Millaku said. "They would say, 'You,
you, not you,' and pull somebody out." This is where he felt
fortunate. "When we were passing, I was in this old coat and also
I was stiff and walking like an old man. My legs were very tired,
and I could not walk well. So it was good luck for me." Those
being freed were sent walking down the road. But they left 90
young men behind. As they crested a hill out of sight, they heard
automatic machine-gun fire that lasted for about 10 minutes
behind them, Millaku said. Millaku voice choked when he talked
about the missing men, but he said he is not convinced that they
were executed. It is possible that the gunfire was just to
frighten them, he said, because the Serbs had often played such
games.
On the road south, Millaku's thoughts turned to his family. On
the pavement, there were spots of blood. There was also an
ominous-looking wagon covered in plastic and driven by men with
yellow doctor's masks. Millaku surmised that they were collecting
bodies. But he also found a more welcome sign. His wife had left
a trail of photographs and articles of clothing strewn on bushes
on the way so that he'd be able to find them. Nevertheless,
Millaku was distraught. "Every step I took, I was expecting to
find the bodies of my family." His wife had been thinking the
same thing about him. Their daughter Dafina was crying
constantly, saying, "Oh, they are going to kill my father,"
recalled Millaku's wife, Mirdita. "And I was saying to her, 'Your
father will come,' even though I didn't believe it." They all
found each other Saturday night when Millaku climbed up to the
border crossing into Albania. "I couldn't stop crying for one
hour," he recalled. And in a tent here, Dafina was still
clutching his leg.
Copyright Los Angeles Times |
