Massacre in a Spring Meadow

In a war of numerous atrocities, Marie Colvin talks to over 100 witnesses of the most horrifying slaughter Kosovo has endured.

The Sunday Times, May 2, 1999

Seven-year-old Egzon Zyberi interrupted adult conversations late last week with a childish monotone. "Long live Milosevic!" he chanted. "Kosovo is Serbian!"

The little boy in orange trousers seemed to want an explanation, his brown eyes darting about for a reaction.

They were strange words to hear from a young Kosovan refugee but everyone around him knew what had happened.

They were what Serbs in uniforms and black masks had made Egzon, his brothers and cousins shout as the children watched their fathers and grandfather being dragged away to a killing field at the village of Meja in southwestern Kosovo on Tuesday morning.

"I didn't feel well to say this," Egzon muttered to a translator, when asked what had happened at Meja.

Egzon's 40-year-old father, Dani, his 30-year-old uncle, Skandar, and his 65-year-old grandfather, Burim, were all pulled out of a refugee convoy by the Serbs. Arbur Hajosaj, a 16-year-old boy they had picked up on the road with his grandmother, was also taken.

They appear to have been some of the many victims of what is emerging as the worst Serbian atrocity of the war in Kosovo.

The women and children last saw them being escorted into a field in the centre of Meja where lines of men already sat in the open under the barrels of what they described as hundreds of Serbian gunmen. Then the Serbian forces on a narrow road shouted at the family to move, move, move. There was no chance to say goodbye.

None of the women knew how to drive a tractor so a 12-year-old neighbour jumped into the seat. "He kept bumping into the other tractors," said Egzon, perking up at something he could talk about. "He didn't even know how to drive."

Egzon and what remains of the Zyberi family now live in a tent in a muddy field outside the city of Kukes in northern Albania. Snow-capped peaks tower over them. Their tent shelters Egzon's mother, grandmother and two aunts, his three small brothers and his two little cousins, one only two months old.

In a corner, weeping silently, is Fawze Hajosaj, the elderly woman who lost her grandson to the Serbs. The Zyberi family does not know her; but she has nobody else so they have taken her in.

The Zyberis are far from alone in their affliction. They are in a camp, run by Médecins Sans Frontières, which shelters most of the families who arrived last week from the latest wave of Serbian ethnic cleansing around the city of Djakovica.

Women wash clothes in brightly coloured plastic basins, children play in the dirt, a few old men gather in little clusters. But in row after row of dark green tents there are no fathers. Family after family tells the same story and it always ends with Meja.

Yesterday the Zyberi women were still hoping their men had somehow escaped the Serbs. They had not been told that other families who passed through Meja after them had seen a pile of bodies in the field in the centre of the village. "There has certainly been a mass killing," confirmed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Estimates of the total dead ranged yesterday from 200 to more than 1,000. Whichever proves correct, the Serbian forces are now killing on a scale that matches their bloodlust in the Bosnian and Croatian wars. In Bosnia, they reached a peak of savagery shortly before their strategic position began to deteriorate.

The trigger that turned Meja into a killing field may have been the assassination there of a senior Serbian officer and several of his bodyguards by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) about 10 days ago. Shortly afterwards, a renewed wave of ethnic cleansing began in the area.

The Zyberi family had already been "cleansed" once from its farmland around a remote village called Molic.

A month ago under pressure from the Serbs, Nushe Zyberi, the grandmother and matriarch of the family, took her husband, her two sons and their families to live with her sister's family in the village of Dobros. They hoped to sit out the Serbian offensive there and return to their farm instead of ending up homeless in Albania or Macedonia.

There was no work and little food. The only shops open in nearby Djakovica were Serbian and the owners had started refusing to sell food - even bread and milk - to ethnic Albanians.

Last Monday night, the adults and children went to sleep as usual crowded together in blankets on the floor. Tuesday morning dawned cold and rainy. While the children slept, the adults rose early. The women started a wood fire and began baking bread.

At 6am gunfire sounded throughout the village. The children awoke, crying and frightened. Dobros had been surrounded by what seemed to the Zyberis like hundreds of Serbs with tanks. Soldiers were firing into the air. Others were shouting at the villagers to leave their homes: "Go to Nato if you like them so much. Go to Albania, this is not your home, this is Serbia."

The time had arrived at last to submit to Serbia's systematic programme to "cleanse" Kosovo of its 1.2m ethnic Albanians. The men moved quickly. Dani and Skandar hitched their two tractors to metal carts and the families piled in. Their wives, young children, mother and father went into one cart, driven by Skandar; their mother's sister and her family were in the second, with Dani at the wheel.

There was no time to take clothes or supplies. They grabbed some blankets to wrap the frightened children in and tacked a plastic sheet over the carts to protect them from the rain, before heading for Albania. They had only been on the road for a few minutes when the farmhouse burst into flames behind them, torched by the Serbs who were rampaging through the village.

Similar scenes were taking place in other villages around Djakovica, once a lovely city of white stone houses but now an armed Serbian encampment, and the road towards the border was becoming clogged with tractors, trailers and their human cargo. Serbian soldiers and police with tanks and armoured personnel carriers lined the route.

At Meja, a hitherto insignificant village on the route, Serbian soldiers and paramilitaries began stopping the convoy. The Zyberi family reached Meja at about 8am. They saw Serbian soldiers walking down the convoy, pulling men from tractors and beating and kicking some of them by the roadside. There was nowhere to turn off and escape.

Skandar Zyberi twice ignored Serbian demands to get off his tractor; then they hauled him off by his sleeve. Describing the scene later, his wife Sheribone, 28, wept and cuddled their two-month-old daughter, Ezuntina.

Skandar's brother and father were ordered out of the cart at gunpoint by Serbs wearing black masks. "The children started crying and yelling 'Daddy, Daddy' but the Serbs laughed," said Nushe, who watched in horror as her husband and two grown-up sons were led away.

"Then they made the children say the Serbian things, terrible things. The children were so frightened."

The last the family saw of the three men was their backs as they walked at gunpoint into the field where several hundred men were sitting surrounded by armed Serbs. With his hands clasped on his lap, Egzon apes the way they sat.

Another member of the family, Aphrodite Zyberi, 19, said the Serbs had shouted: "You killed seven of us; we will kill 700 of you." In Yugoslavia during the second world war, the Nazis killed 100 people in retribution for every German slain by partisans.

Family after family reaching the refugee camp outside Kukes last week was interviewed separately yet described the same scene at the same place. Males aged from 16 to 60-plus had been forced from their families into the meadow at Meja. Serbs had shouted and beaten anyone who did not move quickly enough.

Xhamal Rama, a 58-year-old farmer, a neighbour of the Zyberis in Dubros, had held out for as long as he could at home; but at 9am he had also piled his wife and 10 children into a cart and had driven off on his tractor. His brother and family followed. "The Serbs were firing their guns and setting fire to the houses," he said. "They had masks and some had red handkerchiefs. They ordered us to leave and we could do nothing."

Reaching Meja after the Zyberis, he found the Serbs behaving like "beasts". Three of his nephews were hauled off his brother's tractor and taken to the field, where about 250 men were being made to show the Serbian three-finger sign and shout, "Long live Serbia."

Zek, 55, another farmer, who would not give his full name, had bruises on his arm and said he had been beaten by the Serbs for shouting, "Leave him alone", when they took his 16-year old nephew. Zek looked far older than his years, which may have saved his own life.

A slight, frail woman called Birami described how Serbs had arrived early on Tuesday at her village, Dalasaj, shooting and shouting that they would kill anyone who did not leave in five minutes.

Her husband, Alban, had piled their four children and their parents into his tractor-drawn cart and departed. As houses went up in flames be hind them, Alban balanced Blerim, his blonde, five-year-old son, on his knee.

On reaching Meja, said Birami, they were confronted by masked Serbian paramilitaries or soldiers; she was not sure which.

Ordered off his tractor, Alban handed her Blerim and walked away into the meadow to join the other men. She could not drive and a neighbour had to take the wheel.

Another of the families caught in this terrible exodus had already been in a fleeing convoy a little more than two weeks ago but had been attacked from the sky.

"A tractor in front of us burst into flames," recalled Fana, the mother of the family, who had seen too much to reveal her full name. People had been burnt in front of her eyes. Other people had jumped from their tractors off a bridge and drowned.

Nato later admitted it had mistakenly bombed the convoy but - like all the refugees - Fana and her family would not say a word against Nato. They insisted the plane must have been Serbian.

After that incident, they had camped in a ruined house in a village called Dalas. At 7am on Tuesday, they said, Dalas was surrounded by Serbs, some wearing black balaclavas, shooting in the air. The family took to the tractor again - and, again, the houses went up in flames behind them.

"Serbs with guns and tanks stopped us at the village of Meja," Fana said. "They took my nephews and my son - he was only 16. We began to cry and scream but we could do nothing because they had guns. They were pushed to the ground and then made to walk into the field where other men were sitting."

Her youngest son, 12-year-old Vilsan, began driving the tractor. "I couldn't see for my tears," Vilsan said quietly as the family replayed the scene at the refugee camp.

"They knocked my father down on the ground and beat him with their guns. But we had to drive because the Serbian soldiers said move immediately. I was afraid to look back."

Vilsan is now the oldest male in the family. Two young women, the wives of Fana's nephews, sat crying near him surrounded by young children. They had only the clothes they were wearing.

Several miles after Meja, the family had been stopped by other Serbian soldiers and robbed of all their money. Another family, the Salihus, had travelled from the village of Ramizi on foot after Serbs forced them to leave at 5am. They reached Meja at dusk on Tuesday.

"We were so afraid," said Ruca Salihu, 23. "I saw dead bodies in a field in the middle of Meja. I was too frightened to look for long. I could only see that they were lying across each other on their stomachs, in this pasture near some bushes. Hundreds of them. Maybe 200."

She crossed her hands, one over the other, to show how she saw the bodies lying. She said other men were sitting in the meadow, still alive and under Serbian guard.

Serbian soldiers pulled her uncle, Niman Salihu, 50, and a neighbour off the road into the meadow. Two soldiers then spotted Rucka's brother, Kiytim, 18, who is small and dark and looks young for his age. "Two Serbian soldiers shouted to me to put down my bag and stop," said Kiytim. "The bag was full of bread. Then my sisters began weeping and surrounded me and I was so afraid I was sick.

"One of the Serbian soldiers, the older one, shouted at me again but the other one said, 'Oh, let him go, he's too young', and we kept walking and I was surrounded by my family and they just let me go. My sisters' tears saved me."

He cannot forget the sight of the meadow in Meja. "There were bodies in the field. A pile of bodies. I was too scared to make any accurate count. I tried not to look for long because the Serbs would notice me."

After five minutes of walking, the Salihu family heard a burst of gunfire that went on for about 10 minutes.

The first news of the massacre at Meja came in the hours after the refugees started crossing into Albania at the Morina border post under a full moon late on Tuesday night.

Nobody expected them, as the Serbs had closed the border days earlier. The only aid agency to meet them was Action Hunger, whose workers began dispensing hot tea in the chilly air. UNHCR officials raced to the border.

In all, 47 tractors hauling carts full of women and children and a few elderly men reached Albania that night. The first arrivals looked merely anxious.

By the time the last tractor rolled across the border, the road down to the refugee camp at Kukes was a trail of misery. Their faces etched with horror, the last to arrive could barely speak.

More refugees from Djakovica poured across the border all week, with 10,000 arriving on Friday alone.

Madeleine Albright, the American secretary of state, has announced that the events at Meja will be investigated as a possible war crime. But no international outrage comforts the families who had to leave their men in Meja. "I feel like I want to die," said Safeta Zyberi, Egzon's mother.

The Macedonian businessman

Petrovski Gupco runs an import/ export company in Skopje: "I can no longer see a future in Macedonia for me or my children. We were lucky to avoid the war, but it will go on around us for many more years. You cannot look for serious investment. When you have poor neighbours, you cannot expect your economy to grow. Albania is the poorest country in Europe. The Serbian economy is destroyed.

"I am seriously considering leaving, to live in a normal country, maybe to Singapore. If these refugees stay in Macedonia, no one will be happy. They cost money. The UN and Nato help out, but it also costs our government. We have 200,000 unemployed and now we have the same number of refugees. We have excellent relations with the Albanians who have lived in Macedonia for generations.

"I have visited the refugee camps. The conditions are very poor. I feel sorry for them. But there is a background to this. This century, when Serbs began to rule Macedonia, they started to kill Albanians. When Bulgarians took Macedonia in World War Two, they killed Albanians. After the war, Albanians killed the Macedonians. But I do not approve of Milosevic. Only a madman would."

The teenager

Arta Abizi, 15, a refugee with a family in Kumanovo, Macedonia: "When we were forced to leave our home in Pristina by the Serbs, I just cried. Not only because we were frightened, but for the things I had to leave behind. I left my photographs that told my whole life's story from when I was three. I left my rings, my earrings, my nice socks. Emin, my brother, who is nearly 12, had to leave his parrot.

"We tried to go to the border but we were turned back to Presovo, a Serbian town near the Kosovan border. The soldiers made us walk back in a line along the tracks. We had to sleep in the open but we could not light a fire because they told us Nato would shoot us. The nights were so cold. When we finally got to the border, we spent six nights in no man's land. I did not sleep one night. I was frozen and it was so very dirty that I was afraid to sleep.

"Since I came here I have started going to school in Kumanovo. People from the school invited me to come to class, because I was a refugee. I hate being a refugee; you have nothing and everything is so uncertain. I don't want to stay here. Every day, all day, all I think is: what am I doing here?"