June 12, 1999
As They Await U.S. Troops, Villagers Are Still Frightened
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
NJILANE, Kosovo -- Up
a pitted dirt road on the outskirts of
town, near a still-smoldering house
and the sun-baked remains of looted
shops, two Albanian men, clearly
frightened, rose from their raw plywood table and ducked through a
doorway, leaving their playing cards
behind.
When they understood that their
visitor was an American journalist
and not someone from a Serbian
paramilitary unit, they invited him
in for coffee. Suddenly the empty
street filled with people, as if created
from the dust.
In a cool interior courtyard, under
the shade of vines, more than 60
Albanians of all ages sat and stood
and listened and talked about what
had happened here in the war that
they cannot quite believe is now ending.
"We were frightened and are still
frightened, and for months we stayed
home, out of sight," said Hamdia, 46.
"We sat at home and almost never
dared even to go down the street.
When we saw your car, even now, we
became frightened."
There is still shooting at night,
another man said in English.
"Until we see the Americans
come," he said, "we won't know it's
really over." Until then, he said, he
would prefer not to provide his name.
"Come back in 10 days," he said,
"and you can have all our names."
Gnjilane, 30 miles southeast of
Pristina, will be the headquarters of
the American contingent of the United Nations peacekeeping force that
is about to move into Kosovo.
Before the war, sleepy Gnjilane
and its suburbs contained about
120,000 people, 30 percent of them
Serbs, said Zoran Aksic, the head of
the city's executive, who promised
full cooperation with the American
troops.
Aksic insisted that nearly all
of the city's Albanians remained
here, but the Albanians themselves
said at least 30 percent had fled to
Macedonia, including nearly the entire Albanian population of the surrounding villages, where the Kosovo
Liberation Army had support.
The rebel group, an essentially
rural movement, was never a factor
in Gnjilane, which was considered a
Serbian stronghold.
But in this interim period, when
power is unclear and no one understands how the West's occupation
will work, Serbs here are worried
about retaliation. And some Albanians here admitted that they were
nervous about how the rebels would
react to those who had worked with
the Serbs, or who chose to remain.
"We've had very little contact with
the K.L.A. or our Albanian leaders,"
Hamdia said carefully. "We just
want to live in peace and freedom
and have no one touch us." He said
he still favored the nonviolent policies of Ibrahim Rugova, the literature professor who was the Kosovo
Albanians' most prominent leader
until the rise of the rebel movement's political leadership.
But the younger English speaker
said the guerrilla army and its platform of independence was the only
logical conclusion to 10 years of Serbian oppression. "I think Rugova is
politically finished," he said. "His
peaceful politics was a catastrophe
over the last 10 years."
Still, he and others said there was
little thirst for revenge among ordinary Albanians. At the same time,
they expressed little regret "if those
Serbs who committed crimes against
people became frightened now and
left Kosovo," another man said.
"The ones with dirt or blood on
their hands will run away," he said.
"And those Gypsies who helped the
Serbs, because of their fear, they will
also leave. They knew that they committed crimes against their neighbors, which no human being should
do. But we will never force them to
leave as they forced us to leave."
Gnjilane is an interesting case, because unlike the villagers, relatively
few of the Albanians of the town were
in fact ordered to leave. But the
whole Albanian population lived in
unremitting fear of the Serbs, becoming prisoners in their own
homes. They heard on the radio what
Serbs were doing to other Albanians
in Kosovo, and they tried to repress
their nightmares.
The NATO bombing that began
March 24 set off a fierce round of
Serbian violence against the Albanians and their property that lasted
nearly two weeks, these Albanians
said. "With the NATO bombing, the
Serbs became more aggressive," another Albanian man said, while the
others nodded.
Another said: "They burned everything in the night, so they couldn't
be recognized. They burned shops
and some houses at the crossroads.
But there was no attack on the people
or on those in this street."
When some Albanians here did
venture out, they were sometimes
harassed and beaten by men wearing black masks and black uniforms
who belonged to the Serbian paramilitary forces. Some of those masked
men, the Albanians said, were probably local Serbs who did not want to be
identified.
In general, the Albanians said they
had simply remained behind the
walls of their compounds and avoided venturing further into town. They
organized a neighborhood watch to
patrol the street at night. They ate
from stocks of food at home. A middleman came and sold them flour at
more than three times the normal
price.
One man described hearing at second hand of the murder of Albanians
in Vlastica, a small village eight
miles southeast of here.
Already in the last few days, he
said, a survivor had told him that
Serbian paramilitary forces had
killed 13 people in one house who
resisted them and then burned the
bodies.
He said three children and a man
of 30 had been wounded but survived,
spending three weeks in a hospital.
But he would not provide their
names.
The English speaker, younger and
more politically radical, said everyone here was grateful to NATO and
to the United States. But he said that
little real information was available
and that the situation in the town
remained complicated.
"These are the deciding days, the
days of transition," he said. "It's
always most dangerous at the end,"
he said, then laughed. "And there is
never an end." He and the others
said they feared that Belgrade's defeat would provoke a last spasm of
violence from angry Serbs.
That fear is shared by a Serbian
police sergeant named Milan, who
spoke over coffee at the Atele coffee
bar, across from a huge, ugly statue
of Prince Lazar, the Serbian commander who lost nobly to the Turks
in 1389 and who is revered as a saint.
"People are full of anger," he said,
as a form of warning to the Americans to tread carefully here. "If a
Serb is murdered by an Albanian,
and it will happen, it could begin
something terrible."
Already, he said, two soldiers recently had their throats cut in the
village of Gadis, 15 miles west of
here, and in Orahovac, near Djakovica, three Serbs were killed on their
doorstep.
Milan, too, is full of anger and
grief, but he considers himself a professional. Although he was born here,
he has orders to leave with the rest of
the Serbian police, and he will go.
What happens next, he said, "will be
no bigger surprise than what has
already happened."
On the road back to Pristina, a
large house was burning.
Long columns of military trucks
filled with soldiers, field artillery and
the feared Praga antiaircraft guns,
often used to destroy the brick walls
of Albanian houses, roared away
from Kosovo.
As the Russians raced the British
and the Americans to plant their
flags in Kosovo, the Yugoslav Army
continued to beat its long retreat.
And the Albanians of Gnjilane
waited for the moment that their
fear might end and they might finally stroll the streets of their town.
