‘Let’s not get into a discussion of which came first, the chicken or the egg,’ Albright responded. To which Arafat replied, cryptically: ‘But we have to remember that in the end there is the hen and there is the egg.’ The response of the new secretary of state is not recorded.
Kosovo
The centuries of conflict over a sacred heartland
8 March 1998
Like earlier Balkan wars, the battle in Kosovo, the impoverished southern province of former Yugoslavia, has its roots in history. For the Serbs the region is the sacred heartland of their long-lost medieval state. For the ethnic Albanians who make up 90% of its population, it has been home for centuries.
The rise of virulent Serbian nationalism was the trigger for the current conflict. In the Yugoslavia of Josip Broz Tito, the former communist leader, Kosovo, although extremely poor, enjoyed a degree of formal autonomy within Serbia.
Under Slobodan Milosevic, the bullet-headed Serbian nationalist, everything changed. In 1989, two years after he came to power as Serbian Communist party leader, he visited Kosovo and proclaimed himself the protector of local Serbs claiming to be the victims of discrimination. He rescinded Kosovo’s autonomous status later that year.
The province is seen as the spiritual home of the Serbian nation: in 1389, at Kosovo Polje, the Serbs lost a battle with Turkish troops that consigned them to 500 years of rule by the Ottoman empire.
Milosevic’s initiative to reclaim Kosovo prompted riots in 1989 and 1990. He sent tanks against the protesters and their leaders fled or were killed.
The ethnic Albanians have never given up their demand for independence. They have ignored the state network, setting up a ‘parallel society’ of schools and hospitals. The driving force behind the policy of passive resistance has been Ibrahim Rugova, known as the ‘Gandhi of the Balkans’ – a quiet intellectual who is president of the self-styled republic of Kosovo.
The present violence appears to have been provoked by younger, more militant Kosovans who feel frustrated at Rugova’s failure to win concessions for them. The Kosovo Liberation Army, an armed guerrilla group, emerged 18 months ago, claiming responsibility for the killings of Serbian policemen and informers. It appears to be funded by Kosovan emigrés in Germany and Switzerland.
By last month the attacks had grown so lethal that the Serbian police withdrew from much of the Drenica region, a stronghold of separatists northwest of Pristina, the capital. Milosevic responded last week by ordering troops to raze villages there.
The fear now is that fighting in Kosovo, which was largely unaffected by the conflicts that engulfed Croatia and Bosnia in the early 1990s, may lead to a wider Balkan war. This could drag in Albania and Macedonia, which has its own ethnic Albanian population. Turkey is sympathetic to fellow Muslims in Kosovo, while Greece could be drawn in on the side of the Orthodox Serbs.
Kosovo’s silent houses of the dead
PREKAZ
15 March 1998
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 hugged herself tightly beneath the table 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).
Basorta climbed through a hole in the wall and ran round the house, shouting: ‘Anybody … is anybody still alive?’ When nobody answered, she crawled back under the table.
The pause in the shelling was 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, 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 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.
Yesterday all that moved in the 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 compound were 51 fresh graves with mounds of dark earth and wooden crosses.
These were the final resting places of the Jasharis who died in the house, four relatives who were killed nearby and neighbours who got in the way of the Serbian forces.
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 10 years ago.
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 Serbian offensive in the Drenica valley, a region of farming villages that is the stronghold of Albanian resistance, began on 28 February, 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