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?’
Letter from … Kosare
4 June 1999
The Times Literary Supplement
The Kosare Barracks of the Kosovo Liberation Army was never much to look at. The fight to capture it from the Serbs had been fierce. Six shell-holes pierced one red-brick wall and there was a hole in the roof. When the wind blew at night, glass fell from the shattered windows. It looked lonely. To get there, you had to walk down a narrow path from Albania, across a barbed wire fence that used to be the international border, past a deserted farmhouse now half tumbled into stones and the corpses of four horses in a grassy field pitted with craters of black soil. Everyone said the border minefield had been cleared, but everyone stayed on the narrow winding path which bore the comforting footprints of those who had walked that way before.
The barracks stood alone in a narrow valley between mountains covered with scrub oak. No one ever sat outside in the spring sun; the Serbs might see you and fire off a shell. There was no electricity. The Serbs were on the next hill and the commander thought the noise of the generator might attract their attention, although since they had lived there first and clearly knew where it was, that really didn’t make too much sense. But there were always bean stews cooking in cauldrons over wood-fired stoves, and there was always someone to talk to at night when you couldn’t sleep.
When I heard Nato had bombed the KLA barracks at Kosare, it was those late-night conversations I thought of. They never started out as war conversations. Someone would come out of the sleeping rooms that were crowded with bunk-beds and Kalashnikovs hanging over the metal bedsteads and pour some oil in a tin pot or whatever he could find, dip in a rag until it was soaked, light the cloth and then a cigarette. It would draw the other non-sleepers and we would stand around, offering each other cigarettes, smoking. There was always the boom of artillery in the background, but no one talked about it – it wasn’t close enough to worry about – and we had learned you only really had to worry when you heard a whistle that meant an incoming shell was close, and then there was not much you could do except dive for the ground. It was from Kosare Barracks that KLA units walked out at night, in single file, up into the mountains to fight the Serbs, to push them back. The gains and losses were unspectacular but dependable: a mile a week, a comrade killed when he was shot trying to lob a grenade into a Serb bunker. Kosare Barracks, for all its discomforts, was somewhere safe before you had to walk out and try again.
The talk would always start with families, now lost in Kosovo. We were in Kosovo, of course, the young men talking at night were proud that they had fought and captured this small piece of their homeland, but the Serb army was between us and where their families lived. The only villages we saw were those we walked through late at night, remaining silent in honour and in awe of the bombed and destroyed homes and the absence of people.
Perhaps in all barracks in a war there is a camaraderie that – intensified by the ever-present possibility of sudden death – thrives on deep and immediate intimacy, that removes the need for formalities, and that, once established, is only broken by death. One night in the hole lit by the flicker of an oil fire, Xhavit said it was his son’s sixth birthday, and showed us pictures of his boy and two older daughters. He was a big beefy man and had been working in Switzerland, sending home money when the war started. He hadn’t seen his family for four months and now he didn’t know if his son had turned six or was dead. He was a sniper. He didn’t even need to say why he was there; everyone in the barracks had reached a point where years of Serb oppression meant they were ready when the time came to pick up a gun. Burim, who had left his restaurant and his girlfriend in Spain, where he had lived for fourteen years, would tell us again about how he found his sister in the mountains. He had not seen her in all that time, but had found her lying exhausted on the ground with her three children, the nephews and nieces he had never met. He had taken his sister and her children to a refugee camp in Kukes in Northern Albania and returned to join his fellow KLA guerrillas. He told us this story every night in the barracks, as if by telling it he would somehow understand how that miracle could happen.
Standing in the oil-lit hallway, everyone knew when the next patrol was due to return, but never talked about it. When the returning KLA soldiers walked in, tired and wet after three days in the mountains, the group around the fire would line up and solemnly, ceremoniously, embrace the arriving men and, anxiously but without saying it, never asking, look to see if anyone who had walked out of Kosare three nights ago had not come back.
Eventually, the talk would always turn to Nato. The KLA soldiers, young men who had grown up quickly or at least tried to seem as if they had, were proud that they were now allied with Nato; when they said it, it was as if they stood a bit straighter, looked a bit taller. They were fighting for their country and it had to turn out okay because Nato, the West, the Americans and the British, those countries where people had unimaginable choices, unimaginable freedoms,