The Apaches, of course, are helicopters. That was important because the KLA are fighting with light weapons. Some had bought themselves expensive kit in Europe, but mostly they all carried battered Chinese copies of Russian Kalashnikovs or even just single-round hunting rifles. They were trying to fight their way across Serb lines, but they faced three emplacements of artillery and tanks – at Batusha, Mount Plahnik and Morine. Against all odds, they had captured not just Kosare Barracks, but fought their way ten kilometres into Serb-held Kosovo, and taken the mountains for another ten kilometres horizontally along the front (Kosare Barracks is at the centre), carving out a foothold of almost 100 square kilometres. Testimony to the continued fighting came to Kosare every day when KLA soldiers carried back injured comrades, and put them on donkeys for the journey up the narrow path to Albania, where they would be put on carts pulled by tractors and, it was hoped, arrive at a hospital two hours away.
Nato could break this stalemate, could destroy those tanks and artillery in hours. If the KLA rushed those positions head on, however, with no weapons other than Kalashnikovs, they would lose hundreds of men. Nato did not strike. There was news of bridges bombed, oil refineries hit, electricity grids destroyed, but never those artillery guns or tanks. The positions of the Serb heavy weapons were no secret. KLA commanders would call Astrit Huskaj, the KLA–American liaison officer in Kukes, give him the co-ordinates of the Serb positions and the KLA positions so that there could be no mistakes. Everyone at Kosare Barracks believed that one day, soon, Nato would take out those Serb tanks and guns blocking their offensive. They all heard the BBC reporting on the reluctance of Nato to send ground troops, but for these KLA men that made no sense. Tell them, they would say to me, an American working for a British newspaper (‘so you must know them’), tell them just arm us and we will go in. We need weapons against tanks, not much more. Our families are there. Our homes are there. We can fight, we have to.
That was before Nato bombed the Kosare Barracks and killed seven of these young men, men I knew, although no one has bothered to list the names of the dead. It was a small place. There is no doubt it was a mistake. The KLA has been anxious to say they understand mistakes can happen and Nato must continue bombing, because it is the only way to end the reign of their enemy, Slobodan Milosevic. Since returning from Kosovo, I have heard all the reservations about arming the KLA, but none has really made sense when I thought of the young men I met and with whom I travelled into the mountains. There was Ramis, very proud that a British journalist was with his unit, a village boy whose family was only about ten miles away in the village of Ratkovac, if they were still alive. We could see the lights of Djakovica, the nearest city, at night, and the fires of the houses the Serbs were burning. He would point to where his village was and tell me it was dark because people slept early, but neither of us believed that. He told me about how the old men in the village had cried when he left and how he told them not to worry: his generation would free Kosovo. There was Ghani, a young philosophy student who would never talk seriously but made a bet with everyone else in the unit that he could eat eight hamburgers and drink two pints of beer when they arrived in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. Doc, laconic, bespectacled, who held the unit together after their commander was shot in the head and killed by a Serb sniper. Doc never talked about bravery; no one did. He had had to travel outside Kosovo for education because Albanians cannot become doctors under the Serbs.
‘You don’t understand freedom,’ he said one day, during a lull in fighting, sitting in a freezing mountain bivouac: ‘you can’t. You grow up with freedom, you’ve never thought about it. I picked up a gun because there is no way we can live under the Serbs any more. This will be over soon. The West understands that.’
I’m not sure how any of these young men feel now that the planes we saw flying overhead every day and that were supposed to destroy the artillery and tanks between them and their villages and families have instead bombed their barracks. I’m not sure whether they are still alive. I do think anyone who met them would also feel it is hypocritical for a Nato spokesman to get up on television every day and talk about the success of hundreds of warplane sorties, and for diplomats to brief journalists that Nato is doing all it can to defeat Milosevic, and not to help the only people who are fighting his troops and paramilitaries every day and are willing to die doing it. There was no talk in the Kosare Barracks about zero tolerance for returning body bags. They saw too many.
The neighbour who burned with hate
DJAKOVICA
20 June 1999
Bozhidar Dogancic was a loser who for the duration of the war had the power to decide whether his neighbours lived or died at the hands of the Serb paramilitaries, reports Marie Colvin in Djakovica.
In Djakovica, a quaint, cobbled town that used to be home to many of Kosovo’s leading writers, artists and intellectuals, Bozhidar Dogancic was a nobody.
He lived near the bus station in a concrete, single-storey house with peeling paint and dirty curtains. His front windows looked out on to a dank garden of earth and weeds, darkened by unkempt trees that hid the property from passers-by.
Dogancic, known in his neighbourhood as Bozho, liked to sit on his porch and drink slivovitz from half-gallon bottles, shouting, singing and talking with friends. What he enjoyed talking about most of all was how much he hated Albanians.
The day before Nato troops entered Kosovo last weekend, Dogancic dumped all the food from his refrigerator into a rotting heap on his living room floor. He could not take it with him and he did not want to leave it for his neighbours. They were Albanians and Dogancic was a Serb.
Dogancic, 65, left Kosovo, knowing he could never return. There was too much blood on his hands.
In almost any other country, he would have remained nothing more than a resentful loser. Neighbours regarded him as something of a bully and avoided him. He rarely troubled them except when his noisy drinking sessions kept them awake at night.
But this was Kosovo and for 10 years, since Slobodan Milosevic rose to high office with passionate promises to protect the Serbs of Kosovo, Dogancic had also exercised power.
Milosevic rode a wave of Serbian nationalism that led to a decade of war in the Balkans. Dogancic did the same thing, on a smaller scale, in his little district of Djakovica. His power over Albanians enabled him to exact intoxicating revenge for slights, imagined and real.
The son of a saddler, Dogancic grew up in Djakovica’s tiny minority community of Serbs and worked for local government. His job was to patrol the forests to stop people felling trees illegally. He was a handsome youth and married a pretty local girl, Radmilla. They had four children.
Albanians, who made up 90& of Kosovo’s population, dominated senior positions in the government at that time and ran most of the businesses. Many had big houses and sent their sons abroad for education and work. Dogancic lived in squalor with little money and few prospects. Everything changed when Milosevic rescinded Kosovo’s autonomy in 1990 and Albanians were kicked out of their jobs. Dogancic had what were considered the right opinions. He told anyone who would listen that Albanians should be deported from Kosovo. After all, he would say, they had Albania, didn’t they?
His mentors were two pairs of brothers from similarly inauspicious backgrounds. Momcilo and Sava Stanovic, and their first cousins, Milan and Jokica Stanovic, are infamous among ethnic Albanians in Djakovica.
There was little education among them; Milan was a sheep farmer, Momcilo a building inspector’s clerk. Under Milosevic’s regime, however, they were able to establish a semi-autonomous dictatorship. Jokica Stanovic, who had friends in Milosevic’s circle, was appointed mayor by Belgrade in 1991. He made Milan his police chief.
Momcilo, his cousin, became a local minister in charge of government property, including state factories. He gave Dogancic, the lowly forest patrol man, the job of director in a brick and tile plant.
In 1996 Momcilo took over as mayor when Jokica became