On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin. Marie Colvin

by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe for suspected war crimes when it became obvious that Nato was about to launch its airstrikes and the OSCE pulled out.

      While Milan arranged for the deportation of countless local Albanians from Djakovica, Momcilo directed squads of special police and paramilitaries into the town. The separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had waged guerrilla warfare against these forces in the surrounding area since early this year. The hatred between them was fierce.

      Djakovica, with its thuggish Serbian leadership, ruthless paramilitaries and poorly defended Albanian community, was about to became a microcosm of Kosovo as it was torn apart. Dogancic would exercise the power he held in his community to devastatingly lethal effect.

      The local Albanians had been growing increasingly fearful of Dogancic for years. He walked around with a pistol in his belt. Serbian police and members of the security forces in civilian clothes came in and out of his house. Whenever he had an argument in his part of town, the neighbour concerned would be taken into the local police station and beaten.

      The danger in the rise of such a man is evident now in the devastation that surrounds his house. The homes of all his Albanian neighbours – mechanics, shopkeepers, barbers – are blackened ruins with overgrown gardens. No more than a cherished rose bush still blooms here and there.

      Dogancic has gone, but there is no jubilation at his departure. His neighbours paid too high a price for living next door. Last week, as the first of them returned to begin clearing out their homes, they spat his name with fury and contempt.

      The Serbs started burning Djakovica on 24 March, the night Nato began bombing. About 100 high street shops were looted and then torched. The homes of professional men and anyone who had had contact with international organisations were set alight.

      For the first few days, people were killed one at a time. Izat Hima, Djakovica’s most prominent ethnic Albanian doctor, was shot dead on his doorstep. Paramilitaries cut the throat of Kujtim Dula, a lawyer who had defended political prisoners, in front of his wife.

      But as the bombing went on, the Serbs launched a systematic campaign to murder the Albanians who remained in the town and to empty the surrounding villages.

      Dogancic would walk through the streets pointing out houses to long-haired men in dark camouflage uniforms with black cowboy hats characteristic of the so-called Frenki’s Boys, a paramilitary group that reports to Frenki Simatovic, Milosevic’s state security chief.

      ‘The paramilitaries didn’t know the neighbourhood,’ said Xhavet Beqa, a heavily built man who got his wife and four children out to Albania but stayed in Djakovica, slipping back to his district through Serbian patrols. ‘They needed Bozho to tell them where to go. He told them who was in hiding.’

      Beqa said Dogancic, his wife Radmilla and their eldest son, Nebojsha, a 26-year-old policeman, had stood in the middle of his street, arms folded, as they watched Beqa’s three houses burn. The paramilitaries surrounded Dogancic, he said, joking and congratulating themselves on a job well done. Radmilla also had a pistol.