Reports of Serbian Death Squads Spread in Kosovo

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia —  The five Serbian police officers who killed human rights lawyer Bajram Kelmendi and his two sons must think that NATO will lose its war with Yugoslavia and that justice will not come to Kosovo.

The officers didn’t bother to pull down their black woolen hats to mask their faces when they abducted Kelmendi and his sons. And they left as witnesses two widows who saw straight into their eyes.

Kelmendi, 62, was one of Kosovo’s bravest human rights lawyers, and that is why the police here in the capital of the Serbian province came for him and his sons when it was time to take revenge for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air raids.

Officers wearing blue camouflage uniforms took the three away at gunpoint from the family’s Pristina home shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday, his widow, Hekibe, said Saturday, the fourth day of NATO airstrikes.

Their corpses were found dumped at the side of the road near Kosovo Polje on Friday, with Bajram in the middle and his sons, Kastriot, 31, and Kushtrim, 16, lying on each side, victims of the death squads that roam Pristina each night.

“They were executed,” Hekibe said, as 20 women wept in mourning with her in the family’s living room. “Bajram was hit with more bullets. There was blood all over his body.

“They were angry with Bajram because he was a big fighter for the national cause and our rights,” she said.

NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia’s military is supposed to stop the persecution and coldblooded killing of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, who make up 90% of the 2 million people in this province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic. But so far, the Serbs have only intensified their onslaught against unarmed people.

That doesn’t mean NATO’s strategy is wrong, Hekibe said, only that the alliance must be sure to finish the job, to make certain that her husband and sons did not die in vain.

“They died for Kosovo, but I wish their blood had not been lost,” she said, glancing down at small photos of her husband and sons selected for the funeral notices. “I ask God to grant us our independence.”

Serbs Accelerate Scorched-Earth Drive

The three Kelmendi men were far from the only victims who have been singled out for retaliation by Serbs stepping up their scorched-earth campaign in several areas of Kosovo, even flattening some villages, according to persistent reports.

When the men’s relatives went to identify them at Pristina’s morgue, there were six more corpses of people who had been shot at point-blank range.

Police aren’t the only suspects. Serbian civilians carrying AK-47 assault rifles and knives walk the streets by day and drive around the city at night, looking for victims.

In one ethnic Albanian neighborhood, armed Serbian men wearing headbands of black cloth walked into one of the few shops that had dared to open Saturday and stole some juice and food. They left with a warning for the clerk, residents who live nearby said.

“They told him, ‘If we see you open this shop again, you will be shot,’ ” one of the neighbors said.

Only a few, mainly Serb-run, shops open each day in Pristina, and the little food left on the shelves disappears in a few hours.

Anyone carrying a shopping bag or loaves of scarce bread is stopped almost every block by someone asking directions to a store that is open and has something edible to sell.

Hekibe and her daughter-in-law, Vjollca, 28, can only hope that the police will leave them in peace long enough to bury their loved ones with dignity.

When the Serbian officers knocked on the family’s door early Thursday, they had what appeared to be a bomb made out of two cylinders taped together. They ordered her to open the door and, when she refused, broke it down.

“They gave us five seconds to leave the house because they said a bomb was going to explode here,” said Kelmendi’s widow, who is also a human rights lawyer and is secretary-general of the Democratic League of Kosovo, the territory’s leading political party.

“They put two bombs together and left them under the stairs.”

The five officers stayed outside, and Hekibe called the emergency police phone number and asked that someone come quickly to defuse the bomb. The person on the other end of the line hung up on her, she said.

When the bomb didn’t explode, the five men came into the house with AK-47s and found her elder son, Kastriot, eating bread in the kitchen with his wife and their two children, Elena and Sokol, ages 6 and 2.

Bajram’s teenage son, Kushtrim, went up to wake his father, who, when he saw what was happening, couldn’t move. The police had ordered his family to lie face down on the floor and had put the barrels of their rifles at the Kelmendis’ heads.

“Bajram was looking at us from the stairs,” his widow said. “I thought he was already dead in his heart. I asked him, ‘Are you alive?’ The police said, ‘Keep your head down or we will shoot.’ ”

Bajram’s daughter-in-law pleaded with the police to spare them.

“I said, ‘If you know God, and have children, and in the name of your sisters and mothers, please don’t do anything,’ ” Vjollca said Saturday. “They told me to shut up or they were going to hit me. They asked me for foreign money, German marks or American dollars.

“I told them I had none, and they said if they found some they would kill one of my children. Then they asked Bajram, ‘Where are your weapons?’ He replied: ‘I am a lawyer. I don’t keep weapons.’ ”

‘There Are Terrorists Called NATO’

When the police left with the three men, Hekibe called the emergency number again and got passed from one department to another or simply dismissed by angry Serbian officers.

“The police told me: ‘There are terrorists called NATO. Go and report to NATO about this case,’ ” she said.

Hekibe finally gave up and frantically began calling personal contacts to see if they could help find out where her husband and two sons had been taken. One person she called was Kosovo’s top investigative judge, Danica Marinkovic.

Marinkovic, a longtime colleague of Hekibe, is best known for dismissing the massacre of 45 ethnic Albanian villagers in Racik in January as a guerrilla propaganda hoax.

She told Hekibe that the men who abducted her husband and sons were probably terrorists who had stolen the uniforms.

But those uniforms, with a crest on the shoulders declaring the men “milicia,” were not all that convinced Hekibe they were real police. Their behavior did too.

“If they were paramilitaries, they would have killed us here, mutilated us and stolen everything,” she said.

Although the killers didn’t carry out the wholesale looting that paramilitary groups are known for in Kosovo’s villages, they did steal a few things from the Kelmendis’ home that might assist in the couple’s work.

They took a cellular phone, a portable radio and Kastriot’s car, an indigo Opel Vectra that Hekibe has subsequently seen being driven around the neighborhood, as if the killers wanted to taunt her with their power.

Four men the size of fullbacks and wearing civilian clothes were spotted Saturday driving in a rental car that two police in blue camouflage uniforms stole from a journalist at gunpoint Thursday.

A distinctive dent in the car’s front end left no doubt that it was the same car, and the men in it appeared to be having such a good time that it was unlikely they feared being arrested.

Pristina’s death squads are only part of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s “ethnic cleansing” machine, which, according to mounting reports, continues to drive thousands of Kosovo Albanians from their villages.

Men in civilian cars seen driving out of an army base on the edge of Pristina have been tossing leaflets onto the street in what appears to be a crude attempt to create a mass exodus of ethnic Albanians from the capital.

The leaflets, professionally printed in black type on red paper, carry the insignia of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, at the top.

But they are signed by Ibrahim Rugova, the leader of the Democratic League of Kosovo and a pacifist despised by many KLA fighters for having insisted that peaceful resistance was the best way to win Kosovo’s independence.

That contradiction between signature and symbol, and the several grammatical errors in the Albanian text, have left Pristina’s ethnic Albanians convinced that Serbian authorities are trying to panic them so much that they will flee the city, and Yugoslavia itself.

“We asked NATO to defend us against the Serbian regime and they have done that,” the leaflets say. “But Serbian forces are preparing for a very big offensive. The KLA forces cannot mount resistance against Serbian forces and they cannot defend the Serbian population.

“We call on all Albanians to leave this country which is in danger and to go for some time to the Republic of Macedonia and Albania.”

Terrified Capital Residents Have Hope

So far, the threats, summary executions, propaganda, food shortages and NATO’s airstrikes haven’t provoked a flight by Kosovo Albanians from the capital.

But many residents are terrified of what might come if NATO keeps bombing each day and the Serbs grow more determined to hold onto Kosovo at any cost.

The fear is mixed with hope that this time, they will not be abandoned and that the NATO bombs they see exploding in bright flashes on the horizon each night may soon end their pain.

An ethnic Albanian journalist, who rarely risks leaving her house in the daylight anymore, goes out into the courtyard with her relatives and their children each night to watch and hear NATO’s air power.

It is the time of day when they are happiest, she said.

“Of course, the children are sometimes afraid of the explosions,” she said. “But we explain that they are helping us to be free.”