The Massacre

Qamil Shehu sat up in bed and listened. The knock on the door was insistent. Pulling on his trousers and shirt, he groped his way from the bedroom to the front of the house. As he drew near the door, a man's voice called urgently.
"Qamil, hurry. We've got to leave."
Qamil opened the door, and a shaft of pale light passed across his face. He looked first at his brother Haziz, a lantern suspended from his right hand, and then at his watch. It was just after midnight.

"It's NATO," Haziz said, "Four hours ago, they bombed Pristina and Belgrade."

It took Qamil a moment to comprehend what was happening. Then he nodded, and slipped back into the house to fetch his wife.

Qamil was a sturdy man, strong-boned and compact, with a lightness of bearing unusual for a person of seventy years. He had lived all his life in Mala Krusha (Krusha e Vogel in Albanian), a largely ethnic Albanian village in the mountains of southwestern Kosovo. He had sought and found a wife there, and had fully expected, when Allah called, to die there. For most of his adult life, he had worked for the Kosovena winery, located fifteen kilometers to the south of the village.

Kosovena employed many of Qamil's neighbors, Albanian and Serb alike. One of them, Dragan Gavric, a Serb, lived up the street from Qamil in a large white stucco house. Dragan was liked and respected by his Albanian neighbors. In the late 1950s, the Krasniqi family gave Dragan the honor of "kumar," the Albanian tradition specifying that he who cuts the hair of the first-born son becomes godfather of the family. Dragan and Qamil sat next to one another on the company bus, shared lunches in the distillery's cafeteria, and, on hot summer evenings, played with their children under the cypress tree near Qamil's front gate.

But all that started to change in the late 1980s, when Serb-Albanian relations in Kosovo began to deteriorate. In the Yugoslavia of Marshal Tito, Kosovo was a self-governing province, and Kosovars of all ethnicities enjoyed substantial autonomy. Tito's brand of "socialism and brotherhood" kept ethnic relations in the province relatively civil and peaceful.
After Tito's death in 1980 and the rise of nationalism throughout the former Yugoslavia, Kosovar Serbs began to protest discrimination at the hands of the ethnic Albanian authorities. Albanians comprised approximately 85 percent of Kosovo's population. As Slobodan Milosevic climbed the political ranks in the late 1980s, from head of the communist party in Belgrade to President of Serbia, he seized on these grievances, as well as the centuries-old myth of Kosovo as the Serbian heartland, to create an image of himself as the defender of Serbian minorities throughout Yugoslavia. In 1989 Milosevic abolished Kosovo's autonomy, re-asserted Serbian direct rule, and purged ethnic Albanians from jobs in government and education. Kosovar Albanians were prohibited from buying or selling property without permission and sales of property to Albanians by departing Serbs were annulled. A powerful police presence enforced Belgrade's control. Kosovar Albanians responded by declaring an independent state and establishing their own parallel structures. They elected a parliament, collected funds to pay for schools and health care, and refused to take part in Serbian elections.

By 1997, Kosovo had become a tinderbox. The Serb police–MUP–were responsible for serious human rights violations, including illegal detentions, beatings, and torture. Political trials were commonplace. Meanwhile, Albanians were growing increasingly restless and frustrated that their peaceful resistance was not bearing fruit. A small militant group called the Kosovo Liberation Army (Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves, or UCK), formed in the early 1990s, began to attack police stations with greater frequency. The police responded with indiscriminate and excessive force, which swelled the ranks of the nascent insurgency. By 1998, the KLA was gaining control in parts of the Kosovar countryside, kidnapping and killing Serb civilians and ambushing Serb patrols. The government's retaliation was fierce: the Serbian police and later the Yugoslav Army swept through villages thought to be harboring KLA guerrillas, destroying homes and burning crops. By mid-October 1998, over 298,000 Kosovars – approximately fifteen percent of the population–had been displaced within Kosovo or had left the province.

As the fighting intensified between the KLA and Yugoslav forces, a shroud of distrust settled over Mala Krusha. No one said anything at first, but it was as if the walls that separated the Serbian and Albanian enclaves in the village had grown thicker. Long past were the days when a Serb bride might work her away across a crowded room to receive a hug from her Albanian neighbors who had dropped in to congratulate her. Nor would one see an Albanian couple – the woman dressed in a black kerchief and flowing shallvare trousers, her husband wearing the traditional conical hat called a qeleshe – in the reception line at a Serb funeral. As always, men from both groups waited every morning by the highway for the Kosovena bus, but they no longer mingled, sharing gossip and cigarettes. Now, long, uneasy silences punctuated their half-hour rides to the distillery. Two days before NATO air strikes began, the owner of the Kosovena winery dismissed all ethnic Albanian employees.

As Qamil Shehu and his family fled through the village during the night of NATO's first attacks, they were joined by dozens of other Albanian families. Avoiding the center of town, where Serb housing was clustered, they made their way up an old logging road and slipped into the woods in the direction of a bluff that overlooks the village and the surrounding valley. By daybreak, more than 300 villagers had gathered on the escarpment.

Fearful of lighting fires, women huddled together with their children in their laps to keep warm, while the men stood near the edge of the cliff, smoking and debating what to do next. Gazing down at the valley, they could see the Drini River as it stretched northward to the town of Djakovica (Gjakove) and beside it the paved road that connects Mala Krusha with its sister village, Velika Krusa (Krusha e Mahde), a mile away. On the road, snaking its way in and out of the morning mist they could make out a convoy of several Serb tanks followed by 15 buses.

Unknown to the men on the bluff, the buses descending on their village were packed with volunteers from the Serbian towns of Nis and Leskovac. Some were dressed in blue police uniforms, while others wore army fatigues with white militia armbands.

Not all of the Albanians in Mala Krusha had fled to the bluff. Some families, hearing that the Serbs were directing civilians to a nearby village, had gone there instead, while others had crossed the Drini River and taken refuge near a KLA encampment. About 150 Albanian villagers, either convinced that they would come to no harm or were too old and infirm to brave the trek up the mountain, had remained in their homes.

Meanwhile, many Serb residents, having caught wind of an army offensive, had painted "Srpska kuca" ("Serb house") on their doorways so that marauding policemen and paramilitary gangs would pass them by, and went to join the approaching column. A handful of men donned militia uniforms and waited on the highway, next to the bus stop, for the arrival of their comrades from Serbia.

At approximately 5 a.m., the column stopped at the entrance to the village. A road block was hastily set up and, as the last wisps of mist dissolved over the roof tops of the village, the shelling began.

When the bombardment ended at mid-day, the militiamen descended from the buses. Cradling AK-47s in their arms, they moved from house to house, pulling people from their hiding places. Several of the higher-ranking militia had painted faces and wore bandannas or black ski masks. While they interrogated residents, other soldiers stormed into the houses, pulling up floor boards to look for jewelry or Deutshmarks, the preferred reserve currency in Kosovo. Mattresses were ripped open, drawers emptied on to the floor to be searched for valuables, and cellars pillaged for food. At one house, the militamen discovered eight people--all members of the Shehu family--hiding in a cellar, lined them up against the wall, and shot them dead. Then they pumped incendiary rounds--known locally as "butterflies"--into the house, setting it ablaze.

By sunset, a thick yellow haze had drifted up from the valley and spread across the mountainside.

The next morning, Qamil and his companions awoke on the bluff to find themselves surrounded by Serb soldiers. The soldiers marched them back down the road to a large house at the edge of the village where a tall man, wearing green army fatigues and a black ski mask, stood in the doorway, smoking a cigarette.

"You asked for NATO to save you," he said in a voice dripping with sarcasm. "Now NATO is attacking us. So we are attacking you."

He ordered the women and children into the courtyard. As they filed past, he would grab teenage boys by the arm and push them back onto the street.

The man in the ski mask then turned his attention to the men on the road. He said something to one of the soldiers, who jammed the barrel of his rifle between Haziz's shoulder blades and told him to move down the road.

Fifteen minutes later, to Qamil's great relief, Haziz and the soldier re-appeared on the road pushing a man in a wheel chair. It was Sait Hajdari, who was paralyzed from the waist down.

For two hours, the Albanian men, with the exception of the invalid in the wheelchair, knelt on the gravel road, their hands behind their heads, staring out at the open pastures. One-hundred-and-twelve men and boys, hungry and exhausted, struggled to keep from pitching forward into the gravel. The youngest were two of Qamil's nephews, Xhelal and Mehmet Shehu, just 13. The oldest, at 72, was Bali Avdyli. Among them was a 45-year-old man, Avdyl Limoni, who suffered from cerebral palsy, and a mentally retarded boy, a month shy of his sixteenth birthday, who sobbed incessantly.

Two soldiers moved slowly along the line, ordering the men to empty their pockets onto the ground. The soldiers scooped up passports, drivers licenses, pocket watches, tobacco tins, pen knives, photographs, rolls of Deutchmark bills and tossed them into a large burlap bag. Meanwhile, two other soldiers circulated among the women in the courtyard, forcing them to remove their jewelry.

When the soldiers had finished with the women, they marched them off at gunpoint to the highway. Walking through the village, seventy-four-year-old Leonora Bajra, a proud and stubborn woman, recalled seeing two men, dressed in militia uniforms with black ski masks pulled over their heads, coming towards them. "One of them looked very familiar," she said. "I whispered to the woman next to me, 'Look at how he walks. Isn't that [Dragan Gavric]?'" As the man drew closer, she called out his name. "Well, he stopped and quickly turned his head away. That's when I knew for sure it was him."

As the women moved down the road, the soldiers ordered the men to get up on to their feet, three abreast. One of the older men stood up, wobbled unsteadily, and pitched sideways into the ditch. Startled, the soldier closest to him turned and fired repeatedly into his chest.

Qamil, sweat now streaming down his lined face, walked at the head of the line. Next to him was Haziz, pushing the man in the wheelchair. They passed a high brick wall, and turned into an open field lined with maple trees. At the far end was a dilapidated old haybarn, its wooden doors wide open.

Milling around in the pasture were a dozen policemen and masked militiamen with Klashnikov assault rifles slung across their backs. Something suddenly slammed against Qamil's head, and he stumbled forward. Before he hit the ground, a pair of hands grabbed him by the shoulders and sent him plunging head-first into the barn. Scrambling to his feet, he caught sight of Haziz, carrying in the paralyzed man across his shoulder, and he followed him to the far side of the barn.

As more and more men pressed into the barn, Qamil turned his face to the back wall and pulled his arms up to his chest to protect it from the crush of bodies.

A burst of gunfire rang out. Followed by another. And another. As a spray of bullets slammed into the adobe wall well above Qamil's head, he sank to his knees and fell across the bodies of his brother Haziz and the invalid.

Qamil stared up at the ceiling of the barn, unsure of what to do next. Flies buzzed back and forth in the shafts of sunlight. A man cried out for water. Another for his wife and son. Qamil cautiously turned and looked around. He could smell the stench of sweat and blood mingling with the musty fetor of old hay.

Outside the barn there was laughter. The door opened and a circle of fire spewing black smoke spun into the room and toppled on its side. Flames from the burning began to creep over the bodies, setting the dry hay crackling. Smoke quickly filled the room, and men, unable to move, shrieked.

When his lungs could bear no more, Qamil heaved himself onto his feet and ran to the door. The sunlight temporarily blinded him and he tripped over the wheelchair. Regaining his footing, he looked up to see a group of soldiers standing some distance from the burning barn and then dashed past a row of trees toward the river. Two men from inside the barn followed him, one with his clothes and hair afire. A burst of gunfire brought that one down. But the other kept running until he caught up with Qamil.

Together, the two men slipped into the tall grass near the paved road. They hid there until nightfall, then crossed the highway and made their way to the banks of the Drini River, where they parted ways. Qamil crossed the river and hid in the woods near the water's edge. Over the next four days, he watched as trucks pulled up to a beach on the far bank and dumped what looked like corpses and rubble into the river. On the last night, a truck got stuck in the sand. Before abandoning it, men poured a liquid in the back of the truck. Then the lorry ignited into flames. It burned all night.

***

On May 24, 1999, two months after Qamil's escape from the haybarn, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia issued an indictment charging Slobodan Milosevic and four co-defendants "with crimes against humanity and violations of the laws of war for planning, instigating, ordering, committing or otherwise aiding and abetting in a campaign of terror and violence directed against the Kosovo Albanian civilians living in Kosovo of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia." The core of the court's indictment was based on detailed accounts of massacres carried out by Serb forces in seven villages and towns, including Mala Krusa, throughout the province.

Qamil and other refugees living in camps in Macedonia and Albania first learned of the Milosevic indictment in the pages of Koha Ditore (Daily Times). Once Kosovo's most widely read Albanian-language newspaper, Koha Ditore was forced to close its editorial offices in Pristina on March 24, the day NATO bombing began. That day the police stormed the editorial offices and shot and killed a guard. As Serb forces rampaged through the city, most of the newspaper's staff went into hiding and then fled or were expelled from the country. Within weeks, they had re-assembled near the refugee camps in northwestern Macedonia and begun publishing their newspaper-in-exile. It became an important source of information for hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians scattered in refugee camps throughout the region. It also was an uplifting sign that their society had not been completely destroyed.

In late June, two weeks after NATO tanks had rumbled into Kosovo, Qamil and his neighbors returned to Mala Krusa. They found it gutted, the houses burnt, the livestock slaughtered. The Serbs had fled. One night a group of children ran amok through the center of the village, burning and looting Serb homes. When they arrived at the Dragan Gavic's house, they took special delight in pulling family portraits from the walls and hurling them into the street.

Qamil stood at his front gate and watched the smoke rising above the Serb houses. It was a hot night, and a fine mesh of insects hung on his breath. Two young boys sped by on bicylces, howling like young wolves as they hurried to catch up with the other children. Qamil felt weary and helpless, far too old to take vicarious pleasure in the youthful mayhem, but too overpowered by hatred to stop it.

* * *

On my way back to Kosovo that summer I stopped at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague to speak with Graham Blewitt, the tribunal's deputy prosecutor. Located in a heavily guarded building along a tree-lined avenue, the Tribunal is a cold, secretive place, a sort of subdued hospital for the Balkan heart, staffed not only by judges but also by hundreds of prosecutors and investigators and translators and clerical workers and security guards.

Blewitt, a robust man in his early fifties, is a survivor. An Australian lawyer who once tracked down organized crime figures and suspected Nazi war criminals in New South Wales, he has served under three chief prosecutors since the Tribunal was established in 1993. "Kosovo," Blewitt told me, "was the turning point for the tribunal. Kosovo marked a recognition on the part of NATO and the international community that the work of the tribunal was a primary objective."

Supporters have viewed the court as a crucial tool for ending the cycle of violence and retribution individual political leaders have long manipulated in countries like Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. By establishing individual guilt, the argument goes, the trials would help dispel the notion of collective blame for war crimes and acts of genocide. As Karl Jaspers said of the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, "For us Germans this trial has the advantage that it distinguishes between the particular crimes of the leaders and that it does not condemn the Germans collectively."

Such trials, supporters claim, can foster respect for democratic institutions by demonstrating that no individual--whether a foot soldier or high government official--is above the law. Insofar as legal proceedings confer legitimacy on otherwise contestable facts, trials also make it more difficult for individuals and societies to take refuge in denial. Some liberal legal theorists even view trials as a kind of moral pedagogy. They contend that tribunals, through their ability to distinguish between proper and improper conduct, can help postwar societies foster virtues of tolerance and reconciliation, forge a "shared truth" of past events, and reshape national identities.

Admirable goals. But governments, at least in the early years of the Tribunal's operation, failed to provide the court with adequate funding and intelligence information. Nor were they at first willing to risk the safety of their troops by removing mines and guarding suspected mass grave sites, let alone arresting suspected war criminals. "In Bosnia, we had to fight every step of the way to get support from the NATO forces," Blewitt said. "It eventually came, but it wasn't easy. In Kosovo it was very different. When the air strikes started we knew the day was going to come when we would be inside on the ground."

The bombing of Yugoslavia ended on June 10, 1999, and the tribunal's investigators did indeed go rolling into Kosovo, with NATO's armed contingents. "As we went in," Blewitt said, "we already had several governments backing us, giving us forensic teams, and de-mining and securing crime scenes." The Tribunal's work had international priority and media exposure, as it had not in Croatia and Bosnia. What is more, the U.S. government had put a bounty of up to a $5 million each on the heads of the five co-defendants.

The indictments announced in The Hague on May 27 charged former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Serb President Milan Milutinovic, former Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic, Chief of Staff Dragoljub Ojdanic, and former Serb Minister of Internal Affairs Vlajko Stojiljkovic with three counts each of crimes against humanity and one each of violation of the laws and customs of war. Of the two types of charges, violations of the laws and customs of war, or war crimes, is the older and more traditional.

"The mere fact that two armies or two parties are killing each other is not a war crime," Blewitt said. "It is only when the parties step beyond the bounds of what is accepted. And modern-day armies are taught what constitutes the laws and customs of war." In essence, these laws define what are legal, illegal, and criminal acts in times of war. They acknowledge that death and suffering are inevitable in armed conflict, but that deliberately inflicting unnecessary suffering, especially upon civilians, constitutes a criminal act for which civilian and military leaders and their subordinates can be held accountable. If an army unit shells a tank column and happens to kill civilians, it has not necessarily committed a war crime, but if it deliberately targets hospitals, it has. Killing or torturing prisoners, civilians, or hostages is a war crime, as is burning crops and killing livestock in order to starve civilians or any other extensive destruction not justified by military necessity.

The most serious charge against the Serb and Yugoslav leaders was "crimes against humanity." The term originated in the Preamble to the 1907 Hague Convention, which codified the customary law of armed conflict. In 1915, the Allies accused the Ottoman Empire of crimes against humanity. Thirty years later, in 1945, the United States and other Allies incorporated it in the Nuremberg charter, which served as the corpus juris for levying charges against Nazi leaders following World War II. Crimes against humanity encompass a wide range of abominable acts--mass murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation--committed against civilians on a large scale. The charge of crimes against humanity also places an onus on all governments to arrest anyone indicted for such a crime. In effect, a person who commits crimes against humanity is, like the pirate or slave trader before him, hostis humani generis, an enemy of all humankind--over whom any state could hold criminal jurisdiction.

If Slobodan Milosevic and his co-defendants faced serious charges, punishable with life imprisonment, for their actions in Kosovo, Graham Blewitt and his investigators also had some serious investigative work ahead of them. In effect, they had to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the crimes committed by Yugoslav forces against civilians in villages like Mala Krusa were not just an accident but had been planned and were widespread and systematic. "In the absence of direct evidence of a plan to massacre these people," Blewitt explained, "we have to rely on circumstantial evidence. So proving patterns is important. We have to demonstrate that the tactics used by Yugoslav military, police, and paramilitary units in, say, village A were the same as those in village B on or about the same day and thereafter in village C and village D. We don't have to prove every single murder, or every single massacre, we just need to select a sample of these so that we can prove a pattern of killing and destruction aimed against civilians."

In building their case of crimes against humanity, the prosecution will need to go back to the late 1980s when the Serbs began targeting Kosovar Albanians by removing them from all public employment. It started with the dismissal of ethnic Albanian doctors, lawyers, and public officials, Blewitt noted. "And then you add to that the fact that rapes and assaults and beatings and torturings over a period of time had been taking place, culminating in the ultimate attack on the population there. People were actually killed, their homes were robbed and destroyed. And all of that we can bring in one charge of persecution."

Blewitt's most difficult task in Kosovo would be establishing "command responsibility"--namely, that Milosevic and the co-accused had either ordered or, having known that crimes were taking place, had "failed to take all necessary and reasonable measures" to prevent or repress subordinates from committing such acts. Establishing chain of command in Kosovo would require real gumshoe work. And to make their case hold, the Tribunal's prosecutors would need to gather three kinds of evidence: testimonial, physical, and documentary.

Witness testimonies, like Qamil Shehu's detailed account of the massacre in the haybarn, would be the ballast of the prosecution's case. But, as in any criminal case involving homicide, such testimonies would hold greatest weight if they were supported by physical evidence, essentially the bodies of the murder victims: the corpus delecti. This was the domain of the forensic sciences.

"Our aim in the forensic area," Blewitt said, "is not to identify every single victim. . . we just don't have the resources to do it." In essence, the forensic experts would be corroborating witness testimonies by identifying some of the victims of mass killings and determining cause and manner of death. They would also be looking for patterns in the mayhem: What methods did the killers use to dispatch their victims? Were the methods similar at different execution sites? And did the killers make an effort to cover their tracks?

Documentary evidence, the proverbial "paper trail" of detective stories, was the essential link that would connect the witness accounts and physical evidence gathered in one village or town with another. Such evidence can come in many forms: battle orders, telegrams, radio communication intercepts, notes from meetings, military intelligence, satellite imagery, photographs from NATO's drone aircraft, even telephone conversations and email. Getting their hands on this material came to obsess Blewitt and his staff.

In January and February 1999, Blewitt's boss, then chief prosecutor Louise Arbour, toured several European capitals, pleading for intelligence information. In Bonn, the Germans, who operated drone aircraft over Kosovo, gave her some pictures of grave sites. The British also supplied her with intelligence intercepts. But it wasn't until April 1999 when the American intelligence community finally turned over confidential data to the Tribunal that prosecutors felt they had a case with legs.

By mid-August 1999, over a dozen teams of forensic scientists were bivouacked across Kosovo. Belgium, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States had sent teams, as had police agencies in Germany, Denmark, France, Holland, and Switzerland. The U.S. team, spearheaded by the F.B.I., whose "area of operation" was the town of Djakovica, consisted of 64 people and 107,000 pounds of equipment, at a cost of two million dollars. Over the next three months, the tribunal shuttled over 300 forensic scientists from 14 countries in and out of the region in what soon turned into the largest international forensic investigation of war crimes--or possibly of any crime--in history.

* * *

The leader of the British forensic team dispatched to southwestern Kosovo was a 47-year-old policeman named Kevin Berry. I found him in a cluster of olive green tents on a hilltop outside of Mala Krusa. As he was driving to the encampment that morning, Berry had passed two corpses lying face down in the ditch at the side of the road. "Revenge killings, I'd guess," he said. "Probably a couple of local Albanian guys found an elderly Serb couple still living in the area and, you know, shot 'em. I can't really say. But I know it happens." As he described the grizzly scene, I could see that it troubled him more than he was willing to let on. "The problem is we can't investigate every case. It's just not in our jurisdiction." He paused. "But, it's kind of sad, you know, to be here investigating murders committed by Serbs, when the Albanians, for whatever reason, are starting to do the same thing."

Berry and his fellow investigators were discovering a pattern in the terror that had raced through the towns and villages of Kosovo. "Their mode of operation was clear," he said. "The Serbs would round up people--maybe 5, 10, 40 at time--herd them into buildings, execute them, and then set the structures on fire." Nowhere was this pattern more evident than in the haybarn in Mala Krusa. When Berry and his team arrived all they found there were a few broken cinderblocks and two craters the size of large satellite disks. After setting fire to the building and removing the charred remains, the police and militamen had placed land mines, or possibly dynamite, inside the building and blown it sky-high. Three months later, the investigators could do little more than measure the size of the craters and collect bullet casings and bones left behind in the tall grass. According to the villagers, the Serbs had dumped the remains three kilometers away in the Drini River. On the banks of the river, investigators found an abandoned truck and sifted through the rubble in the flat bed, pulling out bones and clothing.

Over the summer of 1999, Berry and his team, dressed in white jumpsuits and wearing face masks, moved from one massacre site to another in the villages of Mala Krusa, Velika Krusa, and Celina (Celine). Temperatures often soared above 104F, and as the heat rose, so did the stench from the rotting corpses buried under the rubble. One evening, as Berry and his investigators were packing up for the day, they were suddenly surrounded by a throng of angry villagers. A rumor had spread through Mala Krusha that the team had gathered all the evidence they needed and would be leaving for another village. "It was a tense moment," Berry recalled. "We'd received orders to move on and somehow the villagers had found out about it. They were deeply concerned that we would leave our work unfinished. So I had to meet with the village elders and reassure them that we wouldn't leave until every body had been recovered."

By late July, the forensic investigators had managed to identify 12 of the dead from Mala Krusa. On a Sunday, the day when Kosovars traditionally bury their dead, more than 2,000 mourners, including Kevin Berry, gathered outside the village schoolhouse to pay their respects. For the villagers, naming and properly burying their dead allowed them to begin the passage through stages of mourning and grief. The women could now visualize the death of their men and say prayers for them. Fourteen wooden caskets sat on top of desks in front of the school. Twelve of them bore the names of men killed in the haybarn. The two other caskets contained unidentified remains. One held the complete skeleton of a nameless young man. His headstone read "I Panjohur," or "Unknown." The other casket contained an assortment of bones and shards of clothing gathered from the back of the truck. It was dedicated to all the victims forever lost in the churning currents of the Drini River.

* * *

Late one afternoon that summer of 1999, Qamil Shehu took me to what remained of Dragan Gavric's house. Storm clouds were gathering over the mountains to the east, and as we walked through the empty streets, we could hear thunder in the distance. Blocking the entrance to the house was a battered sofa, its beige fabric singed and torn. The once white stucco walls were blackened by the smoke that must have billowed out of the windows when the children set the house on fire.

I pulled a copy of the Milosevic indictment out of my bag and showed it to Qamil. I turned to page 34 and pointed to the list of men reportedly killed in Mala Krusa on March 26, 1999. There were 103 names. Thirty-five of them had the last name of Shehu.

Qamil took the document and ran his finger slowly along the edge of the page. Speaking in a low voice, he read the names out loud: "Destan, that is my brother ... Dritan, my cousin ... Mentor, another cousin." He stopped at the name of "Qamil Shehu" and smiled slightly, "So they think I'm dead..."

He continued down the list: "Haziz, he is my younger brother ... Myftar, also my brother." When he reached the last two names, his face hardened and he pressed his finger hard against the page. "Samit and Veli Shehu," he said, "they are my sons."

A gust of wind sent ashes and dust swirling about our feet.

"Could you imagine ever living again with Gavric and the other Serbs in the village?" I asked.

He thought for a minute, shifting his feet and looking from the charred remains of the house to the darkening sky.

"Before, we were neighbors," he said in a voice thick with anger. "We went to each others' weddings. We worked together and drank together. Before all this, we never had anything bad with them. But today, I could eat them with my teeth."

As Qamil spoke, I could feel him slipping into what writer Michael Ignatieff has called "the dream-time of vengeance." Many of us who wrote about the wars in Bosnia and Croatia found that as we listened to atrocity stories it was occasionally difficult to determine, as Ignatieff writes, "whether these stories had occurred yesterday or in 1941 or 1841 or 1441. For the tellers of the tale, yesterday and today were the same." The dream-time of vengeance, he writes, is a somniferous, timeless state, where time past and time present are indistinguishable, "a place where crimes can never be safely fixed in the past, but remain locked in the eternal present."

"How can I ever forgive what happened?" Qamil asked me, his voice swelling with anger. "I can't ever bury the bodies of my brothers and sons. No, now I only have hate."

* * *

"The revenge fantasy," writes psychiatrist Judith Herman, "is often a mirror image of the traumatic memory, in which the roles of perpetrator and victims are reversed. It often has the same grotesque, frozen, and wordless quality as the traumatic memory itself." In his humiliated fury, Qamil imagines that revenge is the only way to rid himself of the shame and restore his own sense of power. This is the only way to force the perpetrator to truly acknowledge the harm done to him, he feels.

Survivors must come to terms with the impossibility of getting even or they'll remain forever imprisoned in the dream-time of vengeance, Herman and other mental health specialists argue. "Pain," writes Donald W. Schriver, Jr., "can shear the human memory in two crippling ways: with forgetfulness of the past or imprisonment in it. The mind that insulates the traumatic past from conscious memory plants a bomb in the depths of the psyche--it takes no great grasp of psychiatry to know that. But the mind that fixes on pain risks getting trapped in it. Too horrible to remember, too horrible to forget."

Giving up the fantasy of revenge does not mean giving up the quest for justice; on the contrary, a quest truly begins with the process of joining with others to hold the perpetrator accountable for his crimes. But accepting the rule of law comes with a price: victims must abandon any desire to physically harm the person who has wronged them and, so it is hoped, break the cycle of vengeance. If Milosevic were ever brought to trial, Qamil would eagerly testify for the prosecution, he told me. But, he added, it was more important personally for him to see that Dragan Gavric pay for his crime--a wish, given the tribunal's strategy of targeting only the big fish, that will probably never be realized.

Qamil is hardly alone in his desire for retribution. Since NATO troops entered Kosovo in June 1999, Kosovar Albanians have driven thousands of Serbs out of the province or into enclaves and murdered dozens of others in cold blood. In its 1999 report on Kosovo, As Seen, As Told, the Organiztion of Security and Cooperation in Europe describes hundreds of incidents where ethnic Albanians have attacked and looted Serb homes and villages. On March 16, 2001, in perhaps the worst incident so far, suspected KLA members set off a bomb on the Serbian side of the border, killing 11 Serbian civilians.

Younger generations of Kosovar Albanians, who have known Serbs only as oppressors, have shown a growing intolerance of all ethnic others, including Roma and Muslim Slavs. People under thirty now make up more than half the population and many young Kosovars manifest a thirst for blind revenge that sickens their parents, many of whom still have personal memories of peaceful coexistence with the Serbs. Gangs of youth, between the ages of 12 and 20, have harassed, beaten, and threatened defenseless victims, especially elderly Serbs. Unlike Qamil's wishes for revenge, which are targeted at a few individuals, the type of vengeance that has taken hold of Kosovo's youth is blind and arbitrary and often directed at the innocent. "I cannot hide my shame to discover that, for the first time in our history, we, Kosovo Albanians, are also capable of monstrous acts," wrote the internationally respected publisher Veton Surroi in August 1999. "I have to speak out to make it clear that our moral code, by which women, children and elderly should be left unharmed, has been and is being violated."

Throughout Kosovo, the real and perceived role of ordinary Serbs in crimes against humanity has proven cancerous, especially among the young. This is compounded by the fact that the killings especially in the villages were so intimate. In Bosnia men were often rounded up and trucked away to be executed, while in Kosovo children watched as paramilitaries, some of whom were their Serb neighbors, backed by Serbian police and Yugoslav soldiers, murdered family members and burned their homes. "I fear for the children a lot," Mary Ellen Keough told me in her office in Pristina. A 52-year-old community health specialist from Massachusetts, Keough is the director of family support services for Physicians for Human Rights in Kosovo. "The children have witnessed so much here. Obviously, they are at a young, impressionable age and have developed firm memories of what they've seen. They are disturbed. You can see it in their faces. Parents have told me that their children are misbehaving more now than before the war. They are harder to discipline. They also have trouble sleeping. . . I think you'll need a couple of generations removed from this kind of viewing of atrocities. . .for the emotional rebuilding of Kosovo to take place."

Qamil Shehu, like many Kosovo Albanians, wants justice, but doesn't believe the small fry like Dragan Gavric will ever be captured and brought to trial. Many of the killers fled in June to Serbia or Montenegro, where they now live without fear of arrest or reprisals. Since no court has indicted them, they are free to travel throughout the region, or even emigrate to the very countries which once bombed them. Moreover, the prospects are slim that the Tribunal will ever reach down through the ranks and indict many of the garden variety killers.

What role will the Tribunal play in the process of rebuilding Kosovo? Will trials help stay the hand of vengeance? To begin with, indicting Milosevic has been an important first step. Albanian Kosovars, Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and many Serbs celebrated the announcement of his indictment. After the war anti-Milosevic protesters in Belgrade could be heard chanting a new admonition: "To The Hague, To The Hague, Slobodan to The Hague." The laborious process of collecting testimonies and establishing the facts -- Who killed whom? Where were the bodies buried? Who were the killers? Did the bullet enter from behind or from the front? And at what range?-- may one day pay off by putting Milosevic and his henchmen behind bars. Factual evidence also can help shield the truth from the slings and arrows of future revisionists and make it difficult for individuals and societies to take refuge in denial. As forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow has said: "It's awfully hard to argue with a single gunshot wound to the head."

The presence of forensic investigators in Kosovo has also had a subtle, and perhaps unintended, effect on Kosovars. As I followed Kevin Berry and his team in Mala Krusa, I could see that they were seen not just as scientists gathering physical evidence for a court case, but as bearers of a more intangible message: recognition and acknowledgment of all that they had suffered. By identifying victims and determining the cause of death, forensic investigators like Kevin Berry were also helping the survivors of the assault on their village to free themselves from the limbo of despair. Caught between hope and grief, many of these survivors longed to know the fate of their loved ones. It consumed them night and day. And until they knew the truth, they would never be able to grieve properly.

Liberal law theorists and human rights activists argue that justice, like the pursuit of rights, is a universal, a historic practice that exists above politics. The Hague Tribunal, in its 1994 annual report, argued that it was essential to peace and security in the former Yugoslavia: "[I]t would be wrong to assume that the Tribunal is based on the old maxim fiat justitia et pereat mundus (let justice be done, even if the world were to perish). The Tribunal is, rather based on the maxim propounded by Hegel in 1821: fiat justitia ne pereat mundus (let justice be done lest the world should perish." But such positivist notions fail to recognize that courts, like all institutions, exist because of, not in spite of, politics. People and entire communities can interpret a tribunal's decisions, procedures (modes and manner of investigation, selection of cases, timing of trials, types and severity of punishments), and even its very existence in a variety of ways. Indeed, politics in this sense is imbedded in everything, especially the pursuit of justice.

No one knew that better than Kevin Berry, who had to confront an angry group of villagers demanding that he stay and finish what he had begun. Faced with a clash that pitted the international needs of the Tribunal against the local needs of the villagers, he opted (wisely) not to move immediately to the next village but to remain in Mala Krusa and finish all of the exhumations. "They're right," he told me after the incident. "The Tribunal has to respect their wishes. They're waiting to see if their loved ones have been recovered. . . . To leave now would be disrespectful."

War crime investigations and trials alone cannot address the root causes of communal violence, especially in a postwar country like Yugoslavia where thousands of people – strangers and neighbors alike – planned and carried out ethnic cleansing with impunity and terrible savagery. The logic of law, as Hannah Arendt suggests, can never make sense of the logic of atrocity, nor how it is interpreted by the survivors and perpetrators. Strictly legal interpretations of Kosovo's nightmare will always be skewed in the eyes of those accused of creating it: while trials of Milosevic and his co-defendants in The Hague may help Kosovar Albanians and their communities feel some small measure of vindication, the communities from which the Serb perpetrators came may feel as if they have been made scapegoats, especially if those local Serbs who participated in the killings and expulsions-the little fish-are never brought to justice. This is why factual truth doesn't always lead to reconciliation, nor should it necessarily be the Tribunal's objective in the Balkans.

Trials may help the rehabilitation of a defeated country, but only as one small element in a broader program of national reconstruction. The Tribunal at least can help to establish a definitive record of what took place and thus pierce the veil of denial and impunity held up by those who planned and carried out atrocities. At the same time, through its investigations and trials it can provide acknowledgment and recognition to the victims. These are important functions. To expect more of the Tribunal--or any tribunal--is wishful thinking.

References

- Timothy Garton Ash, "Anarchy and Madness," The New York Review of Books,
February 10, 2000.

- Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)

- Roy Gutman and David Rieff (eds), Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know
(New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1999).

- Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence-From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

- Michael Ignatieff, "Articles of Faith," Index on Censhorship, 5, 1996.

- Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Metropolitian Books, 2000)

- Sebastian Junger, "The Forensics of War," Vanity Fair, October 1999.

- Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, Organization of

- Security and Cooperation in Europe, Kosovo/Kosova: As Seen, As Told, Vol. II, 1999.

- Veton Surroi, "Victims of the Victims," The New York Review of Books, October 7, 1999.

- John Sweeny, "Revealed: Five men brought death to Krushe," The Observer, May 16, 1999.