AS THE INSURGENCY SPREAD ACROSS Kosovo that summer, the lines between Serb and Albanian were clear. But even among themselves, ethnic Albanians were forced to take sides. On one side were Ibrahim Rugova and his Kosovo Democratic League (LDK) that had represented Kosovar Albanians for a decade as Milosevic had systematically destroyed Yugoslavia in the name of Serbian nationalism. Rugova was a Sorbonne-educated intellectual, a professor of literature, who had organized a shadow government that managed everything from holding university classes in people’s homes, to delivering health care, to picking up the trash. Rugova was a pacifist.
The other choice that summer was the KLA, the group of mostly young dissidents who had gathered enough arms after the Albanian government collapsed in the wake of the pyramid scheme to set up a pretty efficient insurgency.
In February the Serbs had attacked the Jashari family compound in Gornje Prekaze, killing Adem Jashari along with fifty-three others, mostly members of his extended family, as retribution for attacks on police stations in the area that they thought Jashari had organized and led. Within weeks there was war.
In those early days there were several KLAs. There was one in Southwest Kosovo, in Dukagjini; another in Drenica, the heartland; a third in the east, in Llap. Each group had its own organizational personality and each group was particularly good at certain complementary skills. The Drenica bunch were the organizers, the Llap group expert smugglers, and the Dukagjini group were arguably the toughest fighters. Slowly, the groups merged and strengthened. By June, the KLA had established “Free Kosova” with the headquarters in Malisevo.
There was a small well in the garden of a café near the center of Malisevo, known as the Well of Freedom. Kosovars would drive from all over the Province in those heady days to drink from it. But, on June 24 the MUP and the VJ moved against Malisevo. That morning, the VJ commander blocked three of the four roads leading into Malisevo and began to roll tanks towards the town. The KLA beat a strategic retreat and the entire civilian population—save one old woman—moved a few kilometers south into the Pagarusha valley.
At one point in early August I asked my Kosovar Albanian translator if a person we had just interviewed was KLA or not. She smiled and said, “Don’t you understand? We’re all KLA.” While Rugova’s picture may still have hung in thousands of homes across Kosovo, the KLA was fighting back and gaining supporters and strength.
Malisevo became a center of gravity to my work. Its axial position in the province meant that I drove through the town almost daily going to one place or another. We really thought the town was empty until one afternoon on the way through we saw that old woman sweeping her stoop. We stopped to talk with her.
Her house was on the main road that ran out from the town center to the southeast. It must have been one of the oldest homes in the town. She wasn’t fully in control of her faculties, but she wasn’t totally around the bend either. We asked her if she lived alone. She told us her husband—we later learned he had died years before—was out and expected back. She didn’t seem concerned that she was the only person remaining in the town. We talked to her for a few minutes and then left her to continue sweeping the stoop. Every once in a while afterwards, we would check in on her to see how she was getting along.
Driving around the province day after day in our Suburbans, we spent time talking and listening to music on cassettes. My regular partner was Rob, a retired Marine master sergeant, who had joined the Foreign Service as a communications technician. We were paired up, I suppose, because there were actually more Foreign Service personnel on the team than military, and since both of us had military experience it seemed to balance out the lack of a career military officer.
We were also about the same age—Rob a few years older —and had roughly the same musical taste. Rob had made a bunch of tapes before leaving Frankfurt, and he always had one in his bag for the mission. My favorite was one with lots of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Steve Miller, and The Who. He hadn’t labeled them but somehow seemed to know which was which. Our translators were all considerably younger and had different musical tastes, I’m sure. One of them had got her hands on this specific cassette at some point and scrawled “Geezer Rock” on the label. Fair enough.
Back in Pristina my work with the NGOs was being supplanted a bit: USAID had brought in someone who actually knew what he was doing, so I was off the hook. I still made the rounds sometimes, particularly to groups that served as information clearing houses like the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and International Red Cross (ICRC). Both groups kept maps of where mines had been reported or had actually gone off. With our teams running around the province, we stopped in regularly to see not only what others had reported, but also to update the maps with what we had learned.
At one point in late August we were driving on a road that was mined, or at least so the locals thought. We had no idea. It was a small road just south of Lladrovac and the hills where the KLA had their headquarters. We were driving along slowly, looking for a way into a small town the Serbs were said to have attacked the night before, when a couple of guys with Kalashnikovs stood up next to the road and flagged us down. They told us the road had been mined a few hundred meters ahead and that we should turn around. We decided this was probably good advice and followed it.
Not far back down the road we met a man leading a donkey cart. We stopped to speak to him. His eyes were red-rimmed, and tears, now dried, had carved little trails down through the dirt on his cheeks. I asked him where his family was, fully expecting him to point up into the hills near Sedlare where a large number of IDPs had settled. He looked down for a moment and then stepped over to the trailer. He looked directly into my eyes.
He said, “I’d like to introduce you to my family,” and flipped back the tarp covering the trailer.
In the trailer were the mutilated bodies of his wife and children. He named them all and then waited for us to react.
I was too stunned to speak. The man stood staring at me through those red-rimmed eyes, daring me or maybe imploring me to say something, anything. I was mute. My translator, Mimoza, was silent as well. There was nothing to translate.
After a moment, Mimi said something to the man in Albanian. He nodded. I asked, “What will you do now?” But stopped her with a hand on her forearm before she could translate. “Where are you taking them?” I asked instead.
“I have to bury them,” was all he managed to say.
Again, there was nothing to say.
“I’m glad I found them,” the man said. “I’m lucky I found them.”
At least we knew the rumors of an attack were true. We warned him of the mines along the road. He said he knew about them, but thanked us. He thwacked the donkey on its haunch with the branch in his hand and they moved off down the road.
When we got back to town, I went over to the UNHCR and ICRC to mark that the road was mined on their maps. Our relationship with the UN agencies, like the High Commission for Refugees and the World Food Program (WFP) was guided—some might say clouded—by the fact that the U.S. is one of, if not the biggest, donor to their operations. In fact, when congressional staffers came to Kosovo to look in on what was happening, they always asked to meet with the UN leadership.
In one case, after a dinner we had put together for a senior congressional staffer, she questioned the UNHCR and WFP leaders so intently, others in the room quietly left until just four of us remained. After our talk the staffer looked like she needed a cigarette. The UN staff mockingly complained later of being interrogated and tortured.
Our team was growing. We gained an Air Force lieutenant named Eric as our intelligence officer. He would work through the night to pull together a morning briefing for us that was supposed to give us what the military refers to as situational awareness. The problem was that we were the only reporting element for the U.S. Government in the area so there wasn’t any additional reporting except that received from the Top Secret signals intelligence or imagery satellites. And we couldn’t get access to that information because we didn’t have a Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF), a place where we could keep a computer that could link into those systems and store the information we’d downloaded. Still, every morning, Eric would dutifully put together as best he could a morning report to brief us on.
After a couple of weeks, he was joined by an Army intel officer. I knew this guy from my time in Germany in the cavalry; he had joined my squadron just before I left at the end of my three-year tour. Doug took over the night shift from Eric, but was no more effective at putting substance into the briefing—there simply wasn’t substantive intelligence to be had. And the night shift was grueling. Doug would start at around two a.m., and work through until our morning brief at about eight a.m. He would try to catch up on sleep during the day while we were out. It apparently didn’t work well.
He wanted to find a place that would be quieter than his room in the middle of the hotel. He nosed around, found my little space in the back, and decided he wanted it. I wasn’t keen to swap, but told him that if all he needed was a quiet space to sleep, he could crash on my rack when I was out. For whatever reason, this wasn’t enough. He complained to our boss that I wasn’t a team player because I wanted to keep my space. My boss pulled me aside and asked that I give up my space for Doug so he could sleep. I explained that I had offered him the space during the day and he had refused it. We were stubbornly at a bit of a deadlock over what seemed at the time to be a very minor issue.
But one afternoon when we came back from a mission, I learned that Doug had collapsed. He had gone for a few days with almost no sleep. His boss, an ambitious Army lieutenant colonel, had been constantly on his back over the character of the morning briefings. While we had been out, Doug had gone into a rage, throwing things around the office and breaking up some furniture in his room. His roommate, a very sturdy Marine Corps major, had finally been forced to restrain him, holding him in a bear hug until he relented and calmed down. That evening the Deputy Chief of Mission from Belgrade came down, and the next morning the two left Kosovo together. The DCM said that, on the way back, as soon as they had left Kosovo and crossed into Serbia proper, Doug seemed to come to—like a flower opening, he said.
Doug’s collapse should have been a klaxon, warning us of what was to come. But, if it was, we failed to heed it. Either we didn’t understand what we needed to learn from it, or we refused to accept that it could happen to any of us. We would endure other, less spectacular crashes on our team. Some came during our tours, and a few hit long afterwards. Some of us would learn the hard way that working around ethnic cleansing and war crimes leaves an indelible mark on the psyche and, possibly, the soul.