YELLOW. THEIR SKIN WAS YELLOW. They had dirt under their fingernails and their feet were dirty. There were six of them, all women, under the tarpaulin. Some of them had lived long enough to have their wounds bandaged before they died. Some of them were killed more or less instantly as shrapnel or 7.62mm rounds had entered their bodies. They had been dead for about 24 hours. We knew this because we had come to witness their funeral—to witness and to stand a type of guard. If we were present, the Serb snipers would not shoot at the family members as they buried their dead.
It was the first time I had ever seen war dead. I remember being surprised that their skin was yellow. My experiences with death before that day had been to a few funerals: a friend’s older brother, my grandmother. None of them had been yellow. So I was surprised at the color. This was the first time I had ever seen what dead people looked like if no embalming was done. What they looked like without make-up and a nice suit of clothes. They were just dead.
Lying in a tangle of limbs under a blue UN tarp on a trailer that only a week before had carried peppers and corn to the market in Malisevo. Only parts of their bodies were visible. I couldn’t see all of their faces. One had an arm resting across her forehead. One had a bandage covering most of her head.
One of the dead was missing, an eighteen- month-old child. We had seen some dogs on the way up the trail. Morgan Morris, the dauntless UN refugee agency field officer who had led us to the scene, said what all of us were thinking, “The dogs probably got the body.” She was right, of course, but none of us wanted to be the one to say it. We had just seen the mother, resting in a house in the village a couple kilometers away. She had a bullet in her upper arm. The bullet had passed through her baby, then through her breast before lodging in her arm. The father said the baby was killed instantly. “The bullet tore the child in half,” he said. He had dragged the mother away to safety. A doctor from the Red Cross was treating her wounds in a small house in the village. There were ten women and a seventy-two year-old man in one stifling, airless room of the house. All of them had been wounded in the attack. They sat silently on the floor, their backs against the walls of the room, lost in their pain and their thoughts, waiting.
Standing in that house on the day after the attack, with the smell of sweat and blood and wounds mingling with the smell of fear in the air, I was overwhelmed with the sense that I was in the middle of something I didn’t, and maybe couldn’t, understand, and that people’s lives depended on my doing the right thing. The old man’s eyes were filled with something between hate and incomprehension: hatred for the Serbs and incomprehension that an American and a Brit—representatives of the United States and the United Nations—were standing in his living room doing nothing about the Serbian infantry a couple of kilometers away who had just killed six women and an infant, and wounded all these others.
Senik was a village of roughly five hundred people, consisting of no more than a couple of dozen houses at a three-way intersection on a dirt road. Hardly enough to warrant a spot on the map; it was too small to have a school. There was an elementary school at the base of the hill a couple of kilometers away. Even in the winter the kids could walk that far. There was only one small store. Everyone went into Malisevo to do their shopping. The trouble with Senik, in the eyes of the Serbian military police who attacked it was that it was on the edge of Berisha Mountain and near Lladrovac, a Kosovo Liberation Army stronghold and headquarters. It was becoming Serbian policy to attack villages that supported the KLA. We never really knew if the villagers supported the KLA before this attack, but afterwards they certainly did—after they had buried six of their women and watched as doctors treated eleven more.
Morgan and I stood at the edge of a trail a couple of kilometers up the road from the house where the doctors were tending the wounded. Some men and women from the village walked slowly behind a tractor pulling the bodies on a trailer into the valley. She had told me the story the night before over a beer in my office in Kosovo Polje. She led us—me, another American and our translator, and several members of the European Union’s mission—to the scene. She, and several men from the village, walked us around the area explaining what had happened the previous afternoon, and in the days leading up to what was to be the first event our team would document in which Serbian special police had attacked civilians. As we moved from yard to yard, they would point out a grenade or mortar fragment in a wall, some dried blood on the ground of a garden still full of tomatoes and peppers. They spoke calmly as if they were merchants showing us used furniture on sale in a warehouse.
The basics of the story went like this. Three days before, ethnic Albanians living in the village of Senik had seen a Serbian T-55 tank roll up the road towards their village from the direction of Malisevo. Many chose not to wait to see what the Serbs had in mind. They packed what they could onto tractors and headed for the higher ground to the northeast. But, the tank did not enter the village. It was simply a demonstration by the Army of what was to come.
The following morning, six mortar rounds hit in the village. We thought the rounds had come from the high ground to the northwest, beyond the draw of a small canyon where those who had departed were hiding. But that was probably too far.
The base of the canyon was surrounded by cliffs three or four hundred feet tall on three sides and led to a narrow gorge that continued to climb to the east. The villagers had spread out in the flat, rocky area at the bottom of the draw on both sides of an intermittent stream. They had parked their tractors and Zastavas helter-skelter around the canyon center. Some had erected small windscreens and shelters from plastic sheeting, and covered them with branches. Many had erected shelters on the trailers they pulled behind their tractors. These looked for all the world like the Conestoga wagons of the American West as they moved along Kosovo’s roads that summer.
One woman had been injured in the first shelling, hit by some 60mm mortar fragments as she was tending to the tomatoes in her garden. We discovered some fragments in the wall of her house, and found her resting inside with the others, waiting for the Red Cross doctors to treat her wounds. The rest of the village, except for those too old to move, had left that afternoon.
The next day, mortar shells rained down on the families in the draw and the trees nearby. Minutes later a platoon of special police, who had been trained as infantry, moved through the canyon, firing automatic weapons. We found dozens of shell casings littering the ground. This was when the six women and the baby had been killed, and most of those in the house down below had been wounded. Unarmed women and children were shelled and shot, and seven civilians murdered by the police, the protectors of the State. I had to keep reminding myself that this was Europe at the end of the 20th century.
The villagers wanted to bury the dead in plain sight of the ridgeline where we could still see Serbian snipers. The land, they said, had been taken from them in the 1940s, and they had reclaimed it in the 1970s. It belonged to these people, and they were going to be sure that the Serbs understood that. The women they were burying were born in this valley and had spent their lives raising crops in its fields and giving birth to their children in the small houses that made up the hardscrabble town.
We had parked our vehicles in plain view as a deterrent to further shooting. Certainly, the Serbs wouldn’t shoot at EU and U.S. observers or the white and blue UNHCR vehicle. Nonetheless, I admit I was shaky standing about at the base of the draw.
The ground was hard and it took some time to bury the dead. The men worked with shovels and picks for about an hour to dig graves for the women. Afterwards, we stopped on the way out of the draw and used our satellite telephone to call Washington and tell the State Department’s Operations Center what we had seen. It seemed very far away from that hillside. The officer on the line was a colleague, a classmate and a friend. Had it been someone else, I might have been more animated in my description of the scene. But he understood what was happening without my resorting to histrionics.
“Eleven wounded: ten women and one seventy-two year-old man. Seven dead: six women and one child.”
“Yes, I counted them myself.”
“Yes, we’re sure they were dead. I verified it personally.” I left out the part about the dogs.
We made one more stop on the way off the hill. An old man flagged us down as we were leaving the draw for the village, and told our interpreter he wanted to show us something the Serbs had done. I glanced through the window of the house and saw a group of women sitting on the floor and rocking slowly, comforting each other. They surrounded the body of another woman. She was laid out on her back and wrapped in a blanket. Part of her face and head were missing, what remained was veiled in a colorful scarf. The man said a mortar round had exploded within a meter of her head. He held his hands out in front of his body to demonstrate the distance. The sitting women wailed in unison as he said this. He was the dead woman’s father. Amid the crying and the smell and the flies, we listened to his story.
Having felt safe enough in her house to remain there with her husband and children rather than moving up with the others, she had decided to take some food up to her neighbors hiding in the small canyon. She was at the base of the draw when the attack started. The mortar shells probably came in groups of three. Poonk, poonk, poonk as they left the tubes, then the breathless, agonizing five or six second wait while they flew, and finally the brittle kahrump, kahrump, kahrump, barking and echoing off the walls of the canyon as they exploded. The gunners probably set the fuses to go off about one and one half or two meters above the ground—about head high.
It was an awful story. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, away from the smell and the crying and the death. I felt outraged and horrified that soldiers would fire mortars at women and children. I had to look away. I concentrated on the colors in the woman’s headscarf rather than her wounds. I watched the other women slowly rocking. I looked at the woman’s father. My partner Rob photographed her body, and I took notes about what her father said. Then we left. Eight dead.
Down the hill, at the intersection marking Senik proper, a crowd of women and a few men had gathered. Some boys were sitting by the edge of the road with a wooden box filled with cigarettes, crackers and Chiclets—entrepreneurs. They sat expressionless as a small crowd swarmed our vehicle. I pushed open the door and stood pinned against the truck by the crowd as my translator echoed staccato pleas for help. One woman pushed through the crowd and held her baby at arms length in front of me. I was face to face with the child while the mother spoke deliberately but calmly.
“She wants you to take her son out of here so the Serbs won’t kill him,” Mimoza said.
I looked at the woman and said to Mimi, “Make sure she knows we can’t do that. Say this, ‘We are observers. We can’t relocate you or your son. If we do, the Government in Belgrade will order all of us out of the country.’”
I felt feckless and impotent as the words spilled out. For the first time, I understood the folly of being in the war only to observe—a tourist among the victims. It was hot and, with the sun beating down on me, I felt cowardly, yellow, hiding behind my sunglasses. I waved my notebook at the Red Cross panel truck and said that was the vehicle that would take them to safety. I thought the Red Cross would probably refuse, but I was unable to muster the courage to tell the woman and the fifty other people crowded around me that there was little hope she would get out that day with an International. I found out later that I had been wrong. Several UNHCR officers arrived late in the day, and one of them took it upon herself to evacuate some of the children to a safer village.
Before we left, I went back into the house where the wounded were being treated. I had to tell the mother of the missing child that we didn’t find her baby. It would have served no purpose to tell her what we thought had happened. I couldn’t have found those words anyway.
That evening after we had returned to our office, after we washed our truck, I drafted my report. It was only about three pages long: no speculation, just the things we understood to have happened based on what we saw and what was reported to us. I said it appeared that a Serbian infantry unit had swept through the valley from north to south, preceded by a barrage of mortar fire. During the barrage and subsequent infantry sweep seven women and one infant had been killed, and eleven others wounded including a 72-year-old man. Vehicles and clothes, food and other supplies were burned in the sweep. I said we had seen no evidence of weapons or of any insurgent activity in the village or among the villagers.
I didn’t mention the funeral or the dogs. I didn’t mention the woman begging me to take some action to save her children. I didn’t mention the look on the old man’s face. I carefully caveated what was told to us versus what we saw ourselves with qualifiers like reportedly and allegedly. I carefully made the people and the events in the village the center of the report rather than my actions or my feelings—never star in your own report. I let my teammates read the report to ensure we all agreed with it, and then I turned it in to the reports officer, our editor. I had written a crisp, dry account of a messy, horrible act of cruelty. In doing so, I had documented a war crime.