WE HEARD ABOUT A LARGE group of IDPs near the town of Istinic, in the far west of the province. I went to the town, but was intercepted along the way by Kurt Schork, who was covering the insurgency for Reuters. Clearly infuriated, he was leaning out of his armored vehicle and frantically waving to stop me. As I pulled alongside his land rover, he yelled, “Where’s the international community now?!? There are twenty thousand people being herded like cattle down there and what are you doing about it? Where’s the sense of outrage!?!”
Kurt was one of my closest contacts at that point. He was a mature, professional journalist who had covered Bosnia and Chechnya, and was now spending his time covering the most difficult and dangerous flashpoints in Kosovo. Our paths crossed regularly, and often when I arrived to cover an event, Kurt was there to fill me in on what had happened. He was usually unflappable, and the fact that he was yelling at me rather than talking to me was disturbing. I assumed the worst lay ahead, waved, and noted that I was on my way.
I worked my way to the town through a series of west Kosovo farm roads. Peja (the Serbians called it Pec), the largest town in western Kosovo sits at the base of the Prokletije Mountains and the Prester Plateau that separate Kosovo from Montenegro. The mountains rise unannounced and nearly vertically from the fields of vegetables and villages scattered across the lowlands at their feet. Although the Patriarchate of the Serbian Orthodox church had been re-established here in 1557—only a few kilometers away, in Glodjane, stood the largest Catholic cathedral in the province—by this time the majority of the population were Albanian Muslims.
I knew there were several roads leading to Istinic but, as we got close, we found that a Serbian police vehicle blocked each of them. We got to the last turn into the town and argued our way past the Serbian police manning the checkpoint. We crept along in our vehicle, passing police buses and dozens of trucks and armored vehicles parked helter-skelter along the roadside. At the town center hundreds of Albanians were sitting on curbs or standing around in knots. We parked and began our work. Within minutes we began to understand the scope of what we were seeing.
The town center was little more than a cobblestone square with a small fountain at its center, surrounded by a dozen small buildings. Beyond the square, there were only a handful of buildings. Probably no more than 150 or 200 people called Istinic home. Just beyond the edge of the square, pastures and orchards began. A couple hundred meters east of the square was an intersection of farm roads. We later estimated 30,000 Albanians were crowded into five pastures at that intersection.
A handful of police officers stood between the square and the pastures. They wanted little to do with us, but brusquely told me that the Albanians were being taken to their homes, or if they had no homes, they would be taken to collective centers in Djakovica (Gjakova to the Albanians) or Pec. When I asked if the Albanians were being moved against their will, the Major said that the people were being moved for their safety, and then he turned away to let me know he was through answering my questions.
Dozens of men and women stood in the square. Most looked terrified whenever we approached them. I decided to ask a few of them if they wanted to leave Istinic. Several quietly said, “Don’t talk to me,” but some were more forthcoming. One young man said that he was from Glodjane, the Catholic village. He said the police had come to Glodjane three days before and accused the villagers of supporting the KLA. A police officer had ordered his family out of their home and told them to move towards Istinic. They had been living in the pastures under plastic sheeting for three nights. He did not want to go to Peja or to Gjakova, he said, but would go home if the road was safe. The woman next to him said she didn’t want to go anywhere if the Serbs could come after them again. After those two spoke out, others came and told their remarkably similar stories. Some families were from Lodi, some from Glodjane, some from areas that had only names like “the area by the hill.” They were all displaced now.
We walked out of the village center towards the pastures. Most of the major humanitarian agencies were already on the scene. I saw a Medecins Sans Frontieres truck parked just outside a large house in a small pasture at the eastern edge of town. Dozens of women with babies in their arms crowded against the front door. One local Albanian MSF employee was holding back the deluge of need as two staffers conducted triage in the foyer of the house. We decided not to press our way in. Doctors rarely need to talk to diplomats when they’ve got sixty or so patients in the waiting room. As we were turning to leave, we heard someone inside yell down the stairs, “It’s a girl!”
We got into our vehicle and made our way down the road towards the largest of the five pastures. At the edge of the field a UN press officer from Australia was sitting atop her land rover with a video camera filming the events. A handful of new officers had arrived to join our team and this was their first mission introduction to Kosovo: 20,000 civilians being herded like cattle. I asked the two new guys—Nick, a Marine artilleryman, and Len, an Army Special Forces officer, both majors—to stay with the truck while I waded into the crowd with a translator.
Inside the pasture hundreds of families had spread out their lives on blankets or carpets under plastic sheeting. The Serbs had ordered everyone out of the pasture, so most people had packed what they had onto trailers and were simply waiting for instructions to move, or for an unlikely intervention by the international community. As we walked through, simply taking account of what we were witnessing, people implored us to do whatever we could.
An enervating wailing seemed to grow from near the eastern edge of the pasture, drawing us to where just a few meters away we saw a group of women holding each other and sobbing hysterically while a handful of men were comforting one old man who was near collapse. Several women were on the back of a farm trailer under a makeshift shelter built of plastic sheeting and tree branches. The women in the trailer were covering a body, what we found out was the body of their grandmother, the matriarch of the family. She had died just moments before at about the same time the mother was giving birth to the baby girl in the makeshift clinic.
As I looked around the group of women, it was painfully evident to me that they were simple farm women dressed in typical Albanian farmer clothes: baggy pants and sweaters, with black plastic slip-on shoes, their heads covered with scarves. The older man, who I assumed to be the husband and patriarch, stood silently holding in his arms a younger man, who I took to be his son, who sobbed unashamed. A few other men stood uncomfortably about the group in their farm clothes, their hands hardened by their work and their eyes misty.
I felt my jaw tighten against the sadness as we walked close to the group. One of the men looked at me as if he wanted to grab me by the collar and shake me for not stopping this from happening. I must have looked hollow and grey because in a second his glance seemed to go right through me. We passed quietly.
Inside the largest of the pastures, I met some workers from Mercy Corps International. One was snapping photos and trying to document what was happening. He introduced me to Rruk Berisha, the LDK’s representative in the area who lived in Glodjane. Berisha calmly detailed the story of how the IDPs had come to Istinic in fear of attacks on their home villages. The police were now driving them out of the area because, he said, they were becoming an embarrassment to the Serbian government. The crowd around us agreed.
I wandered around a bit more and found the World Food Program team leader, a mountain of a man, easily 6’5” and about 250 pounds. He was a former Royal Marine commando and as intimidating a physical presence as one could imagine. He was clearly outraged at what was happening, and was moved almost to tears of fury at the situation surrounding us.
As I walked through the pastures, I watched the police order the Albanian families onto the road and towards the collection point at the fountain. The police were using their rifles to prod the slow movers and just behind them two wheeled armored vehicles called BOV-Ms were moving slowly around the field with steel grates folded across their fronts, crushing the remaining small shelters, and herding the very last stragglers towards the gates. Atop each of the vehicles, a soldier sat poised behind a machine gun. There was nothing we could do, save document the forced eviction of thousands of people and send the reports back to Washington. Maybe, I thought, the NGOs and the UN might actually be helpful.