A FEW DAYS AFTER THE October cease-fire had been declared, we began the process of verifying the withdrawal of Serbian Army units from Kosovo. Most of the fighting had stopped and only sporadic skirmishes continued. Outside the town of Malisevo, the Ministry of Interior police had occupied a gas station at an intersection leading south to the Pagarusha valley. The intersection was at a town called Dragobilje, which was completely empty save for a few KLA guys who watched the Serbs watch the town. The roughly five thousand regular inhabitants were now mostly living under plastic sheeting a few kilometers south in the Pagarusha Valley. I was talking with some IDPs there when my boss called me and told me to meet him in Dragobilje.
Dragobilje was an unlikely flashpoint in the high stakes game of Balkans politics. But as these things go, it was also somewhat typical of small wars. The phrase “isolated incidents of violence” is a favorite among government spokesmen trying to downplay the importance of burning villages and rampaging thugs. My counter to that, as someone more often than not living in these flashpoints was, “it’s only isolated when it’s not your village.” Someone told me that on CNN Richard Holbrooke had called Dragobilje, “the most dangerous place in Europe.” I never heard the quote, but even if it were true, I suspect he was thinking geo-politically and strategically, rather than tactically. But nonetheless, it was a dangerous place.
Our deputy was sitting in his truck talking on the radio when I arrived. Two KLA political committee leaders, Sokol Bashota and Fatmir Limaj (aka Chelik), and a handful of KLA fighters were also standing around in the courtyard of a lovely yellow brick house. “We’re going to set up an office here to help keep these guys from shooting each other,” Dean said. He, Chelik, Sokol, our translator, Sahit and I went into the house.
I had assumed I would be living in a burned out hulk of a house, sleeping on a cot at best with no heat—dramatic visions of Stalingrad or Sarajevo danced in my head. But the house, other than a broken lock on the door, was terrific. A wide tile-floored hallway led to the rear of the house. The kitchen and living room opened off to the left; there was a bath at the end of the hall; four bedrooms upstairs, one with a nice balcony looking off to the south. We stepped into the kitchen. There was a woodstove in the corner. A sink and stove took up the wall on the left. A small wooden table and three chairs sat under the window. A few glasses and plates were in the sink, clean. More plates and some pots and pans sat on a shelf above between the sink and stove. I quickly took note that the stove was gas and that there were two propane bottles. Well, we shouldn’t starve, I thought.
Dean pulled a bottle of whisky out of his bag and poured a finger for each of us while we talked about the relative locations of the MUP and KLA units in and around the town. Sokol said the KLA had no intention of giving up the town, but neither would they attack the Serbs at the intersection. Dean finished off his whisky and headed for the door, leaving the bottle on the table. As he walked to his truck he spoke softly to me, “Set up a satphone and stay on the net as best you can. We’ll try to get some electricity out here for you in the next few days.” He paused as he got into the truck, “Don’t get shot.” I came to realize that when he had said “we” earlier, he was using the word in a corporate sense rather than the personal. I wasn’t immediately sure how I felt about this. Dean was a Marine lieutenant colonel, a Force Recon special operator with lots of experience I would have welcomed. But he wasn’t staying. I was leading a start-up, KDOM’s first franchise.
After Dean left, my translator and I looked at each other and—seeing the sun starting to set—asked the KLA commander if we could get some firewood. The commander agreed, and within half an hour a tractor had delivered a pile of firewood to the drive and a couple of young KLA fighters were busily splitting the wood.
We left the compound and drove up the hill towards the gas station. As we pulled in, a couple of the Serbian Ministry of Interior troops came out to see who had arrived. We talked to the lieutenant and told him that we were living in a house in Dragobilje and would appreciate it if he wouldn’t shoot at us (I was simply following the boss’s instructions, as always). We pointed out to the lieutenant where our house was located. I got down behind one of his machine guns, noting that my house was clearly in the range of the weapons, and then asked if he would consider humoring me by moving the aiming stakes so that it would be taken out of their range fan. He and his sergeants laughed when my translator asked this. He suggested that I make sure that no KLA fighters (terrorists he called them) were walking around in my yard. We joined the MUP squad for coffee and slivovitz, and then trundled back down the hill to consider our situation.
Just to recap, I was now living in a house with no electricity or running water in late October in the Balkans. The Serbs had the high ground about 300 meters to the northwest, my house was clearly in their range fans, and they were drinking. For the first time the U.S. had opened an outpost between the warring factions. KLA fighters were all around me and they clearly considered my presence to be in their favor.
When we got back to the house we moved some firewood into the kitchen and started a fire. We found some oil lamps and lit them. I set up the satphone and made a quick call to the office to establish communications. We had a bit of a scare when I opened the kitchen window to see if the antenna would connect and an old man surprised us as he passed by the window walking around in the yard collecting kindling. Sahit brought in the sleeping bags and a box of MREs. The night passed with only occasional shooting, although at one point a few consecutive bursts of automatic weapons fire broke out. My American colleague—an Air Force tech sergeant—jabbed me hard in the ribs through my sleeping bag and sat upright, asking in a stage whisper, “Did you hear that?”
We called in to Pristina the next morning and told them about the small amount of firing in the area. They seemed unconcerned since there was regularly much more firing in the vicinity of the Hotel Herzegovina each night.
Over the next few days our schedule settled into a series of visits built around two objectives: convince the Serbs to leave, and build confidence in the local Kosovar Albanian population. We worked on the first by visiting the Serbs a couple times a day. We got to know the officer and a couple of the sergeants well enough that we were regularly invited for coffee or slivo.
We worked on the second issue by driving around the villages in the area, stopping to shop for food and sundries to make our life easier, and talking to people. We figured out which shops in the villages ringing the Pagarusha valley were still operating and who sold what. There was a great place for meat and another that could reliably be counted on for cases of beer. One shop in the valley proper had begun selling little sausage sandwiches.
Our little outpost was the first visible symbol of the implementation of Holbrooke’s plan. So, we were regularly visited by reporters wanting quotes and video. I had a pocketful of approved quotes—talking points—that kept them sated temporarily. One evening Nic Robertson from CNN came by and asked if he could shoot a few minutes’ interview with me. I asked my boss and we got permission from the Embassy in Belgrade.
Sitting and talking over a coffee or a beer with a reporter is one thing, but an on-camera interview is quite another. I was awful. I stuck to my talking points and got the information out, but I was shaking and felt like I was stammering the whole time. Nonetheless, CNN International ran clips from the piece every ten minutes and the whole piece at least hourly during the day. That evening I got a call from the press attaché at the Embassy who said I wasn’t to do any more TV interviews. I assumed it was because I had screwed up, but he said I had done fine. In fact, everyone at the Embassy and in Washington was pleased that a Foreign Service officer was leading the news. He told me that Holbrooke had called and told him, “I don’t know who Ron Capps is, but I don’t want to see him on TV anymore.” Years later, I had the chance to ask Ambassador Holbrooke about this, and he said he didn’t remember it. Regardless, my days on CNN and in the newspapers, were over.
In Dragobilje, the KLA kept a few fighters in one house that was screened from the MUP at the gas station by other houses on a small hill. We would stop in to visit them every afternoon just to check in or to get a message to their leadership. The floor was covered with cheap carpet and blankets the fighters slept under. The place smelled of sweat, stale smoke, and dirty clothes. It was, in fact, more or less like any other combat outpost in any other war. We called it the Fraternity House.
On the fourth day of our routine, we dropped in on the Serbs and found a replacement team in place, but packing to leave. They were simply moving out of the gas station up to their larger headquarters two kilometers away in Malisevo, but they were leaving Dragobilje. At first, the lieutenant wasn’t keen on talking to us, but after a few minutes, he loosened up a bit and began to talk to me. I pointed out that I hadn’t known he had kept so many armored vehicles in the village—there were five armored vehicles along the road and two more moving nearby—he smiled as if to say, “That’s not all you don’t know.” He told me they were simply moving up to Malisevo and might move back to the gas station in the next week or so. But it was clear they were leaving for good and were unhappy about it.
I asked the lieutenant whether there were any mines or other booby-traps in the building or surrounding area. This was a necessary precaution because, in the days immediately following the agreement and subsequent withdrawal, several people had been injured or killed by booby-traps and mines left by withdrawing Serbian forces. “We’re not that kind of police,” he said curtly. I could smell the liquor on his breath. It was about 8:30 in the morning.
By noon the MUP had left the town. We watched as they moved out of their positions. Within a few minutes of their departure, KLA fighters had moved into the area to check for stragglers or snipers. Within a few hours, a few young men from the town were back to check their houses. It seemed a victory when I called it in to the office.
But, that afternoon mines killed two KLA fighters. These had been placed in the field directly behind the gas station. The men were apparently walking across it, when they hit a daisy-chained series of mines, killing one fighter outright and leaving the other barely able to drag himself out of the field. He died in the street scarcely fifty meters away. His blood was still there when we drove back into town after our daily trip around the valley.
Someone had dropped some flowers on the spot where he had died. A young KLA fighter with a Kalashnikov stood more or less at attention a few feet away from the bloodstain. The Serb lieutenant’s words echoed in my head as we passed two weeping girls who, having just returned to their village that afternoon, would be burying two of their neighbors the next morning. I would drive slowly around that spot for weeks afterwards.
That evening one of the KLA commanders confirmed to me that his unit had found several other booby traps in the area. One was a hand grenade fixed to the branch of a pear tree, set to go off if someone pulled a piece of fruit off the branch. Others were found in a large house overlooking the town just across the street from the gas station. Some were set into bunkers the Serbs had abandoned. Most of the booby traps were set in places where kids would instinctively go to play or explore. But none of them were positioned more than two hundred meters from the security of the gas station.
Over the next few days, many of the villagers returned to Dragobilje. Within a couple of weeks, I hoped, we would have families living in all the houses. However, this meant that now we had to find humanitarian assistance for them. Morgan from the UNHCR was my first target.
I called her and explained where I was living, what was going on, and how much assistance we needed. That afternoon, she dropped in for a visit. The next morning, Oxfam UK delivered small shelter kits consisting of plastic to cover windows, and a hammer and some nails to the local Mother Teresa Society representative. That was a start. The MTS house was just across from the Fraternity House, but I was surprised to see that none of the windows in the Frat house was covered by Oxfam plastic. Throughout my time in Kosovo, I don’t believe I ever saw donated food or supplies for sale in the markets.
As we continued what we had dubbed our “hearts and minds campaign,” we began to get to know a few of the villagers in each of the small communities. One of the objectives I had set was for us to be seen in every village in the valley at least every other day. We organized a schedule, and set up a simple rotation, sending us down the east side one day and up the west the next. Every couple of days we had to run into Pristina or Suva Reka for supplies and showers, and—truth be told—to give the rotating translators and observers a break from my cooking. After a few days, we fell into a regular pattern. On the road out of town to the south, towards the Pagarusha valley, a small store stood flush with the edge of the road, located far enough towards the edge of town that it had not been visible to the Serbs in the gas station. It remained sporadically open, and we would stop in for a talk once in a while—checking the pulse of the locals.
We stopped in for a chat late in our first week in the house. A couple of concrete steps led us up to a porch where a paltry few items were defiantly displayed. A tire, a sack of flour, and a case of beer sat, friendless, by the door. Inside, a counter with shelves behind it stood along the right wall and curved around the long back wall. A snooker table stood in the back of the room, covered by racks of beers. Batteries, cookies, soap, and canned milk collected dust on the shelves. With the entire town living under plastic sheeting in the valley to the south, business was slow.
There were usually a few men sitting around the store. They welcomed us in and offered us a beer. I sat on a crate and started asking them political questions. We talked about Rugova and the LDK. One of the men said it was time for the Albanians to stop listening to only Rugova and to look at what the KLA had done. Another piped in sarcastically, “Yes, they got our families to move to Pagarusha while our houses sit empty in Dragobilje.” I didn’t know if I was supposed to laugh, but after a moment we all did anyway. One of the men wanted to know what we were going to be able to do, whether we could order the Serbs out of Dragobilje, and if we were armed. I always hated this question; being unarmed in Kosovo was like being naked. It was a culture of armed men where weapons were considered appropriate communion gifts. Nonetheless, we were always unarmed. But sitting there on that fall afternoon seemed as comfortable as if I were hanging out at my local with some friends. It was just some guys sitting around having a beer and talking politics.