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June 16, 1999
Web posted at: 5:55 a.m. EDT (0955 GMT)

DJAKOVICA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- "Five centuries and they burned it all in one night," says Fatime Boshnjaku, standing amid hundreds of fire-gutted homes and shops that were once the thriving, ancient heart of Djakovica.

The bustling stores of bakers, shoemakers and grocers were reduced to roofless, charred shells. A graceful minaret of the centuries-old mosque was decapitated by explosives. Now, roses bloom in deserted courtyards already bristling with weeds.

Serb police, she said, set fire to the first house of the old quarter the moment NATO began its airstrikes March 24, and as the inferno raged through the night they slit the throats of witnesses.

"They wanted to reduce Gjakova (pronounced JA-ko-vo) to ashes because they thought it was just an Albanian town," said Boshnjaku, an administrator for the Mother Teresa humanitarian organization who endured brutal beatings during months of imprisonment.

He referred to the town by its Albanian name.

Refugees from Djakovica (pronounced JA-ko-vit-za) who reached neighboring countries relayed some of the most searing stories of Serb atrocities to come out of Kosovo.

And now survivors who remained behind repeat them -- eighteen women, children and old people burned alive in a basement, mass graves in surrounding fields, almost nightly arson and executions by paramilitary gangs.

"There was no night that we didn't see flames," said Boshnjaku, who said she was imprisoned for helping residents flee the town.

Whether it was the high proportion of ethnic Albanian residents -- 99 percent to 1 percent Serb -- or the strong presence of the pro-independence Kosovo Liberation Army, Serb police and paramilitaries reserved a special fury for this western Kosovo town.

Navruz Manzhuka, a former television reporter, estimates that 70 percent of the town's residents fled into the hills or to Albania in the wake of the Serbs' ethnic cleansing. The fates of as many as 1,200 men who were taken away by the Serbs are still unknown, he said.

"They sought out intellectuals and those they thought were especially anti-Serb, but they killed others too," said Manzhuka, who evaded a Serb manhunt for 2 1/2 months. "There were no rules."

"He was executed right here," said Magbule Mejzini, pointing to the garden path where she saw her 68-year-old father shot in the head by three masked gunmen.

Serb paramilitaries, furious over a NATO bombing that killed Serb civilians, broke into her family compound April 3, looted the house and then demanding more money from her father, a retired bank clerk.

The 35-year-old English language teacher said she suspected local Serb civilians, possibly postal workers, accompanied the paramilitary gangs on their nightly rounds to help target wealthier residents.

Choking back tears, Mejzini and family members stood around a mound of raised earth in the backyard where they buried her father. A neighbor killed the same night lies next to him.

"We were afraid that if the Serbs took him away we might never know where his bones were lying," Mejzini said.

She said many of the executed were taken away by Gypsies working with the militiamen for burial in the town cemetery in an attempt to make the killings harder to trace.

Manzhuka said families of the victims would bribe the Gypsies with German marks, begging them to place at least a simple marker on the graves.

Fine, marble tombstones grace the town cemetery but two large plots, with several hundred recently dug graves, are dotted with crude wooden slabs. There is also a flattened area with no tomb markers under which Manzhuka says lie an unknown number of others who were executed.

Discarded in the grass are pairs of surgical gloves, some sheets and blankets -- the tools of the corpse carriers, he says.

Now, the defeated Serb military, police and militia gangs have withdrawn, and Italian peacekeepers are deployed in the shattered town, once prosperous from the textiles, tobacco and vineyards it produced.

Also gone are its Serb residents. They were so few in number that all fit along what was dubbed Serb Street. And there was general harmony between the two communities.

The town's ethnic Albanians saved their Serb neighbors from a possible massacre during World War II by acting as human shields before the advancing Germans.

But things changed radically when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic revoked Kosovo's autonomy in 1989 and enforced a policy of reducing the ethnic Albanians to -- at best -- second-class citizens.

"They were 99-to-1 in our town but they took over power, entirely. And even many of the Serb citizens changed," Manzhuka said.

Boshnjaku, the Mother Teresa worker, says there should be no revenge for what followed: the ethnic cleansing of Albanians, the night they annihilated the old town.

"But with what they have done," she said, "it will take centuries to forget."

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