In Serbia’s Bloody Province, Times That Try Men’s Souls

TOPILA, Yugoslavia — At nightfall, or when the Serbs’ heavy guns open up from the valleys below, about 60 survivors of the Racak massacre move to the safest refuge they have left: a mountain cave.

One of them is Ismet Emini, an oil refinery worker in Switzerland with British Petroleum, who had the unfortunate fate of being on holiday in the Kosovo village when about 45 residents were shot dead Friday.

His younger brother, 40-year-old Ajet Brahimi, was killed that day by three Serbian police bullets to the head fired from several yards away, Emini said Wednesday. Then the older man pulled a piece of human skull from his jacket pocket.

There was a trickle of dried blood on it. In his other hand, Emini held a black wool cap with a short row of three small holes across the front, where he said the bullets that killed his brother pierced and shattered his skull.

The grisly mementos were evidence of the all but unimaginable to Emini, but he wanted to leave no doubt that he was telling the truth as he stood at the mouth of the mountain cave.

Emini and at least 100 other refugees living in scattered groups on the mountaintop said they hadn’t eaten more than a little cheese and bread since Saturday, when they fled Racak.

So news that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was stepping up preparations for possible airstrikes against Serbian targets didn’t mean much to them.

“It’s only empty words,” Emini said through an interpreter. “This kind of blah-blah-blah has been going on for years, and here are the victims of it, living in a cave.”

U.S. diplomat William Walker, who heads a team of more than 700 international observers in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, is supposed to leave the country by tonight for accusing Serbian security forces of a crime against humanity after he viewed victims of Friday’s killings in Racak.

Authorities in Yugoslavia, where Serbia is the dominant republic, continue to insist that police were only fighting separatist guerrillas, terrorists in Serbian eyes, after a police officer was killed.

The government is carrying out its own examination of the allegations and refuses to grant a visa to Canadian Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Walker returned from Belgrade, capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia, to Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, on Wednesday, and he made sure he didn’t look like a man ready to pack his bags. Instead, he went straight back to work amid suggestions that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic might bend under heavy international pressure and let Walker stay.

A multinational naval force, including the American aircraft carrier Enterprise, is moving closer to the Yugoslav coast, and NATO cut the readiness time for an attack from 96 hours to 48.

But the alliance still appears far from a decision to launch airstrikes. People like Emini wonder what happened to NATO’s threats in October, when the world feared that thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees would freeze to death in mountain refugee camps.

The cave is a two-hour hike from Racak. Wednesday on the mountain track, which alternated between stretches of thick ice and thick mud, the thud of a single exploding shell sounded in the distance, somewhere on the other side of the mountaintop.

Refugees said it was fired from one of the Serbian forces’ heavy guns along the main road to Prizren, Kosovo’s second-largest city, and they claimed that at least 30 had exploded much closer to their camp Tuesday.

When the refugees fled Racak on Saturday, they had to climb along the steep track slowly so that the children and old people among them could keep up.

Hava Rama is 85, partially paralyzed and unable to walk. People had to take turns carrying her up the mountainside. She spent Wednesday lying on damp leaves, under a small tree.

In the group of 20 refugees from Racak who sat next to her, all but two were women and children, and several of them were crying.

A little farther down the mountainside, a smaller group of men lay in the sun in a small meadow, next to a natural wall of large rocks. It was the safest place they could find to get warm.

None of the men had any weapons, and most were middle-aged or elderly. Emini was with them, and he is 45, with a large paunch. He was wearing a New York Giants cap.

He also has a bad back, the result of an injury on the job in Zurich, he said. As he walked, Emini leaned on a long, makeshift crutch cut from a tree limb. “Look at this stick,” he said sarcastically. “Am I a terrorist with this?”

He led the way down a path to the cave, where the gray ashes and charred logs of a dead fire lay by the entrance. Another fire had burned itself out just a few yards farther back in the cave, which split into at least two large chambers.

Emini sat on a rock ledge with two other men from Racak and a teenage boy, and they gave their version of what happened in the village Friday.

Like many other survivors, Emini said police shells began exploding around Racak just before 7 in the morning.

Uniformed officers reached his brother’s house about 45 minutes later as they rounded up villagers and separated the men from the women and children, he said.

His brother was shot as the police approached his house when he tried to make a run for it through a rear gate, Emini said.

“They shot him from the left side, and he shouted, ‘Oh, they’ve killed me’ while he fell to the ground,” Emini said. “Then I saw his brains were blown out.”

Emini said he obeyed an order to stop and put his hands behind the back of his head and joined a group of village men.

And here his version of events differs significantly from those of other survivors, who say police ordered men to start running up a hill before opening fire on them from several directions.

Emini’s group broke and ran on its own because its members feared that their police guards would take them to the woods and shoot them there, he said.

Almost 28 years ago, Emini moved from Kosovo to Switzerland, a popular destination for migrant workers trying to escape the poverty of the mainly ethnic Albanian province.

His wife is still in Zurich, but they have no children. His brother left behind five children, and they are now Emini’s responsibility.

“I have only three years of schooling, so I don’t know anything about politics,” he said. “I never had any problem with the police. All I know is how to work.

“My body hurts now, but the hardest thing for me is that I am wounded in my soul.”

The piece of his brother’s skull and his torn woolen cap weren’t all that Emini had in his jacket pocket. There was a folded airline ticket too, and he pulled it out to show where he came from, and where he should have been, instead of a mountain cave in Kosovo.

The ticket showed that Emini arrived in Pristina on a flight from Zurich on Dec. 24. He had come to celebrate the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in Racak with his brother and sister-in-law and their kids.

It also listed his reservation for the return flight from Pristina to Zurich. The departure time was 1:44 in the afternoon of Jan. 20. That very day.

Emini looked at his watch, and the time was coming up to 2 o’clock.