See Guardian journalist Audrey Gillan’s account of her efforts to find Kosovo rape victims in Macedonia<\/p>\n
London Review of Books\r\nVolume 21, Number 11, Cover date 27 May 1999\r\nWhat's the story?\r\n<\/pre>\nAudrey Gillan tries to find the evidence for mass\r\n atrocities in Kosovo\r\n<\/pre>\nFerteze Nimari had lost two of her brothers and her\r\n husband was forced to bury all the dead in one grave.\r\n Later, packed into a stifling bus with sixty fellow\r\n Kosovars, the couple held onto each other as he clutched\r\n a strap suspended from the ceiling. The bus stopped in\r\n the Stankovac I refugee camp in Macedonia and they told\r\n their story. 'The tank came to our village of Sllovi. The\r\n Serb neighbours said not to worry - it was just there to\r\n observe us. But by lunchtime the next day a teenage girl\r\n lay dead in the street. Then another 15 people were\r\n killed. They told us to run into the woods and they\r\n started shooting us.'\r\n<\/pre>\nI asked them so many questions about what they had\r\n seen. 'What happened when your brothers were shot?'\r\n 'How many people did you bury?' 'How do you feel\r\n now?' When they said the Serbs had forced an old\r\n woman into a tent and burned her alive I looked at them\r\n doubtfully and asked how they knew she had been alive.\r\n Someone from her family had seen it happen, they said.\r\n<\/pre>\nThe Nimaris had arrived at what they thought was a safe\r\n haven, but I pursued them, and I did so unsparingly. I\r\n got on the bus when the driver opened the doors for air.\r\n<\/pre>\nThey had stood for hours on that malodorous bus. I felt sorry\r\n for them: but not so sorry that I stopped the questions.\r\n<\/pre>\nThey had yet to step down to the misery of the camp the\r\n British press has taken to calling 'Brazda'. All they had\r\n was a bottle of water passed to them through an open\r\n window - and my questions. Ferteze, eight months\r\n pregnant, caught me glancing at the watch on her wrist\r\n when Remzi, her husband, said all the women in the\r\n village had been robbed of their jewellery.\r\n<\/pre>\nEarlier that day, Ron Redmond, the baseball-capped\r\n spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner\r\n for Refugees, stood at the Blace border crossing from\r\n Kosovo into Macedonia and said there were new reports\r\n of mass rapes and killings from three villages in the\r\n Lipljan area: Sllovi, Hallac Evogel and Ribari Evogel.\r\n He spoke to the press of bodies being desecrated, eyes\r\n being shot out. The way he talked it sounded as if there\r\n had been at least a hundred murders and dozens of rapes.\r\n When I pressed him on the rapes, asking him to be more\r\n precise, he reduced it a bit and said he had heard that\r\n five or six teenage girls had been raped an murdered. He had\r\n not spoken to any witnesses. 'We have no way of\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nverifying these reports of rape,' he conceded. 'These are\r\namong the first that we have heard of at this border.'\r\n<\/pre>\nOther UNHCR officials later told stories of women\r\nbeing tied to the walls of their houses and burned, 24\r\nbodies buried in Kosovo Polje. Another report, again\r\nfrom Sllovi, put the dead at a hundred. Mr and Mrs\r\nNimari were adamant that it was 16. Truth can be scarce\r\nat the Blace border and in the camps dotted around\r\nMacedonia, but you are not allowed to say that during a\r\nwar like this, where it may be that bad things are being\r\ndone on both sides, just as you are not allowed to doubt\r\natrocity. It's as if Nato and its entourage were trying\r\nto make up for the witlessness of the past: trying to show\r\nthat whatever we do, we won't be turning a blind eye.\r\nBut the simple-minded reporter in me wants to ask a\r\nquestion: is there any real evidence for what is being\r\nsaid?\r\n<\/pre>\nIn Macedonia, listening to the stories and the UNHCR\r\naccounts, you would find it hard to tell what was hearsay\r\nand what was fact. When you looked at the people\r\nclinging onto the carrier bags that now held the remnants\r\nof their lives, it seemed evident that terrible things\r\nhad\r\nhappened to them, that people had been forced to flee\r\ntheir homes and drag themselves to a non-life in another\r\ncountry. Each person arriving at the camps had\r\nexperienced some kind of trauma, and most are still\r\nliving it. Many have seen death and other horrors. It is\r\njust that there is little to suggest that they have seen\r\nit in the ways, and on the scale, that people want to say \r\nthey have. Most of those who have seen killing have seen \r\none or two shot and the bodies of others. Eye-witnesses to\r\nmultiple atrocities are very rare and the simple - and\r\nnot at all simple - truth is that it can often be hard to\r\nestablish the veracity of the information. One afternoon,\r\nthe people in charge said there were refugees arriving\r\nwho talked of sixty or more being killed in one village,\r\nfifty in another, but I could not find one eye-witness\r\nwho actually saw these things happening.\r\n<\/pre>\nNow, they may have happened. But what we have is a\r\nsituation where Western journalists accept details\r\nwithout question. Almost every day, the world's media,\r\njostling for stories in Macedonia, strain to find figures\r\nthat may well not exist. In the absence of any testimony,\r\nmany just report what some agency or other has told\r\nthem. I stood by as a reporter from BBC World reeled\r\noff what Ron Redmond had said, using the words\r\n'hundreds', 'rape' and 'murder' in the same breath. By\r\nway of qualification (a fairly meaningless one in the\r\ncircumstances), he added that the stories had yet to be\r\nsubstantiated. Why, then, had he reported them so keenly\r\nin the first place?\r\n<\/pre>\nI found myself wanting to discover the evidence. I was\r\nalso impatient to find a 'good' story - i.e. a mass \r\natrocity. As each new bus trundled over the border, I <\/span>told\r\n<\/span>my interpreter to shout through the windows asking if \r\n<\/span>anyone was from the three villages Redmond had <\/span>mentioned. \r\nDid they know anyone, had they seen <\/span>anything? We went alongtwenty buses before we found <\/span>Mr and Mrs Nimari. A transit \r\ncamp had been set up in <\/span>the no man's land between the riverand the frontier road <\/span>at Blace. This was where the tens of thousands were <\/span>trapped in fetid misery before Macedonian\r\nofficials <\/span>dispersed them one night to the newly-built \r\ncamps. Now <\/span>the place is used to give a night's rest to someof the <\/span>great many who wait patiently at this border for \r\nentry to <\/span>a country that doesn't want them and to which they<\/span>really don't want to go. Every 20 minutes, the <\/span>Macedonian\r\npolice let around two hundred people <\/span>clamber down a dirt \r\npath to be processed before being <\/span>admitted into the camp. \r\nAs they stood in line, I asked <\/span>whether anyone was from \r\nthose villages and whether <\/span>they'd seen anything they wantedto talk about. No one <\/span>was and no one did. Or at least they didn't want to tell <\/span>us <\/span>about it.<\/span><\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nIt seemed that the Nimaris were the only people from\r\nSllovi. I was moved by their fear and passion to believe\r\neverything they said. Remzi told me he'd buried the dead\r\nin a grave in the woods at Lugi i Demes. It will take the\r\nverifiers from the International Criminal Tribunal for\r\nthe Former Yugoslavia in The Hague to put our agitated,\r\nagitating minds at rest.\r\n<\/pre>\nThe officers from ICTY, the verifiers from the\r\nOrganisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe\r\nand researchers from Human Rights Watch are\r\ncompiling reports of war crimes, which will be used at a\r\nlater date for any trial at The Hague. Speaking to these\r\npeople, I found them to be wary of using the hyperbole\r\nfavoured by reporters and by the UNHCR. They say they\r\nhave yet to see evidence of atrocities on the scale that\r\nthey witnessed while working in Bosnia. When I went to\r\nsee Benedicte Giaever, the co-ordinator for OSCE's\r\nfield office in Skopje, I saw that she was angered by the\r\nbehaviour of the media. I squirmed when she said she had\r\nheard of a female journalist getting onto a bus to\r\nquestion some refugees. She said almost every journalist\r\nwho came to see her asked one thing: could she give them\r\na rape victim to interview. She spoke of one woman\r\nbeing 'hunted down' by journalists and having to have\r\nher tent moved to shelter her from their intrusions: she\r\nhad had a breakdown.\r\n<\/pre>\nI wanted at the same time to test the validity of the\r\ntruths being offered us and to behave decently in the face of what could not be known for sure, and I knew it wasn't\r\npossible to do both. Yet I could see that much of this\r\nrough treatment of female refugees was a direct\r\nconsequence of Robin Cook telling the world that there\r\nwas evidence of rape camps inside Kosovo. 'Young\r\nwomen are being separated from the refugee columns,'he \r\nsaid, 'and forced to undergo systematic rape in an <\/span>army \r\ncamp. We have evidence from many refugees who <\/span>have managed to escape that others were taken to rape <\/span>camps.'<\/span><\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nI know of several tabloid reporters who were despatched\r\nto Macedonia and Albania with the sole purpose of\r\nfinding a rape victim. Talking to each other in the bar\r\nof Skopje's Hotel Continental we rehearsed the question\r\nwhich has now become notorious: 'Is there anyone here\r\nwho's been raped and speaks English?' We were aware\r\nof the implications of some of our more despicable\r\nbehaviour. We knew that one woman, raped by Serbian\r\nsoldiers then forced to leave her country, was\r\ntraumatised all over again by a journalist looking for a\r\ngood story.\r\n<\/pre>\nThe things you come to know as a journalist do not\r\nmarch in single file. Facts are often renegade. But among\r\nthe rape victims arriving in Macedonia nobody spoke of\r\nanything like the camps the British Foreign Secretary\r\nreferred to. Benedicte Giaever told me there had been\r\nrape, but not systematic and not on a grand scale. The\r\nsame was true of the killing. 'We don't have big\r\nnumbers,' she said. 'What we have are consistent small\r\nnumbers - two here, five there, ten here, seven there.'\r\n<\/pre>\nUnlike the media and the UNHCR, the OSCE works in a\r\nslow, methodical way, waiting a few days till the\r\nrefugees have settled in before they begin to ask\r\nquestions. 'These people have just arrived and I would\r\nsay they are still under a lot of stress and tension,'\r\nGiaever says. 'In that situation, 5 people can easily\r\nturn into 75. It's not that they want to lie but often they\r\nare confused. It's not to say it didn't happen. But a story\r\ncould have moved around from village to village and\r\neveryone from that village tells it as if it happened to\r\nthem.'\r\n<\/pre>\nAnother senior OSCE source spoke even more clearly\r\nthan any of us were inclined to do. He told me he\r\nsuspected that the Kosovo Liberation Army had been\r\npersuading people to talk in bigger numbers, to crank up\r\nthe horror so that Nato might be persuaded to send\r\nground troops in faster. Robin Cook's rape camp was the\r\nsame thing, he said: an attempt to get the British public\r\nbehind the bombing. And wasn't all this a lesson in how\r\npropaganda works in modern war?\r\n<\/pre>\nWhen I came back to London, I went to see the KLA's\r\nspokesman and recruiting officer in Golders Green. Dr\r\nPleurat Sejdiu, sitting beside the KLA flag and busts of\r\nthe Albanian national hero Skenderbeg, said there were\r\nindeed rape camps, and that the evidence of mass\r\natrocities was to be found among the refugees in\r\nAlbania, not in Macedonia. He is in daily contact with\r\nthe KLA frontline command by satellite phone and has\r\nbeen told of rape camps in Gjakova, Rahovec, Suhareka,\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nPrizren and Skenderaj. 'We know there are concentration\r\ncamps and women are kept and raped there,' he said. 'I\r\ndon't think we will get the evidence until we go in with\r\nthe ground troops. There are a lot of stories confirming\r\nit. There are mass executions and mass graves are\r\nappearing now. We have reports from our special units\r\nmoving around Kosovo. And the pertinent question is:\r\nwhere are the young men who have been taken from the\r\nrefugee columns? I think everything will be proved when\r\nNato troops go in.'\r\n<\/pre>\nIn Skopje I had been to see Ben Ward, a researcher for\r\nHuman Rights Watch, in the flat he is renting (he had\r\nfound the Hotel Continental too expensive and the\r\nbehaviour of the reporters too disconcerting): he pored\r\nover maps of Kosovo and pointed to villages where he\r\nknows incidents have taken place. His information comes\r\nfrom eye-witnesses and is corroborated by the testimony\r\nof others. He has noted a very definite scorched-earth\r\npolicy. But while his latest report details killings and\r\nthe mutilation of corpses in the villages of Bajnica and\r\nCakaj, he doesn't think there is evidence of mass\r\nexecutions. 'It is very rare for people not to know\r\nsomeone who knows about people being killed. But there\r\ndoesn't appear to be anything to support allegations of\r\nmass killings,' he said. 'It is generally paramilitaries\r\nwho are responsible. It doesn't seem organised. There \r\nappear to be individual acts of sadism rather than anything\r\nelse. There seems not to be any policy or instruction, but that isn't to say that people have not been given the\r\nlatitude tokill. However, I don't think at this stage we \r\nhave anything that adds up to the systematic killing of\r\ncivilians.' Ward believes that those who stayed longer in\r\nKosovo have been subjected to more violence, that many\r\nhave been terrorised because they have stayed so long.\r\nMany have fled terror but some of those Ward spoke to\r\nsaid they were fleeing the Nato bombs. 'The Serbs didn't\r\ntouch us until Nato attacked,' a Kosovar told him.\r\n<\/pre>\nOne morning I made a two-year-old girl hysterical. I\r\nhad asked her parents to show me the wound the child\r\nsuffered when the bullet that killed her grandmother\r\nentered her shoulder. I was getting desperate for some\r\nkind of truth to hold onto. They pulled up Marigona\r\nAzemi's dress and her pink T-shirt and pointed to a\r\nworn bandage. She squealed and said it was the 'licia'\r\nwho shot her, unable to get her small tongue round the\r\nAlbanian word milicia. Like the majority of those killed\r\nor wounded or abused by the Serbs, Marigona was\r\nattacked by paramilitaries, a vicious, marauding band.\r\nSeven people in her village of Lovc - including her\r\ngrandmother Nexhmije - were killed. Some villagers\r\nclaimed that a local teacher and his cousin were skinned\r\nalive before they were burned, others said they were\r\nburned alive. No one actually saw this but the rest of\r\nwhat they had to say tallied when they told their stories\r\nindependently. The Azemi family had been trying to escape \r\non its tractor when the paramilitaries opened <\/span>fire: what they did was sadistic and it was a horrendous <\/span>tale, but it \r\ncouldn't be turned into a story of mass <\/span>atrocity. Some \r\npeople tell me that evil is evil; that <\/span>there's no point in quantifying it. Does that mean I am to accept Robin Cook's unchecked facts because they align with my hunches?<\/span><\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nI feel bad for having made Marigona cry in order to\r\nprove to myself that there was truth in her story. (For\r\ndays, I went to her - pathetically - with dolls and hair\r\nbobbles and sweets and orange juice.) But that is not\r\nall I feel. Watching the television images and listening tothe newscasters thunder about further reports of Serb\r\nmassacres and of genocide, I feel uneasy about saying\r\nthat they have very little to go on. Yet almost every\r\nnewspaper journalist I spoke to privately in Macedonia\r\nfelt the same way. The story being seen at home is\r\ndifferent from the one that appeared to be happening on\r\nthe ground.\r\n<\/pre>\nMaybe the truth here is not one thing: but I don't want\r\nto be an accomplice to a lie. I don't want to bellow for my\r\nlife or for theirs, yet there's something not right in\r\nthis easy way with detail. It is a surreal place, \r\nMacedonia, and it was this aspect to which a friend drew my\r\nattention when I got home. Nobody much wants to return\r\nto Jean Cocteau, but there was something soothing in the\r\nwords my friend quoted. 'History is a combination of\r\nreality and lies,' he said. 'The reality of history\r\nbecomes a lie. The reality of the fable becomes the truth.'\r\n<\/pre>\nAudrey Gillan is a reporter on the Guardian, for whom\r\nshe went to Macedonia.\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
See Guardian journalist Audrey Gillan’s account of her efforts to find Kosovo rape victims in Macedonia London Review of Books Volume 21, Number 11, Cover date 27 May 1999 What’s the story? Audrey Gillan tries to find the evidence for mass atrocities in Kosovo Ferteze Nimari had lost two of her brothers and her husband … <\/p>\n