London Review of Books<\/p>\n
Volume 21, Number 11, Cover date 27 May 1999<\/p>\n
What’s the story?<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span> Audrey Gillan tries to find the evidence for mass<\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>atrocities in Kosovo<\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>Ferteze Nimari had lost two of her brothers and her\u00a0husband was forced to bury all the dead in one grave. \u00a0Later, packed into a stifling bus with sixty fellow\u00a0Kosovars, the couple held onto each other as he clutched\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>a strap suspended from the ceiling. The bus stopped in\u00a0the Stankovac I refugee camp in Macedonia and they told\u00a0their story.<\/p>\n ‘The tank came to our village of Sllovi. The\u00a0Serb neighbours said not to worry – it was just there to\u00a0observe us. But by lunchtime the next day a teenage girl\u00a0lay dead in the street. Then another 15 people were\u00a0<\/span>killed. They told us to run into the woods and they\u00a0<\/span>started shooting us.’<\/p>\n I asked them so many questions about what they had\u00a0seen. ‘What happened when your brothers were shot?’\u00a0‘How many people did you bury?’ ‘How do you feel\u00a0now?’ When they said the Serbs had forced an old\u00a0woman into a tent and burned her alive I looked at them\u00a0doubtfully and asked how they knew she had been alive.\u00a0Someone from her family had seen it happen, they said.<\/p>\n The Nimaris had arrived at what they thought was a safe\u00a0haven, but I pursued them, and I did so unsparingly. I got\u00a0on the bus when the driver opened the doors for air. They\u00a0had stood for hours on that malodorous bus. I felt sorry\u00a0for them: but not so sorry that I stopped the questions.<\/p>\n They had yet to step down to the misery of the camp the\u00a0British press has taken to calling ‘Brazda’. All they had\u00a0<\/span>was a bottle of water passed to them through an open\u00a0<\/span>window – and my questions. Ferteze, eight months\u00a0pregnant, caught me glancing at the watch on her wrist\u00a0when Remzi, her husband, said all the women in the\u00a0village had been robbed of their jewellery.<\/p>\n Earlier that day, Ron Redmond, the baseball-capped\u00a0spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner\u00a0for Refugees, stood at the Blace border crossing from\u00a0Kosovo into Macedonia and said there were new reports\u00a0of mass rapes and killings from three villages in the\u00a0<\/span>Lipljan area: Sllovi, Hallac Evogel and Ribari Evogel. \u00a0He spoke to the press of bodies being desecrated, eyes\u00a0being shot out. The way he talked it sounded as if there\u00a0had been at least a hundred murders and dozens of rapes.<\/p>\n When I pressed him on the rapes, asking him to be more\u00a0precise, he reduced it a bit and said he had heard that five\u00a0or six teenage girls had been raped and murdered. He had\u00a0not spoken to any witnesses. ‘We have no way of\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>verifying these reports of rape,’ he conceded. ‘These are\u00a0among the first that we have heard of at this border.’<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>Other UNHCR officials later told stories of women\u00a0being tied to the walls of their houses and burned, 24\u00a0bodies buried in Kosovo Polje. Another report, again\u00a0from Sllovi, put the dead at a hundred. Mr and Mrs\u00a0Nimari were adamant that it was 16.<\/p>\n Truth can be scarce\u00a0at the Blace border and in the camps dotted around\u00a0Macedonia, but you are not allowed to say that during a\u00a0war like this, where it may be that bad things are being\u00a0done on both sides, just as you are not allowed to doubt\u00a0atrocity. It’s as if Nato and its entourage were trying to\u00a0make up for the witlessness of the past: trying to show\u00a0that whatever we do, we won’t be turning a blind eye.<\/p>\n But the simple-minded reporter in me wants to ask a\u00a0question: is there any real evidence for what is being\u00a0said? \u00a0In Macedonia, listening to the stories and the UNHCR\u00a0accounts, you would find it hard to tell what was hearsay\u00a0and what was fact. When you looked at the people\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>clinging onto the carrier bags that now held the remnants\u00a0of their lives, it seemed evident that terrible things had\u00a0happened to them, that people had been forced to flee\u00a0their homes and drag themselves to a non-life in another\u00a0country. Each person arriving at the camps had\u00a0experienced some kind of trauma, and most are still\u00a0living it. Many have seen death and other horrors. It is\u00a0just that there is little to suggest that they have seen it in\u00a0the ways, and on the scale, that people want to say they\u00a0have.<\/p>\n Most of those who have seen killing have seen one\u00a0or two shot and the bodies of others. Eye-witnesses to\u00a0multiple atrocities are very rare and the simple – and not\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>at all simple – truth is that it can often be hard to\u00a0<\/span>establish the veracity of the information. One afternoon,\u00a0the people in charge said there were refugees arriving\u00a0who talked of sixty or more being killed in one village, fifty in another, but I could not find one eye-witness\u00a0who actually saw these things happening.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>Now, they may have happened. But what we have is a\u00a0situation where Western journalists accept details\u00a0<\/span>without question. Almost every day, the world’s media,\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>jostling for stories in Macedonia, strain to find figures\u00a0that may well not exist. In the absence of any testimony,\u00a0<\/span>many just report what some agency or other has told\u00a0them. I stood by as a reporter from BBC World reeled\u00a0<\/span>off what Ron Redmond had said, using the words\u00a0‘hundreds’, ‘rape’ and ‘murder’ in the same breath. By\u00a0<\/span>way of qualification (a fairly meaningless one in the\u00a0circumstances), he added that the stories had yet to be\u00a0<\/span>substantiated. Why, then, had he reported them so keenly\u00a0in the first place?<\/p>\n I found myself wanting to discover the evidence. I was\u00a0also impatient to find a ‘good’ story – i.e. a mass\u00a0atrocity. As each new bus trundled over the border, I told\u00a0my interpreter to shout through the windows asking if\u00a0anyone was from the three villages Redmond had\u00a0mentioned. Did they know anyone, had they seen\u00a0anything? We went along twenty buses before we found\u00a0Mr and Mrs Nimari.<\/p>\n A transit camp had been set up in\u00a0the no man’s land between the river and the frontier road\u00a0at Blace. This was where the tens of thousands were\u00a0trapped in fetid misery before Macedonian officials\u00a0dispersed them one night to the newly-built camps. Now\u00a0the place is used to give a night’s rest to some of the\u00a0great many who wait patiently at this border for entry to\u00a0a country that doesn’t want them and to which they\u00a0really don’t want to go. Every 20 minutes, the\u00a0Macedonian police let around two hundred people\u00a0clamber down a dirt path to be processed before being\u00a0admitted into the camp. As they stood in line, I asked\u00a0whether anyone was from those villages and whether\u00a0<\/span>they’d seen anything they wanted to talk about. No one\u00a0was and no one did. Or at least they didn’t want to tell us\u00a0about it.<\/p>\n It seemed that the Nimaris were the only people from\u00a0Sllovi. I was moved by their fear and passion to believe\u00a0everything they said. Remzi told me he’d buried the dead\u00a0in a grave in the woods at Lugi i Demes. It will take the\u00a0verifiers from the International Criminal Tribunal for\u00a0the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague to put our agitated,\u00a0agitating minds at rest.<\/p>\n The officers from ICTY, the verifiers from the\u00a0Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe\u00a0and researchers from Human Rights Watch are\u00a0compiling reports of war crimes, which will be used at a\u00a0later date for any trial at The Hague. Speaking to these\u00a0people, I found them to be wary of using the hyperbole\u00a0<\/span>favoured by reporters and by the UNHCR. They say they\u00a0have yet to see evidence of atrocities on the scale that\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>they witnessed while working in Bosnia.<\/p>\n When I went to\u00a0see Benedicte Giaever, the co-ordinator for OSCE’s\u00a0field office in Skopje, I saw that she was angered by the\u00a0behaviour of the media. I squirmed when she said she had\u00a0heard of a female journalist getting onto a bus to\u00a0question some refugees. She said almost every journalist\u00a0who came to see her asked one thing: could she give them\u00a0a rape victim to interview. She spoke of one woman\u00a0being ‘hunted down’ by journalists and having to have\u00a0her tent moved to shelter her from their intrusions: she\u00a0had had a breakdown.<\/p>\n I wanted at the same time to test the validity of the truths\u00a0being offered us and to behave decently in the face of\u00a0what could not be known for sure, and I knew it wasn’t\u00a0possible to do both. Yet I could see that much of this\u00a0rough treatment of female refugees was a direct\u00a0consequence of Robin Cook telling the world that there\u00a0was evidence of rape camps inside Kosovo. ‘Young\u00a0<\/span>women are being separated from the refugee columns,’\u00a0he said, ‘and forced to undergo systematic rape in an\u00a0army camp. We have evidence from many refugees who\u00a0have managed to escape that others were taken to rape\u00a0<\/span>camps.’<\/p>\n I know of several tabloid reporters who were despatched\u00a0to Macedonia and Albania with the sole purpose of\u00a0finding a rape victim. Talking to each other in the bar of\u00a0Skopje’s Hotel Continental we rehearsed the question\u00a0which has now become notorious: ‘Is there anyone here\u00a0who’s been raped and speaks English?’ We were aware\u00a0of the implications of some of our more despicable\u00a0behaviour. We knew that one woman, raped by Serbian\u00a0soldiers then forced to leave her country, was\u00a0traumatised all over again by a journalist looking for a\u00a0good story.<\/p>\n The things you come to know as a journalist do not\u00a0march in single file. Facts are often renegade. But among\u00a0the rape victims arriving in Macedonia nobody spoke of\u00a0anything like the camps the British Foreign Secretary\u00a0referred to. Benedicte Giaever told me there had been\u00a0rape, but not systematic and not on a grand scale. The\u00a0same was true of the killing. ‘We don’t have big\u00a0numbers,’ she said. ‘What we have are consistent small\u00a0numbers – two here, five there, ten here, seven there.’<\/p>\n Unlike the media and the UNHCR, the OSCE works in a\u00a0slow, methodical way, waiting a few days till the\u00a0refugees have settled in before they begin to ask\u00a0questions. ‘These people have just arrived and I would\u00a0say they are still under a lot of stress and tension,’\u00a0Giaever says. ‘In that situation, 5 people can easily turn\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>into 75. It’s not that they want to lie but often they are\u00a0confused. It’s not to say it didn’t happen. But a story\u00a0<\/span>could have moved around from village to village and\u00a0everyone from that village tells it as if it happened to\u00a0them.’<\/p>\n Another senior OSCE source spoke even more clearly\u00a0than any of us were inclined to do. He told me he\u00a0suspected that the Kosovo Liberation Army had been\u00a0persuading people to talk in bigger numbers, to crank up\u00a0the horror so that Nato might be persuaded to send\u00a0ground troops in faster. Robin Cook’s rape camp was the\u00a0same thing, he said: an attempt to get the British public\u00a0behind the bombing. And wasn’t all this a lesson in how\u00a0propaganda works in modern war?<\/p>\n When I came back to London, I went to see the KLA’s\u00a0<\/span>spokesman and recruiting officer in Golders Green. Dr\u00a0Pleurat Sejdiu, sitting beside the KLA flag and busts of\u00a0<\/span>the Albanian national hero Skenderbeg, said there were\u00a0indeed rape camps, and that the evidence of mass\u00a0atrocities was to be found among the refugees in\u00a0Albania, not in Macedonia. He is in daily contact with\u00a0the KLA frontline command by satellite phone and has\u00a0<\/span>been told of rape camps in Gjakova, Rahovec, Suhareka,\u00a0Prizren and Skenderaj.<\/p>\n ‘We know there are concentration\u00a0camps and women are kept and raped there,’ he said. ‘I\u00a0don’t think we will get the evidence until we go in with\u00a0the ground troops. There are a lot of stories confirming\u00a0it. There are mass executions and mass graves are\u00a0appearing now. We have reports from our special units\u00a0moving around Kosovo. And the pertinent question is:\u00a0where are the young men who have been taken from the\u00a0refugee columns? I think everything will be proved when\u00a0Nato troops go in.’<\/p>\n In Skopje I had been to see Ben Ward, a researcher for\u00a0Human Rights Watch, in the flat he is renting (he had\u00a0found the Hotel Continental too expensive and the\u00a0behaviour of the reporters too disconcerting): he pored\u00a0over maps of Kosovo and pointed to villages where he\u00a0knows incidents have taken place. His information comes\u00a0from eye-witnesses and is corroborated by the testimony\u00a0of others. He has noted a very definite scorched-earth\u00a0policy. But while his latest report details killings and the\u00a0mutilation of corpses in the villages of Bajnica and\u00a0Cakaj, he doesn’t think there is evidence of mass\u00a0<\/span>executions. ‘It is very rare for people not to know\u00a0someone who knows about people being killed. But there\u00a0doesn’t appear to be anything to support allegations of\u00a0mass killings,’ he said. ‘It is generally paramilitaries who\u00a0are responsible. It doesn’t seem organised. There appear\u00a0<\/span>to be individual acts of sadism rather than anything else.\u00a0There seems not to be any policy or instruction, but that\u00a0<\/span>isn’t to say that people have not been given the latitude to\u00a0kill. However, I don’t think at this stage we have\u00a0anything that adds up to the systematic killing of\u00a0civilians.’ Ward believes that those who stayed longer in\u00a0Kosovo have been subjected to more violence, that many\u00a0have been terrorised because they have stayed so long.\u00a0Many have fled terror but some of those Ward spoke to\u00a0said they were fleeing the Nato bombs. ‘The Serbs didn’t\u00a0touch us until Nato attacked,’ a Kosovar told him.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>One morning I made a two-year-old girl hysterical. I\u00a0had asked her parents to show me the wound the child\u00a0suffered when the bullet that killed her grandmother\u00a0entered her shoulder. I was getting desperate for some\u00a0<\/span>kind of truth to hold onto. They pulled up Marigona\u00a0Azemi’s dress and her pink T-shirt and pointed to aworn bandage. She squealed and said it was the ‘licia’\u00a0who shot her, unable to get her small tongue round the\u00a0Albanian word milicia. Like the majority of those killed\u00a0or wounded or abused by the Serbs, Marigona was\u00a0attacked by paramilitaries, a vicious, marauding band.\u00a0Seven people in her village of Lovc – including her\u00a0grandmother Nexhmije – were killed. Some villagers\u00a0claimed that a local teacher and his cousin were skinned\u00a0<\/span>alive before they were burned, others said they were\u00a0burned alive. No one actually saw this but the rest of\u00a0what they had to say tallied when they told their stories\u00a0independently. The Azemi family had been trying to\u00a0escape on its tractor when the paramilitaries opened fire:\u00a0what they did was sadistic and it was a horrendous tale,\u00a0<\/span>but it couldn’t be turned into a story of mass atrocity.<\/p>\n Some people tell me that evil is evil; that there’s no point\u00a0in quantifying it. Does that mean I am to accept Robin\u00a0Cook’s unchecked facts because they align with my\u00a0hunches?\u00a0<\/span>I feel bad for having made Marigona cry in order to\u00a0<\/span>prove to myself that there was truth in her story. (For\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>days, I went to her – pathetically – with dolls and hair\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>bobbles and sweets and orange juice.) But that is not all I\u00a0feel. Watching the television images and listening to the\u00a0newscasters thunder about further reports of Serb\u00a0<\/span>massacres and of genocide, I feel uneasy about saying\u00a0that they have very little to go on. Yet almost every\u00a0<\/span>newspaper journalist I spoke to privately in Macedonia\u00a0felt the same way. The story being seen at home is\u00a0different from the one that appeared to be happening on\u00a0the ground.<\/p>\n Maybe the truth here is not one thing: but I don’t want to\u00a0be an accomplice to a lie. I don’t want to bellow for my\u00a0life or for theirs, yet there’s something not right in this\u00a0easy way with detail. It is a surreal place, Macedonia,\u00a0and it was this aspect to which a friend drew my\u00a0attention when I got home. Nobody much wants to return\u00a0to Jean Cocteau, but there was something soothing in the\u00a0words my friend quoted. ‘History is a combination of\u00a0reality and lies,’ he said. ‘The reality of history becomes\u00a0a lie. The reality of the fable becomes the truth.’<\/p>\n