QIREZ, Yugoslavia -- Sunday was market day here.
People would come in from all over the countryside to sell their produce in stalls along the one street. Elsadet Gemajli, working in his father's blacksmith shop, four buildings up from the new school, would make sure to have plenty of horseshoes for sale. Ilmi Dobra would dish out small cups of thick coffee in his cafe, where the farmers and the townsfolk stopped to rest their feet and swap the news.
It was a snug, provincial, conservative life.
Today weeds poke up through the street. The shops are rubble. The schoolyard holds three burned-out cars and four dead horses.
Qirez, a little village of 2,000 deep in the Drenica Valley, could be a symbol for all that has happened to Kosovo in the past year. Through 1998 it saw the Serbs come and go, chasing the residents out, letting them back in, smashing and burning a little before moving on.
To the people who lived here, much of what the Serbs did seemed to have no explanation, as if they were simply trying to sow confusion and anxiety among them.
Two weeks before the NATO bombing began in March, the Serbs were back again, saying one thing, doing another, killing a few. With the onset of war, Serbian forces moved in to stay.
The people of Qirez and smaller villages around it fled to the mountains, to towns elsewhere in Kosovo, to Albania. They spent months shifting from place to place, suffering from cold and hunger -- but none would have traded places with the few young women who were forced by police to stay behind, penned into two neighboring houses.
It is these women, anonymous today, who will brand Qirez into the memory of Kosovar Albanians. What happened here while they were alive might never be certain, but their fate during the Serbs' last spasm of defiant violence before pulling out is dreadfully clear.
They were slaughtered.
The Drenica Valley is a stronghold of ethnic Albanian villages. Only a handful of Serbs live in the region, clustered in the larger towns. Qirez has always been exclusively Albanian. Shaqir Nebihi says that his family has lived here for generations, that the village predates the Turkish conquest in the 14th century.
The Drenica was a stronghold, as well, of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and this explains why the Serbian forces devoted so much attention to it.
Isolated amid wildflowers
A visitor to Qirez must drive a half-hour along a winding dirt road, between fallow fields that seem to glow with purple and white wildflowers. Rows of luxuriant trees mark the streambeds. Low hills hide one settlement from the next.
The first glimpse of the village now is what remains of the mosque, its silvery domes crushed and minaret toppled. A dead cow lies impaled on barbed wire.
Farther on, in the center, the few dozen men who have returned tend to gather, to smoke and wait for the daily British army patrol. A few vendors have set up little stands, where they display flour, sugar, yeast, tea and cigarettes, but no one is buying.
The Nebihi farmstead lies out past the village on the other side, on about 14 acres where Shaqir Nebihi and his two brothers once grew wheat and corn, tended to their plum and apple trees, raised chickens and kept eight cows.
He also once commuted by bus to his job as a stenographer at a ferro-nickel plant in the town of Glogovac. But the bus no longer runs, and NATO bombs reduced the plant to a crumpled ruin.
Nebihi is embarrassed to let visitors see the ruins of his house. His niece, Jehona Fazliu, is baking bread with cheese in it in the wood-burning oven they have set up under a gaping hole in the roof. The cheese is homemade, with milk from the one remaining cow on the farm. The flour is from the first shipment of humanitarian food aid, which arrived last week.
The story of the Nebihi family's treatment at the hands of the Serbs is like thousands of others in Kosovo, distinguished only by the particulars. And it begins long before NATO sent its missiles and bombers over Yugoslavia.
The first time the 15 members of the household were forced to flee was in March 1998, a year before the air war began, when Serbian police began sweeping through Drenica. They returned when it was safe, planted their fields, led a quiet summer.
In September the Serbian police were back.
The women and children of the village were herded to a place called Kozhica, while the men fled to Mount Cycavica, an hour's walk away. For two nights, Nebihi says, the refugees camped at Kozhica, with the police occasionally pulling people away and killing them.
"After that, they told them to go back to their houses. 'The offensive is over.' But when they got back, they found everything burned and stolen," Nebihi says. "They burned all the corn and grain we had stored. They burned my car."
They also burned one of the two houses on the farm.
The outburst of violence and destruction that marked the end of the Serbian offensive, directed at regions where the KLA was strong, seemed calculated. It was obvious, Nebihi says, that the Serbian forces were aware of the men camped in the mountains, even as they made no move against them. It was, he thinks, a crude form of psychological warfare, letting the men of the valley have a taste of what could befall them if the KLA continued its fight.
A week of calm passed, and then another Serbian offensive.
Again, the women and children and the family patriarch, Ferat Nebihi, were herded to another village (this time Stutica) and the younger men went to the mountain. A day later, they returned -- to find the other house burned and the humanitarian food aid stolen.
"After that, we thought the war had ended and everything would be all right," Nebihi says. The school reopened. Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe began to come to town. They received lumber and plastic from the United Nations to begin rebuilding their houses.
It was a hard winter, and it was barely over before the Nebihis discovered their hopes for peace were misplaced. The Serbs were on the move again. Weeks before the airstrikes began, three months ago, they came for the fourth time to Qirez.
'No need to be afraid'
"They told the women and children there was no need to be afraid," says Nebihi, that this was only a training exercise. But they began shooting anyone who left the village.
For a third time, the men fled to Cycavica. They watched with binoculars as women and children who had gathered in Qirez from surrounding villages were sent off toward Glogovac.
For the next three months, the Nebihi family went from village to village, staying with relatives, sometimes sleeping 100 to a house. The men, in the mountains, had some corn and potatoes, but hunger and cold were constant.
Twice, Nebihi lost contact with his family, and twice, while on nighttime foraging expeditions for food in the valley, he stumbled upon the houses where they were staying.
Once, they saw troops firing grenades into a nearby house. The army also began shelling the woods where the men were hiding.
The Kosovar Albanians had radios and knew when the peace agreement was signed. In 10 or 11 more days, Nebihi says, people would have started to die from malnutrition. But before going home, they had to wait out another Serbian rampage.
Three days before the Serbs pulled out, the villagers say, the soldiers and paramilitaries began a last, thorough ransacking of the village. All the shops were burned and looted. Farm animals were killed, cars set afire. The last few houses were wrecked. There was constant shooting, though the men of Qirez suspect most of it was sprayed wildly into the air.
A few days later, when they thought it was safe, they walked back to the village. Nebihi and his brothers retrieved their families from where they had been staying, all still alive. They set up camp in the ruins of the farm.
But there was one last nightmare that the village had to confront. During the war, the men had continued to watch from the hills to the south, and they realized that the Serbs had kept a number of young women with them.
The men watched through binoculars as these women moved between the two houses that Serbian paramilitaries were using as headquarters. For three months, they watched truckloads of soldiers driving up to the houses and then away again.
The last day, men on a hill near the village, including Frasher Gemajli, believed they saw Serbs dumping bodies into one of the village wells.
Last week they took a visitor to the well. It was behind the house where the women had stayed in two small whitewashed rooms, the house once owned by Ilmi Aliu, who had a job with the water works and has disappeared.
About 10 feet down was a pile of rubble and bricks. British soldiers had told the villagers not to disturb the site but to wait for forensic experts to come examine it.
Then they took the visitor to another well. This one still had water in it, and there were objects floating in the water, but it wasn't clear what they were.
Then they took the visitor to a third well, in the garden of Abide Gemajli. This one hadn't been visible from the hills. A rough wooden box surrounding the well rose about three feet above the ground.
Bodies clearly visible
Twenty feet below, at least three bodies could distinctly be seen on the surface of the water, wrapped in clothing or perhaps blankets. There may have been others beneath them.
The men believe the victims were killed with knives.
They were eager to take outsiders to the wells, but deeply uncomfortable talking about what happened. Maybe, the men said, the women were cooking and cleaning for the Serbs. But when pressed, they admitted that what they suspect is rape.
A terrible stigma attaches to rape victims in Albanian society, and it's a subject all would like to avoid. The men here say they believe the women were from two other villages nearby, but for now there is no way of telling.
When investigators eventually examine the bodies -- and it could be a while, because of the unexpectedly large number of massacre sites uncovered in Kosovo -- news of what they find will spread throughout the region.
"For a man to be shot by a bullet, that's one thing, OK, may he rest in peace," said Frasher Gemajli. "But for women and children, when you don't even know how they were killed -- how can we live here after a tragedy like this?"
Abide Gemajli, 65, has lived for a week now with four relatives in a house just a few feet from the well. Her husband's shoes and clothing were lying near the well when she returned, and she fears the worst.
"I want to know the truth," she said. "They killed my husband, and I don't know where his body is. It might be there, too."
Her anguish is intense, with no way to assuage it. "I have nightmares every night," she said. "But all we have is our life in this house. I have nowhere else to sleep."
No one here expects the village to be the same even after it has recovered physically; no one expects it to be free of the memory of what happened here.
"Well, maybe the next generation, you know," said Avdullah Hyseni, 52.
But for now, the villagers have no choice but to try to restart their lives. Farmers are scything hay off fields that would in a normal year be ripening with corn and wheat. Elsadet Gemajli is tearing down the remains of his blacksmith shop, by hand, and planning to rebuild. He's fixing his house -- for the third time in a year.
"I'm very, very happy we are free," says Shaqir Nebihi, "that my children can play freely in the fields, that there are no weapons, that no one will be shooting at them."
But everyone here believes the only way the village can survive is with help from abroad -- food aid for at least a year, and housing materials so there will be some shelter this winter. Qirez is looking to the West to put it together again.
"I hope they'll bring us humanitarian aid," says Nebihi. "I hope they'll rebuild our country, rebuild our factories. If they don't do that, they've done nothing."
Pub Date: 6/27/99