The newly released Albanian prisoners did not fully realise it was their last day of hiding before Kosovo's balance of terror shifted in their favour. On Saturday morning, a friend led me off the Pristina-to-Belgrade highway, down a steep street that had been devastated by a car bomb early in the war, then through the walled alleys of the Albanian neighbourhood of Vranjevac.
There were 13 of them, tired, frightened Albanians between the ages of 14 and 63, refugees from Podujevo, Drenica and Glogovac. They were among 117 prisoners released from Lipljan prison on June 10th, and the local people had placed them in the walled house of a family who had fled to Macedonia. Staring with tragic, glassy eyes, they told me a story of arbitrary, sadistic cruelty, carried out under the pretence of Yugoslav law.
"None of us is from the Kosovo Liberation Army," Abdullah (45) explained. Some had worked in factories until Albanians were fired en masse from their jobs in 1989. "Since then, we raised some cows and sheep and did some farming - just enough to feed our families." Nazif (61) interrupted. "All of our farms are destroyed now. We saw them burning our houses."
On April 30th, a column of Albanian refugees who had been expelled from their homes in northern Kosovo headed south towards Pristina. Near Lebane, about 300 men were separated from the women and children and put into buses. "I tried to turn back to say goodbye to my daughter," Nazif said, "and a policeman beat me with a Kalashnikov on my arms, chest and shoulders."
As Nazif spoke, Fazli, a boy of 14 from Drenica, began crying and left the room. When he returned, he said: "I am so young - and I had never lived through anything like those beatings. Now I am worried about my family. I don't know if any of them are alive. My father was released from prison a week before me, and my brother was sent to another prison."
Serbs wearing three kinds of uniforms split up the Albanian families on the road near Lebane. There were Interior Ministry police (MUP) in blue uniforms with the colour-coded blue, yellow and white ribbons they used to identify one another tied to their epaulettes. There were men wearing Yugoslav army uniforms, and there were paramilitaries in black, one of whom wore a black and white polka-dot bandana, pirate-style, on his head.
The Albanians were ordered to stare at their feet, with their hands clasped behind their heads or backs. So they didn't see who fired into the refugee column, killing Xhavit-Musa Berisha, his wife Ajete and their seven-year-old daughter Arjeta, all from Konusherc village near Podujevo. But they heard the shots and saw the bodies collapse to the ground.
The male prisoners were taken to Pristina jail for three days, where they were given nothing to eat or drink. Each night, Albanian men - mainly those between the ages of 20 and 30 - were taken away one at a time for beatings, and several of them did not return. The men pointed at Milazim, a skinny, middle-aged, bald man with an absent look in his blue eyes. "They beat him with shoes on both ears until they were bleeding," Nazif explained.
"He's completely deaf now." As if to prove it, they shouted Milazim's name several times before he stood up in surprise.
When the Albanians left Pristina for Lipljan prison, 13 km away, they were forced to walk between two lines of policemen who beat them with rifle butts as they reached the bus. They spent 42 days there, crowded into a room with a concrete floor, without mattresses or blankets, without the possibility of even washing. "They told us, `you are prisoners of war; you are terrorists', " Abdullah said. The Serbs maintained a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and "justice" system, giving each a sheet of paper signed by Ljuba Cumburovic, the prison director.
"This is to confirm that Muamet from Podujevo was sentenced for terrorism and conspiring against the state under articles 125 and 136 of the Yugoslav criminal code, sections 1 and 2. . . on May 2nd 1999," the convictions say. All of the papers are identical, with the name and home town of the prisoner typed in.
In Lipljan prison, the men say, an Albanian teacher from Urosevac was beaten to death in front of Mr Cumburovic. Three more busloads of Albanians arrived on May 24th and 25th, and three of them were also beaten to death. "They wrapped them in blankets and a van came and took the bodies away," Abdullah said.
"They released us in the same way they had welcomed us to the prison, with two lines of policemen on either side, beating us," Nazif said. "There were some Serb criminals who worked in the prison kitchen and they helped beat us."
On the day of their release, the men received not even their usual daily rations. They were told to walk the 13km into Pristina, but each time they encountered police or Yugoslav soldiers, they were shoved and beaten again, on the pretext that they had no identity papers. They credit Xavit, an Albanian from Vranjevac who ferried 40 of them back to his street in his car, two at a time, with saving their lives.
NATO troops were approaching Pristina, but these Albanian men were still hiding. Gunfire rattled a few blocks away, where Serb paramilitaries were looting and burning. They could not believe their ordeal was ending. If NATO arrived, if it became safe for them to go outside, their first trip would be to the Red Cross to try to find their families.