Nick, YOU SERB D-ICK
so this is how you want to play it -
LETS GO AT IT!

NICK'S 6 PROOF OF YUGOSLAV VICTORY :

1. "Kosovo is still Yugoslavia territory".
For the moment maybe - but not SERBIAN !
Serbs have lost absolute control.
KOSOVARS RULE - with international protection.
This is proof .... of YUGO DEFEAT - not victory.

2. "Milosevic is still in power".
In power of Serbia - yes.
Let him stay in power there and spread his poison on Serbs.
Milosovic is in power over bankrupt shambles.
This is proof .... of YUGO DEFEAT.

3. "UN, not NATO is in control in Kosovo"
Milo wanted SERBS to be control of Kosovo.
Now UN / NATO / KLA are in control.
Milo LOST CONTROL.
Proof, yes, of YUGO DEFEAT.

4) "NATO must deal with Albanian liars, etc."
The ONE BIG LIAR HERE IS ....... Milosovic.
Everybody knows not to trust him.
His word has a long record of being WORTHLESS.
At least give Albanians a chance.
Now we listen to them - not to you Serbs.
Proof ... of YUGO DEFEAT.

5. "The Russians are in Kosovo "
Yes, soon to be under NATO command.
YOUR GREATEST ALLY now sport
'KFOR' (= NATO) on their tanks,
... begging to join the victors.
Proof ... of YUGO DEFEAT

6. "There is no autonomy for Kosovo .... etc".
De facto, Kosovo is now VERY autonomous.
Serbs have nothing - NOTHING to say there anymore.
Whatever the degree of autonomy,
SERBS ARE NOT IN CONTROL.
Hence, proof .... of YUGO DEFEAT.


NICK, if you still don't believe
THAT YOU ARE WRONG IN CALLING IT "SERB VICTORY"
then look around you everywhere
including the Russian and Serbian media :
HASTY WITHDRAWALS AFTER CAPITULATION !

SLOW LEARNERS NEED TIME,
BUT YOU WILL HAVE TO LEARN AT SOME POINT.

NICK

I warned you for 70 days :

1. Serbs will be defeated - GOOD ALWAYS WINS.
2. Milosovic is wrong ....
3. Human beings must be respected - despite differences.

You could not agree with any of the above.

HAVE YOU LEARNED ANYTHING - per today ?

Or are you STILL PISSING AGAINST THE WIND ?

I said "I can't comprehend how someone with your "apparent" education can be such a moron. I am not a violent person, but if I could get my hands on you I would beat the fu<k out of you, you worthless piece of sh!t."

You said "Anytime. I would kill you though. In self defence I would not hesitate. I would KILL you."

You moron, I was right about you. People like you are the worlds main problem. I said I would beat you up, not kill you. You immediately say you would KILL me in self defence. Why? I did not threaten your life. People like you (and Milosevic) with primative animalistic instincts that rule their psyche are a bane to everyone else. You are an animal moroNICK, not a human by any true humans standards. You degrade this message board by your presence. Go back to your cave and leave the Homo-Sapiens alone you Troglodyte.

P.S. Thank you for revealing your true self to the true humans here.

HE HE HE! HA HA HA! HO HO HO! LOL LOL LOL!
I'm a baaaad boy.

CONTEXT

For those of you joining us
at this late hour,
allow me to put it all in a nutshell:

Nick, Maja, Daniela and a few others
(a.k.a. "Milosovic Collaborators")
are sympathizers of Milosovic -
and his policy of ethnic cleansing.

They believe that Serb police,
Army and Special Forces
Have done no harm
during their stay in Kosovo ......
Pusssy-face ARKAN is their hero.

In their view,
all the mass graves ....
approx 100 so far
are fabrications -
so called "Western propaganda".

Those graves that are not a part of a MAJOR ...
MAJOR "International Conspiracy"
are the rightful graves of 'inferior humans'
a "race" that deserved what they got.
Jews, Albanians, no difference - inferior all.

THESE are the people we are facing here.
We've been confronting them for 3 months now.
Even in the face of defeat -
they claim victory.
An upside-down world.

Nick is the leader,
Maya is a cheerleader,
Daniela is the greatest fan.

So - let's keep them in context.

HA HA HA HA HE HE HE HE!! I'm sorry I just can't stop laughing at MORONick! HA HA HA! Oh crap the tears are rolling down my chubby decadent American cheeks from laughing so hard! OH OH chest pains from my overweight heart! No it is just another round of hysterical laughter coming on! HA HA HA HA HA!

Main Entry: trog·lo·dyte
Pronunciation: 'trä-gl&-"dIt
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin troglodytae, plural, from Greek trOglodytai, from trOglE hole, cave (akin to Greek trOgein to gnaw, Armenian aracem I lead to pasture, graze) + dyein to enter
Date: 1558
1 : a member of a primitive people dwelling in caves(or on DMS)
2 : a person resembling a troglodyte (as in reclusive habits or outmoded or reactionary attitudes)See MORONick
- trog·lo·dyt·ic /"trä-gl&-'di-tik/ adjective

HA HE HA HE LOL LOL LOL Hiccup hiccup, oh crap I have to stop laughing or I will have to get in my big ugly Corvette and go to the hospital to be sedated.

Main Entry: mo·ron-ick
Pronunciation: 'mOr-"änik, 'mor-
Function: proper noun
Etymology: irregular from Greek mOros foolish, stupid
Date: 1999
1 : a mentally retarded person who has a potential mental age of between 8 and 12 years and is capable of doing routine work under supervision
2 : a very stupid person
- mo·ron·ick /m&-'rä-nik, mo-/ adjective
- mo·ron·i·ckal·ly /-ni-k(&-)lE/ adverb
- mo·ron·icksm /'mOr-"ä-"nik-z&m, 'mor-/ noun

This is right out of Websters Dictionary folks.
Ha! Sorry I'm all laughed out. I just realized it isn't really funny. It's sad because it's true.

jack, guido, lady emina


i showed up late to this clambake, but it was certainly my pleasure to get a few licks in along with you...so let's raise a pint >>cheers<<


but the situation is no less tragic, and the *ssholes are no less *ssholes, and no one's PAIN


has been lessened, and our nemeses are hardly converted...


so congratulations all around, and a GREAT BIG BRONX CHEER for the people whose butts we kicked


==we beat 'em up, we didnt KILL them==even if nick deserves to be thrown out of a 10th story window


and to the extent anything we do here amounts to a hill of beans, we'll await you in the trenches, evil ones, and all you can do is mewl your nasty, spiteful, tiresome little riffs. CONSIDER YOURSELVES SCORNED.


Salud, comrades.salud

Milosevic Increasingly Desperate

By Dusan Stojanovic
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, June 16, 1999; 4:31 p.m. EDT

VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Abandoned by his main political allies and
facing unprecedented calls for his resignation, Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic appears increasingly desperate to salvage his rule.

Milosevic this week made his first public appearances since October
1998, seeking support and promising a war-weary public he will rebuild
their bomb-ravaged country.

By controlling Serbia's police forces and state media, Milosevic still looks
firmly in control. And, being a master of self-preservation, he is likely to
use force against any legal or popular moves to unseat him.

But, apparently fearful of an increasingly restive military, he showered
Yugoslav army officers with medals and promotions on Tuesday. The
poorly-paid military has shown signs of dissent in the wake of the NATO
air campaign that cost the lives of thousands of soldiers and devastated
their facilities, from barracks to airports to sophisticated air-defense
systems.

Milosevic still has the support of rural, uneducated Serbs, whose backing
has played a key role in preserving his 10-year autocratic rule. But even
that support has been eroded by the NATO bombing campaign and the
exodus of tens of thousands of Serbs from Kosovo, considered their
medieval heartland.

The influential Serbian Orthodox Church demanded Tuesday that
Milosevic and his government resign and be replaced with ``new officials,
acceptable at home and abroad.''

Although the church has criticized Milosevic before, it has never called for
his resignation and even tacitly supported his war campaigns in Croatia
and Bosnia.

But Milosevic's loss of Kosovo, the seat of the Serbian Patriarch, and the
exodus of some 50,000 Kosovo Serbs who fear reprisals by rival ethnic
Albanians, have appalled the church hierarchy. The church has political
authority, especially among Serb nationalists, who could mount the biggest
challenge to his rule.

Adding to Milosevic's troubles, his chief political ally, the extreme
nationalist Radical Party, has announced it is quitting Serbia's coalition
government because Milosevic ``surrendered Kosovo without a fight.''

Without the Radicals, Milosevic has no majority in Serbia's 250-seat
parliament and his government won't be able to function. He is likely to try
to lure key opposition leader Vuk Draskovic into the government to
replace Radical leader Vojislav Seselj.

But Draskovic, who was removed as a deputy premier after suggesting
Milosevic was ready to end the confrontation weeks before he actually
did, has said he would not join the government unless ``fundamental
democratic reforms'' are made in Serbia.

If the ultra-nationalist and democratic opposition parties joined forces with
deputies from Montenegro, the rebellious Serb partner in the Yugoslav
federation, Milosevic could be unseated by a vote in the federal
parliament.

In a sign of his growing uneasiness, Milosevic this week inspected two
sites destroyed in the allied bombing, promising quick reconstruction and
to ``re-establish ties with the whole world.''

Milosevic, who has not addressed Serbs throughout the 11-week NATO
campaign, told a selected crowd of cheering supporters that his
government ``managed to defend the country'' and maintain its ``territorial
integrity and sovereignty.''

Despite being kept in the dark by the state-run propaganda, many Serbs
know that Milosevic -- indicted for alleged Kosovo war crimes -- is
internationally isolated and that the West has vowed not to give Serbia any
reconstruction aid as long as he remains in power.

Predrag Drecun, a top official in pro-Western Montenegro, ridiculed
attempts by Milosevic's regime to portray the outcome of the conflict with
NATO as a victory.

``While they are speaking about reconstruction (and victory) ... Serbs and
Montenegrins are fleeing their centuries-old homes in Kosovo in panic,''
Drecun said, calling Milosevic's latest campaign ``very distasteful'' amid
``the greatest Serb defeat in history.''

Further highlighting Milosevic's isolation, Montenegro's President Milo
Djukanovic was scheduled to meet President Clinton in the former
Yugoslav republic of Slovenia on Monday. Increasingly frustrated by
Milosevic's policies, Djukanovic has been talking about taking
Montenegro out of the Yugoslav federation. That could trigger more
Balkan bloodshed as Milosevic is unlikely to allow Montenegro to bolt
without intervening.

In 1989, Milosevic revoked the Kosovo Albanians' autonomy, triggering a
chain reaction that led to the wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia that
killed tens of thousands and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their
homes.

Despite the bloodshed -- the worst carnage in Europe since World War II
-- and Yugoslavia's loss of Serb-inhabited territories in Croatia and
Bosnia, Milosevic emerged stronger then ever.

Now, the Milosevic-created crisis has come full circle, returning to
Kosovo. And Kosovo could cost him his rule.


EDITOR'S NOTE: Dusan Stojanovic has covered Yugoslavia and the
Balkans for The Associated Press since 1984.

Hey, guys!

The only reason why Nick comes here is to enjoy getting the sheit beaten out of him. He comes here, dumps his toxic waste, gets it back in his face, and comes back for more. HIT ME WITH YOUR RHYTHEM STICK, HIT ME, HIT ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I guess the bad blood ALREADY polluted his brain so much, it's damaged beyond repair.
PATHETnICK.

Zoja

TIRANA, Albania, June 16 (UPI) -- Radio Tirana is reporting that
ethnic Albanian refugees are refusing the identity cards they're being
issued before crossing back into Kosovo.
The refugees are refusing the cards because they label them as
Yugoslav citizens. Radio Tirana today quoted a refugee, Agim Krasniqi,
in Kukes as asking, ``How can we accept to have a citizenship of a state
which expelled us by force?''
``It is unthinkable and unacceptable to get this card now,'' refugee
Ikbale Llapi told Albanian Radio.
Another refugee asked, ``How can I live in the Yugoslav federation
when this state killed us, massacred us an expelled us?''
``These identity cards were prepared by the U.N. High Commissioner
for Refugees, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe,
the European Council, NATO, the Albanian government and Microsoft,''
Musa Ulqini, the Albanian Minister of Information, said.

A LANDSCAPE OF RUIN
Across Kosovo, Death at Every Turn; Brutal Campaign
Litters Countryside With Bodies, Bones

By Peter Finn, David Finkel, R. Jeffrey Smith and Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 16, 1999; Page A01

DJAKOVICA, Yugoslavia, June 15—The war's survivors climbed from
their cellars and homemade bunkers today to discover their 500-year-old
city, once the jewel of southwestern Kosovo, turned into a graveyard.

Homes and shops are blackened skeletons along streets clotted with
rubble and glass. The dead, and there are hundreds, lie in makeshift graves
in family courtyards and under fresh earth in the local cemetery. The living,
and there are few, are sunk in despair as they wander through the harvest
of the whirlwind, their bellies empty as they scratch for food.

They point to houses where two, three, 30 people were executed, their
bodies sometimes carbonized by fire.

Kosovo is a brutalized landscape. Sections of it remain untouched and can
seem almost normal -- but turn any corner, traverse any road, approach
any city and you enter a wasteland scarred by fire, fear and freshly dug
graves.

The view of Kosovo became clearer today than it has been in months,
since large areas of the Serbian province were blotted out by a Serb-led
Yugoslav military offensive, an 11-week NATO bombing campaign and
the flight of more than a million people. Now, as Yugoslav and Serbian
forces withdraw from still smoldering towns, many residents are learning
for the first time what the war left of their lives.

Seven Washington Post reporters, traveling across Kosovo today to
assess the breadth of the destruction, found new evidence of massacres by
Belgrade government security forces and a pattern of killings that
suggested executions of ethnic Albanian civilians were carried out in
community after community across a wide swath of the province.

The evidence and accounts of returning Kosovo residents spoke of a grim
period of reckoning: In the identification of a mass grave that appears to
hold scores of bodies from a slaughter at a strip mine; of abandoned
human remains in deserted towns; in the execution today of a man in front
of his daughter; and in a son's discovery of the fate of his father.

IN VLASTICA

'Why Are You Shooting at Us?'

Skender Ibishi arrived home today to search for his father. He wanted to
come sooner, but Serbian police were in control of the area until Monday.

The house is a pile of bulldozed rubble in a village of rubble. The
population of this eastern Kosovo village used to be 2,100. Now it's zero.
Every house has been burned. Every window has been broken. Everything
has been destroyed.

And somewhere in the rubble of the home, Ibishi says, are the remains of
his father and 12 other people, all of whom were shot, set afire and buried
with a bulldozer in mid-April.

He reaches into his left pants pocket and pulls out a pocket watch he had
found. My father's, he says.

Now he sees a scorched green-and-white striped shirt. The shirt my father
was wearing, he says, and he bends down to touch it. He lifts it up, and a
smell so foul suddenly fills the air that it makes him spit and almost vomit.

The bodies, he says, are somewhere under here.

He walks over to another section of the rubble, where there's an old stove.
The stove has a drawer, covered by a piece of cardboard. Look, he says,
removing the cardboard to show what he has put in the drawer, and there,
arranged neatly, are a half-dozen pieces of blackened human bones. One
is a ball-and-socket joint; another looks long enough to be part of an arm.

"Thirteen people," he says. And unable to stay in this place for another
moment, at least today, he leaves and heads a few miles north to the city of
Gnjilane, where ethnic Albanians are celebrating their liberation.

There are thousands of people in the streets, many out for the first time in
months. Long lines of cars parade in every direction, with honking horns
and flashing headlights and people hanging out the windows waving flags.

Ibishi ignores them. He heads to a quiet side street and goes through a blue
gate. Inside is a 13-year-old girl named Vjore Shabani, who has short
black hair and a beautiful face and a deep red dent in her left cheek and a
left pinkie finger that is mangled and bruised.

Shabani, it turns out, was in the room where the 13 people were lined up
and killed. She also was shot but survived.

It happened in her house, she says. There were two soldiers. They told her
family to line up and not move. They ran out and brought in another family,
and then another. There were 23 people in all, she says, and they all were
told to sit in a row except for her grandfather, who was told to lie down.

"Why are you shooting at us?" she says a neighbor named Hysen Hyseni
asked the soldiers, who were just inside the doorway. "We're not shooting
at you," they said. At which point, she says, the shooting began.

Hyseni was shot first. Then the soldiers worked methodically down the
line. Each person was shot two or three times, she says.

"In the head. All in the head. Most of them in the forehead."

She knows this, she says, because she watched, at least until the guns
swung toward her mother. That's when she turned away.

She says they killed her mother, Zjavere, 38, her father, Selami, 45, and
her brother, Fisnik, 2. They killed four Shabanis and seven Hysenis and
one Berisha and one Ibishi, she says, and they wounded three more, while
leaving six untouched. Then they swung their guns once more, toward the
last person in line.

"Me."

One shot.

"I was hiding my head," she says. "I heard the gunshot. I felt nothing. I just
saw my finger was almost severed."

This was the pinkie, which she had resting on her cheek as she tried to hide
her head.

"It was just hanging," she says, "and I saw blood."

The soldiers, she says, ran off. She did too, looking for someone to help
her.

"And those two soldiers saw us," she says. "We ran away to a hiding place
in the house, and then the two soldiers came back and set our barn on
fire."

Then they burned the house that held the bodies.

Later came the bulldozer, but she didn't see that part. The last she saw of
her house was the flames, and she hasn't been back since. She has been
here, in Gnjilane, where flags are flying and horns are honking today
because the troops and police had gone at last.

"It's a day of freedom for me," she says, sounding as joyless as a
13-year-old can, and now, back in Vlastica, a cousin of Vjore's named
Nehat Shabani has made his own pilgrimage to see what the rubble
contains.

He, too, finds some bones. He, too, suddenly wants to be away from here.
He stops looking. He starts crying. He retreats to the skinny road winding
through this dead village. "It's horrifying," he says.

IN CIKATOVA

'We Had to Start Singing Again'

Rifat Billali, a chemistry teacher, moved reluctantly to the edge of a large
nickel and iron strip mine here in this town in Kosovo's central Drenica
region today, covering his nose to fight back the stench. Then he pointed to
the place where he said the bodies of about 80 ethnic Albanian men had
been dropped after Yugoslav troops machine-gunned them on May 1.

Billali, who had been beaten and shot by the soldiers, said his captors told
him to watch the executions. "This will happen to you later," one soldier
said. He said another soldier warned that "I would soon be sent to the
ovens" of the nearby Feronikal foundry.

"In those moments, I couldn't cry," Billali said. "We were not sure that we
were going to survive."

Shaban Veliqu, another man who was arrested and taken to witness the
execution, said he too became convinced that "it was going to happen to
me." Both men were spared for reasons that were never clear to them.
They were told only to sing "Kosovo is Serbia," a hymn to Serbian
determination to hold on to Kosovo in the face of an independence drive
by ethnic Albanian guerrillas.

Billali and Veliqu survived five weeks of detention at a nearby prison,
where they were forced to dig trenches and construct bunkers to protect
tanks and troops from NATO airstrikes. When the last of the security
forces withdrew from this area at 9 a.m. today, the two men were
released. Stopped along the road, they were eager to recount what they
had seen.

But they knew only a part of what had happened, according to the
accounts of others. Several weeks after the massacre, Yugoslav troops
returned to the scene and pulled the bodies from the mine, lending
credence to Western concerns that Yugoslav authorities may have
attempted to hide evidence of atrocities in Kosovo from war crimes
investigators.

Lavdim Morina, 18, said he witnessed the operation from a hill
overlooking the site. "They pulled the bodies out and put them in a truck."
He did not see where the bodies were taken, but other residents in the
area said that a few weeks ago, several tractors pulled into a vacant lot
across the street from a police station in Cikatova and deposited bodies in
shallow graves.

There are 66 mounds of earth at the site, including many that are large
enough to hold more than a single body. The rubber heel of a shoe pokes
out of one pile; a fragment of human bone sticks out from another.

Adem Hoxha, 20, and Muftar Dervishe, 32, both said they saw ethnic
Albanian prisoners dig the holes while more than 20 Yugoslav army troops
watched. Dervishe said he could not count the bodies but remembers that
they were naked above the waist.

Billali's odyssey began on April 30 in the town of Strutica, where a
government assault killed 18 people, according to Billali and Veliqu. Billali
was shot repeatedly and still has bullet fragments in his back, right arm,
neck and heavily bandaged hand. The shirt he wore today is full of of holes
where the bullets passed through.

After their arrest, Billali and Veliqu were taken to a mosque in the village of
Cirez, where 176 men rounded up from the surrounding area were briefly
detained. "They beat us with plastic truncheons and executed two people
there," Billali said. Then they put 30 to 40 people in each of four army
trucks and drove them to the mine. On the way, they were instructed to
hold their hands behind their heads. Soldiers beat them repeatedly.

At a juncture in the gravel road along the edge of the strip mine, according
to both Billali and Velliqu, the first two truckloads of men disembarked and
were marched in three lines toward the pit. "Go farther, go farther," the
soldiers shouted at the men, Velliqu recalled.

The truck in which they were riding was driven 50 yards farther down the
road, past a curve where they could look back at the mine. "Put your head
up and look at them; this is going to happen to each of you," said the
soldiers, who were all wearing arm bands and black, fingerless gloves.
They "sprayed them with bullets," Billali said. "Then we had to start singing
again."

One man survived the massacre, but his whereabouts are unknown, the
two men said. All that can be seen today at the edge of the mine are track
marks where a bulldozer pushed dirt and brush onto a ledge where the
bodies fell. Flies cover the pile, and a portion of a cow's head juts from
beneath some broken branches.

Billali says he is not sure why he was not killed, but he recalls that most of
the men in his truck had wounds or were elderly, while those in the first
two trucks were younger and thus more likely to be suspected by
government troops of membership in the separatist Kosovo Liberation
Army. "Everyone involved with the KLA will be executed," one soldier
said. "The others can live."

Afterwards, he and Velliqu were taken to the Glogovac police station,
which was occupied today by KLA members and had an Albanian flag
flying outside. At the rear of the building, Billali pointed to the bare cement
room where he said he and many others were beaten with wooden sticks.

"They beat us until we fainted. Then they threw water on us so they could
beat us some more," he said. "One prisoner couldn't take it, and he fell on
the stairs, so they executed him. They took one man of 79 years and one
of 13 years from the room. He was my pupil, Lulzim Gllareva. We never
saw either of them again."

IN DOBRODELJANE

'I Couldn't Do This To Someone'

Ethnic Albanians from a neighboring town came to this deserted hillside
village in southern Kosovo today to claim two bodies -- one shot in the
head, the other with a pitchfork in the gut and a missing leg. They were
carrying them home for burial.

Dobrodeljane has been a virtual ghost town since March 25, the day after
the NATO airstrikes began. Beginning Monday and continuing today, a
trickle of perhaps a half-dozen families returned to find every one of the
town's 170 houses destroyed or heavily damaged. There is no electricity,
water or food. The shops are empty, and stockpiles of food were burned.

Serbian police and Yugoslav army units had occupied the town for the last
three months, and some buildings were damaged during firefights between
government forces and ethnic Albanian rebels, who had three bases in the
area.

But most homes were simply trashed by police and soldiers who used
them, then looted them, then set them ablaze. Their red tile roofs collapsed
around charred timbers. Windows were smashed. Walls are pocked with
bullet holes.

Sadri Sikaqi, 65, and his wife Mihrie, 62, picked over the ruins of their
walled two-building compound, which they had rebuilt after their first
house was destroyed in a battle between Serbian militiamen and ethnic
Albanian guerrillas in August. Now, the family of 10 lives in a small
guestroom near the front gate.

"Only people who aren't human could do this," Sikaqi said, standing at the
living room window with a view of this ruined town, the concrete walls
burned black, the rugs and furniture a jumble of ashes strewn about the
floor. "I couldn't do this to someone."

IN SIQEVA

'I Will Not Leave This Place'

Here it was the children who dug the mass grave. It was a pit in a field, and
they laid the five bodies alongside each other, covering the grave with
branches.

"It was all we could do," said Shehide Berisha's son, Jakup, a waiter. "We
would like to have given them a proper funeral, but it was impossible. And
in any case we don't have enough money for one."

The village of Siqeva is just 20 minutes' drive from Pristina, the Kosovo
capital, at the end of a dirt road that follows a valley leading up into green
hills. It is home to the tightly knit Berisha clan. Everybody in the village
bears the same surname. By ancient custom, when a young woman
marries, she must leave the village and go to live with her husband. No one
but Berishas are permitted to live in Siqeva.

When the Yugoslav military launched its offensive in this area at the end of
April, torching and looting homes believed to belong to Kosovo Liberation
Army sympathizers, all but the oldest people in Siqeva fled into the
surrounding hills.

The elderly felt they were safe from army and police brutality. When the
government forces pulled back, the rest of the population came down from
the hills.

A second offensive followed in the middle of May. Since half the houses in
the village had been destroyed, the older people gathered in the home of
85-year-old Sulejman Berisha at the edge of the village. Sulejman and a
90-year-old male relative, Jahir Berisha, slept in a room to the right of the
porch. Sulejman's wife, Vahide, 66, and a female relative, Shehide, 77,
slept in a room on the left.

"I pleaded with them not to stay. I said, 'It's better for you to flee because
they will come to kill you," recalled Sulejman's son, Hajdim. "But my father
said, 'They came before and did not kill us. I will not leave this place.' "

Having fled to the hills above the village for a second time, the younger
members of the Berisha clan could see Serbian militiamen move into
Siqeva. They carried away everything that could be carried away --
stoves, refrigerators, television sets, furniture, video equipment, loading
their booty onto trucks. They recognized men from the neighboring Serbian
village of Brnica among the looters.

It was six days later -- May 20 -- that the younger villagers dared return to
Siqeva. When they went into Sulejman's house, they found the corpses of
the two old women stretched out on their beds. The floor was littered with
a dozen bullet casings from an automatic rife. Across the hallway, in the
room the men had been using, lay the body of Jahir. A hole in the floor
suggested that someone had thrown a hand grenade into the room.

The younger men found Sulejman's body in a stream at the bottom of his
garden, covered by a bloodstained leather coat. His hands were manacled
behind his back and his corpse bore signs of the explosion that had killed
Jahir. They concluded that Sulejman had been handcuffed and dragged
back into his room for execution by hand grenade.

"My father was beaten badly," Hajdim said. "I could see the marks on his
face."

Another body was found nearby -- that of a young man in his late teens. It
lay in a pool of blood and bore signs of a beating. Evidently the man was
an ethnic Albanian refugee who had come down out of the hills in search of
food and had been captured by the militiamen surrounding Sulejman's
house.

IN SRBICA

'When Is NATO Coming?'

As Serbian and Yugoslav forces departed today, the killing continued.

At 9 a.m. 13-year old Adile Koliqi witnessed the execution of her father
Kadri in the middle of a road that passes through the heart of the Kosovo's
Drenica region.

Kadri was a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has been
fighting for the province's independence from Serbia for more than a year.
To escape the military assault that engulfed Drenica from March 20 until
last week, he had spent much of the past two months hiding in the nearby
Berisha Mountains.

Today, he made a fateful miscalculation that the arrival of NATO troops in
Kosovo meant he and his five children could return safely to their home in
the village of Obrinje. He set out with them, carrying a pistol in a holster
and an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. As he passed in front of a
house that had seemed empty, several Yugoslav troops called out to him in
Serbian, and the family froze.

A brief but tense conversation ensued. Adile said she did not know what
was said because she speaks only Albanian -- since ethnic Albanians
withdrew from public schools in 1989 to protest government repression,
almost no children here have learned to speak Serbian.

Adile said the Yugoslav soldiers walked over to her father and took away
his guns. Then he started walking faster. "He was trying to get away
because they knew they were going to shoot him," Adile said. They shot
him then, from the roadside and from a balcony of the house where they
were keeping watch.

Later, tears streaming down her face, Adile said she saw his blood run
across the highway. His last words had been in Serbian. She didn't
understand them.

Hours after the killing, only a dozen or so people had ventured onto the
road, because government troops remained in the area, and NATO forces
were still nowhere in sight. Every home within miles appeared to have lost
its roof, windows and doors to fire and looting by government troops; their
walls were scorched and pockmarked by shelling. Artillery fire echoed in
the distance, from beyond a green hill covered by wild flowers and weeds,
and a few columns of smoke rose to the west.

One young refugee returning home along the road, 10-year old Agron
Shaqiri, said his family had spent the past month hiding in the mountains
and asked a reporter: "When is NATO coming?"

IN SUVA REKA

'Now, We Have a Place We Can Rest'

One day in early April, a backhoe showed up at the town cemetery here
and dug 34 graves. Today, no one is certain who is buried here, where
they came from or how they died. Thirty of the graves are marked by
stakes, some with a number painted in aquamarine, some with no notation
at all. Four have names on them.

"We think they're all local -- including an engineering professor who paid
50,000 marks to government troops but was killed anyway," said Nexhat
Palushi, 26, who lives in a village near Suva Reka, a town of 20,000 in
southern Kosovo. "A lot of them we think were dead in their homes for
about a week after the start of the war, and the Serbs then buried all of
them at the same time."

Suva Reka and its surrounding communities were at heart of a campaign of
expulsions by Yugoslav and Serbian forces who pushed most of the
residents out of the region. Today, the town has been demolished. It is
nearly deserted, save for a large contingent of Kosovo Liberation Army
members patrolling the streets.

Toward the center of town, Mihrije Berisha, 25, was returning home with
her year-old daughter and 3-week-old son after hiding in the forest since
the beginning of the war, unsure what she would find but expecting the
worst. She was accidentally separated from her husband and the rest of
her family during the exodus and now is uncertain where they are.

The gates of neighboring houses were all ajar, revealing burned-out hovels.
Berisha moaned and caught her breath as she entered her own property.
Serbs and Gypsies had ransacked the main house, a neighbor said.
Clothing and other personal belongings were scattered everywhere, and
there was a foul smell. Everything of value had been taken.

In a second dwelling on the property, the Toyota in the garage had been
set afire, and the blaze had spread to the other rooms. But in truth, the
structure was salvageable.

"It's okay. I'm happy. We have all these things. We have something," she
said. "Now, we have a place we can rest our heads."

IN DJAKOVICA

'It Is Hard to Trust That We Are Safe'

Before NATO's air campaign began, there were nearly 90,000 people in
Djakovica. By this morning, a few thousand at most remained. They had
spent the last 80 days or so hiding in basements by day and moving like
shadows by night to avoid the next burning rampage by Serbian militiamen.

"I see the NATO tanks," said Korab Shasinvari, whose 71-year-old
grandfather was assassinated by Serb-led forces. "But it is hard to trust
that we are safe. NATO is here, but they have liberated an empty land."

Mahmut Dautaga and Adem Koshi are bicycling through Djakovica,
looking for their sons. On May 10, Serbian militiamen kicked in the doors
of both their homes and forced their families to march to an intersection in
the city center. All men between the ages of 15 and 66 were taken away
on trucks, and the rest were sent home. And now Dautaga and Koshi,
having hidden for weeks in basements, ride together through different
neighborhoods. They stop, again and again, to ask if anyone has news of
their boys.

No one has. They move on with sad glances and few words.

"We know nothing," said Koshi, 67, his eyes sunken as he offers a
half-hearted smile to a foreign visitor. "We are just pushing ourselves
forward with dreams."

Some ethnic Albanian rebels and their supporters streamed through this
city today, honking their car horns and punching the air with their fists. It
sounded like laughter at a funeral and, except for the children playing in the
open for the first time in a long while, drew only weary looks. There are no
stores open and little food available. The survivors' only sustenance is relief
that they are alive. And today, people meeting for the first time in months
held each other in lingering embrace, thankful that another had made it
through the nightmare.

Like many residents here, the Abrashi family moved from house to house
almost every night to avoid new police roundups. They considered joining
the refugee exodus to Albania but feared that the women and children
would be separated from the men, leaving Farije Abrashi, the 75-year-old
matriarch, with no one to help her. Fear, paralysis and defiance held
thousands here.

"My boys stayed with me," said Farije Abrashi this morning. "God bless
them."

The militiamen came to the Abrashi's house on May 7 at 4:30 in the
afternoon. Ezren Abrashi and his brother pushed the women and children
onto the roof of the two-story house and then heaved their paralyzed
mother up. They jumped from roof to roof, scaled down a sloping roof
onto a shed and then made their way to a river bank -- carrying Farije
Abrashi all the way before they waded across the river and found shelter
for the family in a neighbor's basement.

Farije Abrashi spoke in a house adjacent to her own. A photo of her and
her husband, taken 40 years ago, is the only thing she salvaged from the
family home. She can see her ruined house through the window from the
couch where she spends her day. There is no back wall. The stairs have
collapsed. Melted pieces of furniture are visible. The stink of rotting food is
in the air.

"They burned our past," she said. "Everything else you can buy. But they
burned our past."

Timea Rexha has built a small wooden marker on the left side of her
courtyard. Behind it, weeds are already growing over the grave of her
husband, Urim, and two neighbors. On March 26 at 2 p.m. Serbian
militiamen entered her home. They were looking for her husband, a lawyer
who had defended Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas and was president
of the local chapter of a moderate ethnic Albanian political party.

The militiamen ordered the family to come up from the basement. Only
Urim emerged, telling his family to stay quiet. The family heard nothing
more but was too terrified to investigate. At 6 a.m., they found the bodies
lying in the courtyard. Urim had been shot once in the head.

"We didn't wash the bodies," said Timea Rexha, referring to the local
custom. "We put them in the ground as they were. We want the war
crimes people to dig them up and find the truth. I am waiting, and I am
strong. I want justice."

Only the eldest of Timea's four children, an 11-year-old girl, knows her
father is dead.

Courtyard graves, like Urim Rexha's, dot the city. Those who were killed
in the streets or abandoned houses were picked up by the local
Department of Public Works and buried by Gypsy grave diggers. Two
weeks ago, about 80 bodies were removed from the local cemetery, and
the freshly dug dirt was bulldozed flat there, according to residents. A
couple of hundred dead from the last two months remain in the cemetery.

The wounded often lay for days before they died or were secreted to the
local hospital by relatives. According to Valdet Spahia, a surgeon at
Djakovica hospital, local Serbian authorities repeatedly refused to allow
the facility's ambulance to pick up wounded ethnic Albanians.

"We asked, and they said, 'No,' " said Spahia. "And if we went out, they
turned us back. People died because we couldn't get to them."

Residents often took remarkable steps to survive. Angel Brovina, 44, dug
a bunker into the foundation of his home under the tile floor of his kitchen.
Four feet high and seven feet long, he stocked it with food and an
automatic rifle. A funnel was connected to a tube, which emptied out into
the garden, so he could urinate. Brovina spent his days there with his
brother, and three times Serbian gunmen stood over him as they looted his
home, cursing the wealth of the people who owned the house.

Brovina, a woodworker, emerged at night to booby-trap his house with
homemade devices, such as pieces of metal attached to fishing wire, which
were triggered by the opening of doors. He rigged a homemade bomb to
the starter in his car.

"I left open the doors in the day so they could take what they wanted," he
said, "but whoever was coming at night to make the fire would die."

Brovina emerged from his home for the first time today, his bravado
quieted by the destruction.

"I was a happy man once, but this has changed me," he said. "When I look
at this, I realize how beautiful was our city. It was a gem. Now it is a
corpse."

Correspondents Daniel Williams, John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore
contributed to this report.

Mothers' grief threatens Milosevic

Protests The human cost of war is turning Serbs against their leader

Rory Carroll in Krusevac
Thursday June 17, 1999
The Guardian

Far from the hum of intrigue in Belgrade's air-conditioned parliament,
mothers from hot, dusty towns like Krusevac are making their own
decisions about the fate of Slobodan Milosevic.

Sons who have returned from Kosovo in white aluminium coffins are
feeding a rage which may yet sweep away any back-room deal in the capital.

Yesterday, the women of Krusevac did not glance at the trade union
building they besieged on May 17, when they smashed its windows
in defiance of the war and chanted: "we want sons, not coffins".

Few paused to return the gaze of the fallen soldiers whose pictures are pasted onto lampposts.

But had the protesters succeeded, Dragutin Todorovic, 39, would
not have died on June 5. His eyes would not now be staring down
at passers-by from an enlarged passport photo. He had a wife, two daughters, a son,
three sisters, a father and mother.

Mirjana, 47, waiting for a bus with her daughter, confessed that
she had not attended the protest; her son was too young to fight.
But the last few weeks' bombing and withdrawal from Kosovo had changed her mind.

"What was the point? What did the war achieve? It was madness."
She dropped her voice. "It's a dangerous thing to say, but we should
get rid of the president. He's been a disaster. If there was a protest tomorrow, I'd
join it."

Mirjana, a chic housewife, said that she was influenced by the synod
of the Serb Orthodox church which on Tuesday called for a government
of national salvation to replace Mr Milosevic.

The cult of self-sacrifice is firmly rooted in Krusevac, a town
of 60,000 halfway between Belgrade and Kosovo, where King Lazar
gathered his troops to fight the Turks in 1389. The Serbs lost, but they still celebrate
Milos Obilic's suicide mission to assassinate the sultan.

This latest war was different. Even the claim that the regime had
shot down dozens of Nato planes offered little comfort. Two nearby
bridges were destroyed, the 14th Oktobar factory that made farm machinery was
badly damaged. The generator that provides flats with heating is
unlikely to be repaired in time for winter.

They have had one piece of good news - their swimming pool reopened
on Sunday - but it seemed indecent to celebrate when the ring roads
were clogged with Serb refugees fleeing Kosovo.

Milica, a 66-year-old peasant who looked 20 years older, sat resting
in front of the boarded-up union building. She does not watch television
nor read newspapers, but she knew one thing: her grandson was returning
home on Thursday.

"He was drafted with all his friends and spent two months in Kosovo,
but he's OK now, so they tell me. We will have a big party for him."

Milica said she knew nothing of the rally and did not want to say
whether she would attend if there was another tomorrow. "Don't ask
me that, please, I'm not political. I'm just glad that there is peace. I don't want any
more fighting."

Information is very restricted in rural towns such as this. Serbian
television and the government newspaper, Politika, did not report
the synod's rejection of Mr Milosevic. Other newspapers hedged the announcement.
Listeners to Radio Free Europe, such as Mirjana, are a small minority.

One development which did make the news was the decision of the
president of Serbia, Milan Milutinovic, to prevent the Radical Party
from deserting Mr Milosevic's coalition government, citing the need for cohesion at
a time of crisis.

It provides a breathing space for Mr Milosevic, a master escapologist,
to yet again turn his blunders to his advantage.

For that he needs a lot more people to react like Zivana, 54, who
was selling ice-cream on the Krusevac high street.

She unbuttoned her white coat to reveal a black lace blouse and
black skirt. "My sister's son died in Kosovo on May 26. Five soldiers
with him were killed when terrorists attacked them - they didn't die in vain, they died
bravely defending their country.

"I'm so angry about Nato; 19 countries against our boys. They made me live in a shelter."

Had the police and army not crushed the May 17 protest, Zivana's
nephew might be alive, yet she remains adamant that the protest was treachery.

"They were not supposed to encourage soldiers not to defend this
country. They should never have done it," she said.

Uncertainty surrounds the fate of those who led the 5,000-strong demonstration.

Spurred by the imminent departure of more soldiers to Kosovo, they
heckled the mayor, Miloje Mihajlovic, who said he was helpless to
reverse government policy. General Neboja Parkovic also failed to placate the crowd,
which hurled stones and eggs.

The whiff of revolt spread to the nearby towns of Rashka and Aleksandrovac,
where the mayor was attacked but not, as was claimed, lynched.

Force was used to disperse the crowds and between 12 and 35 people
were arrested in Aleksandrovac, said Momlico Stevanovic, the local
head of the anti-Milosevic Democratic Party. "We don't know where they are or
what's happened exactly. There are all sorts of stories, but I know
some were questioned," he added.

Of one thing, Mr Stevanovic was certain. "There will be no more
protests, not for now, anyway. People are happy that their sons are back."

Now that the fear has ended, there are too few casualties to create
a critical mass of grieving families, he said.

Three miles out of town, the gravedigger at the old cemetery was
relaxing in the sun. Things could be worse, he said. There were
only six mounds of fresh earth.