Peace Efforts Set Back by Massacre of Serb Farmers

By VALERIE REITMAN and SCOTT GLOVER

July 25, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

GRACKO, Yugoslavia — NATO troops, forced to function as homicide detectives, searched Saturday for clues to the killers of 14 Serbian farmers in a Kosovo wheat field. The attack Friday night was the bloodiest setback for peacekeeping efforts in the province since alliance forces rolled in last month.

International war crimes investigators in Kosovo, who for the most part have been documenting thousands of atrocities allegedly committed against ethnic Albanians by Yugoslav forces, termed the scale of the massacre “very alarming” and said they will join in the probe.

NATO and United Nations officials denounced the killings. British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, commander of the Kosovo Force, or KFOR, peacekeepers, decried the massacre as a “tragic and murderous attack against people engaged in perhaps the most innocent of pastimes, making hay on a summer’s evening.”

But the words were of small comfort for residents of this tiny Serbian farm town, who accused KFOR troops of ignoring their earlier pleas for greater security and their Friday night telephone calls requesting help when the farmers didn’t return from the field by sunset.

“How can we be safe when we are surrounded by Albanian villages?” asked Milan Janicjevic, whose brother, two uncles and 17-year-old cousin were slain. “We asked KFOR to come here, to be based here, but they didn’t come.”

Like most of the Serbs who have remained in Kosovo since NATO-led peacekeepers began arriving June 12, residents here live in a segregated village. They are so fearful of revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians that they rarely travel the mile or so to the larger town of Lipljan to shop. Villagers tell of residents who have gone missing, such as Petar Ristic, who disappeared a few weeks ago when he took milk to the Lipljan market.

Many Serbian victims of attacks served in the Yugoslav army and police reserves, said Stojisa Vliguie, the father-in-law of one of the farmers slain Friday. But they had no choice: They were conscripted.

“Those who did the crimes have left,” said Vliguie, who insisted that no one in his village committed crimes during the spring, when Yugoslav forces drove more than 1 million ethnic Albanians from their homes.

On Saturday, KFOR leaders vowed to step up patrols in Serbian villages. But Jackson, the commander, said his soldiers can’t be everywhere at once.

“I regret those deaths bitterly, but I go back to the atmosphere of hatred and revenge,” he said. “Responsibility lies with those people who pulled the trigger on those poor farmers.”

Indeed, Kosovo remains a long way away from being at peace.

The number of slayings in Pristina, the provincial capital, is indicative of the level of violence throughout the province, with much of it carried out by ethnic Albanians against Serbs. (North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops have killed eight Kosovars and injured three in what the soldiers say have been cases of self-defense.)

In the past three weeks, 60 victims have entered the city hospital’s morgue, including the farmers. The latest victims, zippered into 14 thin, white vinyl bags, still lay on the concrete floor early Saturday evening because the morgue was full. Only one bag was opened: An old man with a bullet wound through his chin could be seen.

Cracking down on the ubiquitous supply of arms in Kosovo has been a priority for KFOR soldiers, who have confiscated thousands of guns, land mines, bullets and mortars from routine searches of homes and cars, though there is no law against having arms here.

On Saturday, Jackson said he was “broadly satisfied” with compliance by the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army rebels with a pact they made a month ago to turn over 30% of their small automatic weapons, such as pistols. Jackson wouldn’t say how many had been turned in by Saturday’s deadline, and he acknowledged that peacekeepers have no way to independently verify how many arms the KLA had and still has.

Jackson’s forces have been intent on turning the KLA from guerrilla fighters into a political force. But the Serbs view KLA members as terrorists, and seeing them fraternize with alliance and U.N. leaders only intensifies the Serbs’ worst fears. Many assume that the KLA is responsible for Friday’s slayings.

But Agim Ceku, a senior KLA leader, condemned the killings. “Those who did this surely do not wish anything good for the KLA,” he said during a news conference Saturday with Jackson.

While the United Nations attempts to create from scratch a government, judiciary and police system for the province, NATO soldiers are left to investigate crimes, along with doing everything from controlling traffic and restarting electrical power plants to negotiating the share of jobs that ethnic Albanians and Serbs will hold.

“We have responsibility for all law and order,” said Canadian Lt. Cmdr. Louis Garneau, a KFOR spokesman. “But we need more--we’re a temporary fix, not a long-term solution.”

In the case of the slain farmers, the investigation so far hadn’t produced many leads, a British soldier said Saturday afternoon as he interviewed residents with the aid of a Serbian interpreter.

Most of the victims, who villagers said ranged in age from the teens to 65, were found in a circle, some head down, some head up, at the side of a combine. One villager was found about 150 yards away on a tractor.

NATO officials said the Serbs were shot, and an ethnic Albanian pathologist at the hospital confirms that all had bullet wounds, most of them to the head. Villagers contend that the bodies had been stabbed and run over by a tractor, and that only the one on the tractor had been shot. Autopsies are scheduled to be conducted today.

Vladolt Odalovic, 32, said he escaped death by leaving the field about 4:30 p.m. His younger brother, an unemployed economist operating the combine, wasn’t so lucky. When Andrija Odalovic, 31, failed to return by 7 p.m., the older brother said, he called peacekeeping forces in Lipljan. Several other villagers said they also called.

When KFOR troops didn’t arrive, Odalovic said, he went back to the field to look for the farmers but turned back when he was shot at. His father returned to the field, where he saw the dead man on the tractor. Odalovic and four others drove to the KFOR office in Lipljan to summon help, he said.

KFOR spokesman Garneau disputes that scenario. He said the troops received only one call, at 9 p.m., and dispatched a quick-reaction force to the area. The force arrived about 35 minutes later, he said, heard gunfire and, at 10:10 p.m., discovered the bodies.

Odalovic said two tractors and a trailer full of about 13,000 pounds of harvested wheat were stolen from the site, though one tractor and the combine remained.

The day after the killings, the combine’s engine was still humming, its lights on as if standing sentry over the crime scene.

On a blustery Saturday afternoon, women clad in black with black scarves around their heads sat outside their homes weeping. Despite the tragedy, most of the villagers interviewed said they would remain in the town because they have nowhere else to go.

There are no men left at the home of two brothers killed in the field, Radovan Zivic, 32, and Jovica Zivic, 29, who shared the house along with their wives and seven children ranging in age from 3 months to 8 years. Bokic Ikonija, 65, a neighbor, was at the house Saturday, baby-sitting the children while a doctor gave the new widows sedatives.

Said Ikonija, “People just went out to make some bread and they were killed.”