Authors: Brian Haig
“Of course,” Delbert said, with Morrow nodding along in a very thoughtful way.
“We’ve got corpses, and we’ve got weapons, and we’ve got suspects in detention. What don’t we have?”
“Motive,” Delbert said.
“Right,” I said, playing the obnoxious law professor to the full hilt.
T
he flight to Albania took about two hours. We had to wind down the coastline of Bosnia, then veer sharply to the left. Albania itself is a small place, very poor, filled with dilapidated Stalinist architecture, which never was known for its splendor or its charm, and lots of shabbily dressed people. The Albanians are called the Bird People because they live largely in mountains. They’re known pretty much throughout Europe as somewhat touchy folks, particularly since they have this quaint old custom, called a blood feud, which dictates that if anyone kills an Albanian, then the family of the victim inherits an obligation to start knocking off the killer’s family. Sometimes these blood quests pass down through five or six generations, and I figured there must be something in the mountain air, because to me that sounds an awful lot like West Virginia.
At any rate, aside from this sedulous custom, the Albanians are not known for a heck of a lot. They invented the necktie. They were led before World War Two by a guy named King Zog, who, as his name implies, was not your ordinary run-of-the-mill royalty figure, but a guy with a big handlebar mustache who rode around the country with bandoleers strapped across his shoulders, marrying exotic foreign beauties and doing pretty much what he wished. Then they were led, during the cold war, by a guy named Enver Hoxha, who was so obnoxiously paranoid that he built concrete pillboxes on nearly every single acre in the country and placed long upright poles in all the fields to keep assaulting helicopters or parachutists from landing. More bizarre still, he actually allied Albania with Red China, which had to be one of the most moronic geostrategic gestures in history. Not surprisingly, Albania ended up the poorest and loneliest country in Europe.
But, in spite of all this, or maybe because of all this, the Albanians are a fairly tough and hardy folk. They don’t mess with others, and they don’t expect to be messed with in return.They’re surprisingly hospitable folks, too. And brave and determined as well, which was partly the cause of the current difficulty, because the shaky history of the Balkans being what it is, lots of Albanians ended up living in other places, like Macedonia and Kosovo.
Kosovo is kind of a Serb’s Jerusalem, filled with old Orthodox shrines and historically significant places, and although only some 10 percent of the people who live there could claim even a drop of Serbian blood, selfish old Billy Milosevic had decided to rid the land of Albanians, either by killing them or driving them over the mountains into neighboring Macedonia or Albania.
We landed with a mighty series of whumps on a roughed-in airstrip about fifteen miles south of the Kosovar border. Once again, a humvee was standing by when we climbed off the plane, and a Special Forces major named Willis was waiting in the front seat to escort us to a refugee camp, inelegantly named Camp Alpha.
This wasn’t my first introduction to refugee misery. I’d seen similar sights after the Gulf War, when thousands of Kurds and Shiites fled south into Kuwait to try to escape the wrath of Saddam’s Revolutionary Guards. Delbert and Morrow, however, developed an instant case of the wide-eyes, as the troops call it. The wide-eyes are about 30 percent horror, 30 percent pity, and the rest pure guilt.
“You get used to it,” Major Willis said as we drove past row after row of hastily constructed tents, crammed with mostly old men, old women, mothers, and young children. There were very few young men, and many of those we saw were either wearing bandages or missing limbs. Everybody, young and old alike, looked gaunt, hungry, and unhappy. Judging by the smell in the camp, it seemed obvious that two things they were woefully short of were showers and toilets.
“How many are in here?” Delbert asked.
“We’re not sure,” our guide answered. “It kind of shifts from day to day. Sometimes it goes up by a few hundred, sometimes a few thousand.”
“How do you know how many to feed?” Morrow asked. “The UN caregivers handle all that. There’s no science to it, though. They adjust up as a result of how many people are left in the chow line when the food runs out. You’ll meet the lady who’s in charge of all that. Later.”
We pulled into a small compound surrounded by barbed wire, with two armed guards at the front gate. They recognized Willis and immediately waved us through.
“Our training compound,” Willis announced.
We dismounted and walked into a large tent, where a mixture of Green Berets and Albanians in makeshift uniforms were running what appeared to be an operations center. Willis led us over to a table in the rear and offered us coffee, which we naturally accepted, because real soldiers live on coffee, and we didn’t want to be mistaken for lawyers or anything as shameful as that.
“This is one of three operations centers we’ve set up for training the Kosovar Liberation Army,” Willis said.“The KLA was already fighting the Serbs before NATO started its bombing campaign, but the Serbs rolled right over them. Frankly, the KLA was pretty small, since lots of Kosovar Albanians thought it was doing a lot more harm than good.”
“Why was that?” Morrow asked.
“One of those lamb-being-led-to-the-slaughter things. Like the Jews before the Second World War, you know, kind of hoping the wolf wasn’t really as bad as all that. Lots of Kosovar Albanians thought the KLA fighters were agitating Milosevic and his boys, so they just wanted ’em to stop.”
“Were they?”
“Nah. They were hardly more than a nuisance, but Milosevic was exploiting them to justify his ethnic cleansing. After what he and his thugs did in Bosnia, you wouldn’t think anyone would’ve fallen for his lies, but hope always springs eternal, right?”
“How large is the KLA now?” Delbert asked.
“Maybe five or six thousand, all told.”
“Only five or six thousand? That’s hardly a pinprick.” “Right, well, the Serbs have been real selective in the way they’ve done their cleansing. About any Albanian male who looks old enough to hump a gun, they take ’em into the woods, shoot ’em, and bury ’em. Real practical, those Serbs. Guess they figure that if they wipe out this generation of Albanian men, they’ll get a bye on vengeance till the next crop gets old enough to fight. Anyway, we try to recruit whatever eligible survivors make it out.”
“That hard to do?” Delbert asked.
“Nope. Hard part’s keepin’ ’em here long enough to teach ’em a few things before they go runnin’ back into Kosovo to start killin’ Serbs. They’re pretty stoked up with hate when they get here.”
“Do they make good soldiers?” I asked.
Willis glanced furtively around the operations center to be sure he wasn’t overheard by any of the Albanians working there. “The Serb army’s been fighting about nine years now and understands this kind of war pretty good. Most of these Albanians haven’t got a clue. A few months ain’t much time.”
We all pondered that a moment.
“Tell ya what, though,” he added,“guts ain’t the problem. The American press don’t know much about what’s happenin’ on the other side of that border”—he pointed his hand in a northerly direction—“but lotsa these Albanians we’re training are dyin’ up there.”
“Did Sanchez’s team operate out of this camp?” I asked. “Nope. Sanchez and his guys worked out of Camp Charlie, maybe forty clicks east of here. All the camps are pretty much alike, though. Seen one, seen ’em all.” He looked at his watch. “If you wanta spend a little time with the UN folks, we’d better get moving. Only free time they got’s between meals.”
We walked out of the operations center and clambered back into the humvee, then drove by more tents to another fenced compound. This one had no flags or guards, just a tiny little sign that said UNHCR, which was the acronym for the United Nations organization that shifts around from one disaster area to the next, trying to care for the world’s most miserable people.
A wiry, birdlike woman about fifty waited for us by the front entrance. She climbed in beside us as we pulled up, then directed the driver to take us back to the middle of the camp. She spoke English with a heavy French accent, and Willis told us her name, but the only part I caught was her first name, which was Marie.
She and Willis seemed to know each other pretty well. The two of them sat comfortably side by side without saying anything, like an old married couple who’re content to just quietly enjoy each other’s company, particularly in the presence of strangers. That was what they were like.
Delbert and Morrow still had the wide-eyes, which in most cases I’d seen tends to last up to a week. After that, the sight of such omnipresent misery becomes just an everyday fact of life, and the nerves sort of get all the oxygen sucked out of them. We finally came to a bunch of tents that were encircled by wire, and there was a big red cross in front. We got out of the crowded humvee and stood there.
Marie said, “New refugees are brought first to this station for medical processing. To get across the border and reach this camp, they must complete a very dangerous and arduous trek across the mountains. At this time of the year, many arrive with frostbite and mild hypothermia. Also, many have wounds inflicted by the Serbs.”
She turned around and led us into the first tent, talking as she walked. A long line of doleful-looking Albanians waited by the entrance, and as we walked in, we saw five or six stations where doctors were inspecting people using stethoscopes and prods and various other medical implements.
“This is the processing tent. Here our doctors inspect their wounds and sort them out for later treatment,” she said as she led us over to a little girl who was lying on a cot. The little girl was filthy, her clothes ragged and torn. A woman who looked about fifty, but on closer inspection was probably just a hard-lived thirty, was huddled over the child, while a doctor made notes in a journal of some sort.
Marie and the doctor exchanged words in French for a minute or so, while all of us stared at the little girl, who seemed to be in a waking coma, wide-eyed but unseeing.
“The girl is twelve,” Marie finally turned and explained to us. “Her mother says a Serb militia unit came to their house late one night about a week ago. Her mother recognized two or three of the men from the village, men she had known from her own childhood. They broke down her door and dragged her little girl and her two sisters from the house, out into the yard. They raped them. She says the rapes went on for hours, about twenty men taking turns. This little girl screamed through the first five men, then fell silent as they kept coming. When they were done, they shot her sisters. The mother does not know why they spared the little one, but they left her there, with her mother, and gave them two days to be gone, or they promised they would come back and do it again.”
We then moved to the next doctor. He had a stethoscope on the chest of an old man whose feet were wrapped in rags but who was sitting on a metal table, stoically enduring his checkup. Again, Marie and the doctor exchanged words, while we stood there trying our best not to appear like a bunch of pathetic Peeping Toms in the midst of these suffering people and those who ministered to their horrors.
Marie again turned to us. “This man was swept up by the Serb police about three weeks ago. They imprisoned him with about two hundred other men for about fourteen days. Then they began taking them out, one by one, for interrogation. He said that for several days he could hear the sounds of horrible screams before his turn came. He was led into the basement of the police station. The walls were covered with blood, and a pile of body parts, fingers and toes, had been swept into a corner. He said that nobody cut anything off him. He was lucky, he said. They took heavy metal truncheons and beat him for an hour or two. He says he knew nothing. They knew after the first few minutes that he knew nothing, but they kept beating him anyway.”
As Marie spoke, our eyes were fixed on the old man, who coughed a few times, and we could see blood drip through his fingers every time he tried to cover his mouth.
“The doctor says it’s a miracle he made it out alive. He and the other prisoners were finally taken out to the woods. A machine gun was set up and the bodies began falling all around him. He grabbed his stomach as though he had been shot and flung himself backward, landing among a bunch of bodies, then used his hands to scoop some of their blood onto himself.When the Serbs came through and began killing the wounded, he fooled them. He crawled off after it became dark, then walked for three days until he arrived here.”
She then led us out of the tent, and we paused before the next tent. In a matter-of-fact tone she said, “The old man won’t last another two days. He has severe internal bleeding. His left arm is broken in at least three places, there is a hole in his lungs, and there is a very good chance a kidney is burst.”
“What will you do with him?” I stupidly asked.
“We will move him into a tent we reserve for the dying. We will give him morphine shots and try to make his death as pleasant as possible. He has a fever of 41 degrees, probably because of internal infections. He knows he is dying. He suffered terribly to come this far so he could die with his own people.”
“What about the little girl?” Morrow asked.
Again matter-of-factly, she said, “We have a rape counselor, but that girl would require years of intensive treatment with real professionals to heal. Girls raised in such rustic circumstances mature much faster than in our societies, so there’s a possibility she’s pregnant, too. At least we can do something about that. Her mother asked us to examine her and perform an abortion if there’s a fetus.”
And so it went for the next hour as we wandered through tent after tent, dropping in on one godawful case after another, and I have to confess that I felt like some kind of a shameful voyeur, spying on these people’s miseries and horrors.