Evidence of a Serbian bloodbath in Kosovo is building. NATO aerial photographs of possible mass graves released last week and a stream of refugee accounts have bolstered claims of atrocities inside the sealed-off province. According to Andre Lommen, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Albania, some of the worst killings may have occurred in a band of villages in southwest Kosovo, near the town of Rahovec . Zhuniqi was one of four survivors of an alleged execution of perhaps a total of 60 people–most from one ethnic Albanian clan–between the villages of Bellacerka and Xerxe by a railroad bridge at 9 a.m. on March 25. He and three other eyewitnesses who fled from Kosovo last week were interviewed, individually, by NEWSWEEK and Human Rights Watch in and around the town of Kukes, Albania. Their testimony provides the most compelling evidence yet of acts of mass murder during the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo. The Serbs have never addressed the issue of killings but claim the Kosovars are fleeing NATO bombings, not the Yugoslav Army.
At 3 a.m. on March 25, Zhuniqi and his family were awakened by the din of Yugoslav Army tanks rolling in. “The Serbs began burning houses with flamethrowers and gasoline,” says Nexhima Zhuniqi, the wife of Isuf Zhuniqi’s cousin Berhare. Around sunrise , “everyone in the village fled south toward the Bellaj stream, about 500 meters to the south.” About 800 people were gathered around a cement railroad bridge sometime before 8 a.m. when the police closed in.
From beneath the bridge , Sevdie Zhuniqi, 60, watched as Serb police shot dead at point-blank range two men from the village, their wives and a total of nine children. Then the police " amassed us in a field beside the water, and separated the men from the women and children," she recalls.
The Serbs ordered women and children to follow the railroad tracks to Xerxe. Among them was Sevdie Zhuniqi’s son Berhare, 29, a slight man who was able to hide himself within the women’s group. As the women hurried away, the village doctor– Bellacerka’s most respected citizen– addressed the Serb captain. “The captain had a pinched, puckered face, with some deep dimples. It was a face I can never forget,” Isuf Zhuniqi says. “Nesim Popaj, the doctor, was begging, ‘Please, we have nothing to do with this war. We are peaceful people.’ While he was talking, the captain said, ‘Move away one meter,’ and when the doctor stepped back, he shot him, with three bullets in the chest. It killed him instantly.” Walking to Xerxe, the women heard a long fusillade. “All the women cried, ‘They killed our husbands’,” says Sevdie Zhuniqi. “I kept walking. "
Isuf Zhuniqi lay in the water for 20 minutes until he was certain the Serb police had left. Then he climbed from beneath the pile of corpses and crept through dense brush to Xerxe, 500 meters along the stream. He says he saw Serb police gun down another nine men from Bellacerka . A local nurse in Xerxe treated his wound. Two nights later, before escaping to Albania, he returned with a small group to bury the dead according to Kosovar custom. “I just went to see them,” he says, “because they are all my family. It was the last time I would be able to see them.”
