![]() There was a human leg in the grass, and then another leg, and then more remains in a ditch. After 20 minutes or so, he led us back into the hot sun of the hayfield and past the compost heap where the men had been shot. He just kept smiling and smoking the American cigarettes we offered him. While telling the story, he seemed undisturbed by the massacres, his own close call, or even the body at his feet. Bashkim escaped the roundup of men in the valley because he was in an isolated house that the Serbs missed. ![]() Wheat and hay fields gave way to brush-covered hills and then the Koritnik Mountains, which run along the Albanian border. Meja was just a scattering of tile-roofed farmhouses along a dirt road in the middle of a broad agricultural valley. They recognized him from Gypsy Road, about five kilometers from here.” One of them was called Stari all the women saw him. They were wearing green camouflage and black ski masks. Then they set them on fire.… It was local militia from Gjakovë. “They made 200 people lie down against a compost heap, piled cornhusks on them, and then machine-gunned them. “They came at five a.m.-not shooting, just yelling,” Bashkim said. The shepherd identified himself as Bashkim he was a handsome blond kid with a wispy goatee and a shy smile that never left his face. Then they came back in the middle of the night to bury them. They’d taken the men from more than half a dozen little villages and gunned them down in a field outside of Meja. ![]() The Serbs had swept the valley from Junik to Gjakovë in retaliation for an attack by the Kosovo Liberation Army, which for two years has fought for independence for Kosovo. The young man who had led us there leaned on a shepherd’s crook and told us that the dead man was in his early 20s and had probably come from a nearby village. He’d been killed two months earlier-on April 27, around midday-and he looked less like a person than a tipped-over hat rack draped in blue jeans and a cheap parka. I had walked into the thicket braced for the worst, but he wasn’t particularly hard to look at. The sweater was still tied around his leg. His skull was broken open and his jawbone was a short distance away. It was a hot day, and my photographer and I stood peering at his corpse, in the same mottled shade that the man had tried to hide in. I saw the dead man in late June, two weeks after nato had taken Kosovo from the Serbs. (Man is a wolf to man.) -Plautus, Asinaria. It was the only distinctive thing on him, and there was a chance that someone might recognize it. His killers took his shoes, and-months later, after the war ended-a fellow Albanian took his belt buckle and brought it to the authorities in Gjakovë. Either way, they eventually spotted him and shot him in the chest, and he fell backward into the streambed. Maybe he was too badly hurt to keep moving, or maybe he didn’t dare because the Serbs were already along the edge of the field. He tied a sweater around the wound in his thigh and waited. It didn’t offer much of a chance, and he must have known that. ![]() The thicket stretched uphill, along the hayfield, to a stand of pine trees, and from there it was all woods and fields leading to the Albanian border. There was a dry streambed in there, and he probably crouched in the shadows, listening to the bursts of machine-gun fire and trying to figure out a way to escape. It must have missed the bone, because he was able to keep going-along the edge of a hayfield and then into another swath of scrub oak and locust. He broke and ran when the Serbs started shooting, and he made it to a thicket before the first bullet hit him in the left leg. ![]() No one knows who he was, but he almost got away. ![]()
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