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Also Today

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Among Suhareka's vineyards, a girl, perhaps 15, perhaps 19, lies spread-eagle in a clearing. No one knows her name; probably she was a refugee from another village. There is no clothing. Her hair, long and black, pools beneath a skull charred by the sun, teeth clenched in agony. Her body, obviously young, has burst, maggot-ridden. Worse still are her fingernails, painted scarlet red, unchipped, the perfection of a great beauty. Dead two weeks, she was led here, raped, her throat slit, not necessarily in that order, and left as she lies. One imagines her not begging for her life.

Also Today Heroes of horror Risking snipers, facing sights so dreadful that they weep along with the victims' families, forensics teams from around the world -- including a team from the FBI -- are performing the heartbreaking, essential task of recording Serbian atrocities in Kosovo.

Hundreds died in Suhareka. In household gardens rest human skulls, femurs, teeth. In the bedrooms of houses torched by Serbs, couples lie burnt in their beds. In a nearby village off the road, nine bodies -- still unidentified -- lie in a puzzle of limbs at the bottom of a well.

Among Suhareka's killing fields lives Muharren Shala, age 47, although he shouldn't. On March 25, the day after NATO began bombing, Shala was shot five times by local Serbian militia members and left for dead beneath a pile of friends and neighbors. He is one of the few victims of Serbian massacres who is able to tell his story. When asked if he would do so, he hesitates, glancing skyward, wringing his hands. Thus far he has spoken to no one about this but family.

Then he nods, assenting, recalling a hasty pledge among his now-dead neighbors -- made on the off chance that anyone survived -- to make what happened known.

At 5:30 a.m. on March 24, Shala says, 30 to 40 militia members -- a ragtag platoon of local Serbs deputized by a notorious paramilitary leader named Mishko Niskovic -- rounded up 14 ethnic Albanian men from three neighboring families. Thirty refugees from nearby villages had been previously collected and separated by gender. The men were shoved together with the locals, then told to wait in a house.

Across the road, one girl among the female refugees was stripped of her jewelry and money, then told to run. She obeyed, began to flee, and was shot in the back. Other women were told to do the same and were similarly shot. Shala does not remember how many, but it was many. Then there was quiet again. The Serbs stood smoking in the road. "I could hear the flies," Shala says. The men began to pass cigarettes between themselves. "We told each other we would be killed. We told each other that if someone survived, he should tell what happened."

The Serbs approached them. "You are looking for independence?" one asked, grinning. Shala remembers putting out his cigarette and dropping it into his breast pocket.

Next page | The killing begins