Summer meadow hides Kosovo killing field

It is a normal summer meadow, birdsong, high hedges and lush grass - the only clue to what has been going on here is the human…

It is a normal summer meadow, birdsong, high hedges and lush grass - the only clue to what has been going on here is the human leg, still in its pinstriped trouser and with a black shoe on the foot, lying in the tufts of grass.

Another clue consists of the ashes from three little bonfires around which are gathered the sad fragments of someone's life, apparently lit by the killers to destroy anything not worth stealing.

In each there is a watch, hands frozen. One has a pipe, one has a pair of metal spectacle frames. Bits of identity cards remain - we find three with the numbers, which may be of use later in identification.

But the real horror is lying hidden in the band of thick hedge that runs along the right side of the field. Here, half hidden in dense dark undergrowth, are the bodies. All are men. The man in pinstripes appears to have been dismembered, his leg in one place, his body and arms, with shiny white bone where the hands should be, lying in the bush. Further along is a complete man lying face down, jeans, black leather jacket, although with the head apparently wrenched forwards and around. Another leg lies nearby, a foot, a trouser leg and a yellow hollowed out thing we recognise as a human thigh.

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The Irish Times broke this story on April 29th, after I spent a night on the border listening as the terrible tale unfolded. The refugees were crossing in early morning into Albania from the Serbian customs post 100 metres away. The first group said they had been on the move for two days, and had had their men-folk, perhaps 300, taken from them and herded into a field by Serbs based at Meje. An hour later, a second group arrived. Asked about the men in the field at Meje, they nodded. Yes, they had seen them. But they were dead.

Yesterday I went to Meje, 10 km west of Jakovica, and found the place where they were executed.

A line of deep dark stains marks the places where their blood seeped into the grass. At the top of the line you can see the outline of a body, apparently killed while kneeling. There is where the head rested, there, another dark stain, the body, and there the legs, bent sharply at the knee as if he was executed and had fallen sideways.

How many lay here it is impossible to tell - I counted 33 separate sites - but it appears from the amount of blood in the soil that many were, as those witnesses told me, lying one on top of the other.

The bodies had been lying here in this field for some time - the grass where they lay is flat and yellow. But someone has removed them, and there are tracks from a large vehicle, driven up the narrow track, too wide for it and thus ripping away fence posts.

One man who wants to find out what the Serbs have done with the bodies is Halit Pajziti, a 21-year-old from Dobrosh who has come to this field to search for his brother Cerim and five cousins. "I don't know where they took them, but I am pretty sure they were all here."

Halit survived because instead of coming with his family in the overcrowded tractors from Dobrosh, he went by foot through the mountains.

And passing through Meje yesterday, among the steady stream of returnees from Albania, is a Dobrosh woman, Gjeva Prajazit. "On April 27th the Yugoslav army arrived. They ordered us to leave immediately as they wanted to use our place for an army base."

At 9.30 a.m., hurried by machine-gun fire aimed into the air and the sight of Yugoslav army trucks rumbling towards them, the people of Dobrosh climbed into trailers and drove away. Yet they had been lucky. The army let them go.

At Meje they saw troops in the blue and purple uniforms of the police. Forty Serb police emerged from the one Serbian house on a hill above Meje when the first refugees arrived, at about 11 a.m.

What happened next may one day be read out in a court. "They separated the men from the women and the children," said Gjeva. "They took maybe 300 men, anyone between 16 and 65. They took them into this field and made them sit with their hands on their heads. Then they told us to leave. From there we moved away, to the village of Orizis.

"There were Serb paramilitaries with black masks living there. First they asked for money and gold, then they started beating the people. And then they took some people, maybe 20, whoever was left, and they lined them up and just shot them in front of us. One of them was my son, Haxhi. He was 18."

Back at Meje, a much larger massacre took place. The Dobrosh men-folk were lined up and shot. How many, no one knows, because the Serbs have taken away the bodies and the refugees have yet to make contact with all those who ran to neighbouring countries.

"All dead," said an old man on one tractor, crammed with people and blankets and bags, whom I interviewed in the early hours of April 27th. "They were lying in the field, more than one hundred I would say, all piled up."

Yesterday we left Halit still wandering around the neighbouring fields, seeing if maybe his brother or cousins were rotting under yet another hedge or bush.