The horror stays locked in Gentiana Gashi's mind. Her eyes are red-ringed holes in a pinched, exhausted face. She came home safely to Cuska last week, but she is still harrowed by the unspeakable memories of May 14, the day she left. Back then, she stood beside her weeping mother, too terrified to cry out, as she watched the Serbs march her father away with the other men, hands clasped behind his neck. He looked back once, tears streaming down his face. Gentiana's mother wept silently too as she watched her husband's retreating figure until laughing Serbs herded the women out of the village, elbowing them with sly smirks, singing obscene songs. That night when the women slipped back into Cuska, it was Gentiana who picked through the charred pieces of bodies inside three smoldering houses to find the remains of her father. She used to give him massages, she said. Ten men had died in that house, but when her fingers touched a familiar torso, "I knew his back, so he was my dad."
To save her mother from the hideous sight, Gentiana helped three women gather up the human debris of her father and 34 relatives and neighbors into little bags. They tagged each with a name and buried them in two communal graves. Then all those who had survived fled, some to the hills above the town of Pec, some to Albania, anywhere away from the Serbian brutality.
Gentiana Gashi is 11 years old.
Under a hot sun broken by violent summer showers, Kosovo is waking to a midsummer's nightmare. The sickly sweet smell of decaying flesh hangs in invisible clouds across the province, and the ground offers up body parts. Bits of ashen bone--a thigh, a rib cage--and chunks of roasted flesh litter the floors of burned-out houses. Corpses, left where they fell, putrefy in fields and farmyards amid the buzzing of flies and the howling of stray dogs. As the first of Kosovo's Albanian refugees stream back across the borders or down from hiding in the hills, they are discovering just how pitiless a charnel house Serbian forces made of Kosovo.
But new life is blossoming. As the peacekeepers of KFOR steadily pushed their heavy tanks and APCs into the province last week, refugees from Albania and Macedonia followed right behind, heading home from rapidly emptying camps in cars crammed with family members, in tractor-drawn carts sagging under their loads, on foot, pushing wheelbarrows laden with bedding and babies. Uprooted Kosovars who had lived rough in the woods crept back to their villages through fields of blood-red poppies. Gun-toting soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army, smart in pressed camouflage, swaggered into cities and towns, posting guards along roads, securing villages house by house. And straggling before them along the roads leading north went the convoys of frightened Kosovar Serbs. They were heading into a bitter, unpromising exile along with the defiant Yugoslav troops in green or blue or black uniforms who had treated Kosovo to their savagery. Despite NATO promises of impartial safety, few Serbs wanted to test KFOR's protection against the reprisals they expected from vengeful Albanians.