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What matters in Kosovo now is an accounting of what happened during the 78 days when Serbs rampaged through the province while NATO bombs were falling. Everyone has a tale of brutality to tell. The stories numb with their awful sameness. Yet as individual tales multiply, they form the shameful mosaic of a season of slaughter that spread across all Kosovo. The evidence before our own eyes is damning. So many Albanians have lost husbands, brothers, wives or children. Nearly everyone has lost his or her home and most possessions. The scale of the terror that is emerging--possibly 10,000 killed, as many as 100 mass grave sites at latest NATO count--leaves little room right now for any emotion but horror.
The striking similarity of the accounts reinforces their credibility and confirms the calculated nature of the atrocities. And last week, as a team of TIME reporters spent days in and around Pec (prewar pop. 100,000), it was possible to discern method in the Serbs' awful madness. Kosovo, the evidence suggests, was razed by a killing machine on orders that stretched directly from Yugoslavia's commander in chief Slobodan Milosevic to the armed thug on the streets. The stories of Pec reveal in miniature how the entire plan worked.
One might be tempted to write off Kosovo as just another Balkan bloodletting. But if the U.S. is to take seriously its credo of humanitarian intervention, politicians and the public need to understand how and why people in the supposedly civilized world fall prey to animal violence. Kosovo has bred fresh hatreds that will lie unresolved beneath every political and social change the West tries to make in this corner of Europe. And we are faced once again this century with the tasks of assigning individual blame for horrors committed in the name of national policy, and determining how best to bring the guilty to justice.
THE KILLING MACHINE AT WORK
The hunters drove out of Kosovo as the people they once hunted drove in. Stuck in a 12-mile-long convoy, Marinko sat atop his army tank surveying the exodus with the cold, dead eyes of a four-year veteran of the Yugoslav army. Marinko is a Kosovar Serb, and he concedes no defeat. "I will take my parents to Belgrade, relieve myself of military duties and return to my home in Pec," he said. "This is all I have. And if the Albanians want to come and take it from me, then let them make my day. I'll kill them. It will be guerrilla war." A ranking commander of the MUP--the Serbian special police--he seemed almost proud as he watched his men pack up for their inglorious retreat. "We worked closely here in March to clean up the terrorists [K.L.A.]," he bragged. And then he explained the awful tactics of destruction: "The paramilitary would go in first, the MUP would mop, and the VJ [Yugoslav army] would stand as the rear guard of the operation." There were different orders for all commands, he said as he took a pull on a cool orange Fanta. "We all worked in synchronicity. I alone killed 500 [alleged K.L.A. soldiers]." As for the killing of civilians, he added, "there are wacky members in every unit. And you just don't have the time to control them."