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Pec revealed their handiwork. Except for a few shuttered apartment blocks and the main square around the Hotel Metohija, the city lay in silent ruin. Whole neighborhoods had been reduced to knee-deep rubble. Not a soul walked the streets. In Kapasnica, the section known as Little Albania, house after house, down every street in every direction, was a vacant husk, broken-walled and covered in soot. The only sound was the screech of jackdaws, the distant scurrying of a mangy dog and the drip, drip, drip of broken water pipes.
A gaunt figure stood outside No. 180 staring at what used to be the home of the 11-member Hasani family. Astrit, 21, one of five known survivors, had braved the empty city to find out how the family compound had fared. Scorch marks scarred the fresh white walls, renovated a year ago, that now rose only head high around debris. "Catastrophe," he said, afraid to enter for fear of booby traps.
Booby-trapping ruins. This was the nature of the Serbian killing machine, where one violent pass was not enough, where bodies could be found with 150 bullets in them. The cleansing of rich, urban centers like Pec was intended to rid the province permanently of large numbers of Kosovars and to destroy the Albanian intellectual and political culture. But Pec was also subject to a special fury. Going far beyond the brutal demands of military tactics or ethnic cleansing. Serbian forces swept through three times, wreaking destruction and expelling Albanians, including a final useless spasm of fury two weeks ago that razed most of the city and surrounding villages when Milosevic was about to surrender. "In Pec," said Astrit Hasani, "it was total vengeance."
The evidence is visible at house No. 19. The house spills its contents across the front porch, out the windows, across the garden. Broken glass mingles with an X ray, torn curtains and a pile of feces in the front hall. Across the long wall in the main room, letters are scrawled, 1 ft. high, in what appears to be blood: NATO AND KILLERS OF SERB BLOOD AND YOU KILL SERB KIDS. The opposite wall is sprayed with blood, and dried puddles stain the floor beneath. Next to the lettering are bloody hand prints.
Serbs took over the neighborhood of Kapasnica as bases for the Yugoslav army and the dreaded paramilitary units known as the "Frenkijevci," or Frenki's Boys, after their reputed leader Franko Simatovic. The shadowy group, say numerous sources, operates under Belgrade's direct control, a kind of special-ops unit run by the secret police. Rumor has it most members are recruited from criminal circles. Frenki's Boys like to dress in black without formal insignia but with a preference for cowboy hats, pigtails and painted faces. In Pec, as in the rest of Kosovo, paramilitary units like Frenki's worked in concert with the VJ and the special-police units, as well as local Serbian civilians who joined in the savagery. All lines led straight back to Belgrade, and this time, unlike in Bosnia, there is no wiggle room for Milosevic to pin the blame for atrocities on "uncontrolled elements" and independent paramilitaries. Here's how Western diplomatic and Serbian sources say it worked: