falcon. It was on the eve of a great battle with the Turks, and Lazar had gathered around him, on the plains of Kosovo, much of the Balkan military elite: Bosnian warlords, Albanian noblemen, and Hungarian horsemen with shamanic bones sewn onto their uniforms. Lazar was understandably nervous—the Turks had wiped out an entire Serb army eighteen years earlier—and wondered if it might not be better to retreat and fight again another day. St. Ilija gave Lazar the choice between a kingdom on earth and a kingdom in heaven; Lazar, wisely choosing the kingdom in heaven, went on to meet his death at the hands of the Turks.
The battle became known as the Battle of Kosovo Polje—the Blackbird Field—and it occupies a particularly fevered part of the Serb psyche. It was on Kosovo Polje that a Serb leader first chose death over subjugation; it was on Kosovo Polje that the guiding maxim of the Serb people, “Only unity saves the Serbs,” was first acted out in all its bloody glory.
Nearly six hundred years after the battle, Slobodan Milosevic, the man responsible for igniting the entire Balkan conflict, would stand on the ancient battlefield and whip a crowd of angry Serbs into a nationalist frenzy. “Yugoslavia does not exist without Kosovo!” he yelled, instantly catapulting himself to the top of the political heap. “Yugoslavia would disintegrate without Kosovo!”
Kosovo is not the birthplace of the Serb people, however. The original Serbs migrated southward from Saxony and what is now the Czech Republic in the sixth century A.D. and didn’t settle permanently in Kosovo for another six hundred years. The high-water mark of the Serb empire came in the 1330s, when a brutal nobleman named Stefan Dusan defeated his own father in battle, had him strangled, and then went on to extend his empire throughout Kosovo and into Greece. He built numerous Orthodox monasteries and churches and eventually had himself crowned emperor of the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Albanians.
The empire didn’t survive his own death, though; within decades the Turks defeated the Serbs at Kosovo Polje, and three hundred years after that the Turks put down another uprising so ruthlessly that most Serbs fled Kosovo. The void they left behind was filled by the Albanians, who drifted back down out of the mountains with their wild, hill people ways.
Traditional Albanian society was based on a clan system and was further divided into brotherhoods and
Feuds in this part of the world inevitably break out over offenses to a man’s honor, which include calling him a liar, insulting his female relatives, violating his hospitality, or stealing his weapons. Tradition dictates that these transgressions be avenged by killing any man in the offender’s family, which creates another round of violence. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, one in five adult male deaths was the result of a blood feud, and in Albania today, it is said, a tradition still exists whereby you must kill one man for every bullet in the body of your dead kin.
Seen in the context of the code of male honor, the Serb police have violated just about every blood feud rule in existence, including the killing of women—a provocation above all others. It’s no wonder they have such a hard time maintaining control of Kosovo.
The Kosovars were granted autonomy at the end of World War II, but then aspiring President Milosevic had the autonomy revoked in 1989, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the recent war in Bosnia and Croatia, failed to address the issue of Kosovo’s status. Inevitably, an independence movement was born, funded by a voluntary 3 percent income tax given by the Albanian diaspora and supported by groups in Albania proper.
The first armed clashes in Kosovo were reported during the summer of 1995, and within two years the KLA was strong enough to force a column of Serb armored vehicles to retreat from Drenica. After that the Serbs began a slow buildup of police and heavy weapons in Kosovo and on the Albanian border, culminating in the attack on Prekaz.
If anything, the massacres have radicalized the youth of Kosovo. The Serbs have already spent an estimated six billion dollars controlling the province. In some ways, they couldn’t have engineered a worse domestic problem if they’d tried; in some ways, they fell right into the KLA trap.
The next morning dawned cold and gray, with a mean little wind blowing trash down the streets; the cafes in town were completely empty. We packed the car and drove out of the city by a different route, hoping to drive into Drenica over some dirt roads that skirted the Serb checkpoints outside Prekaz. We wanted to see the villages that were getting shelled. The Serb government had bowed to international pressure and agreed to resolve the dispute through diplomacy, but meanwhile it was hammering the villages with rocket and artillery fire.
We had no problems at the first checkpoint—just the usual guns in our faces. But at the second one a police officer in an army jump-suit stormed over and ordered us out of the car. He was young, clean-shaven, and handsome in the way that Serb men often are: black hair, light skin, pale blue eyes. “You journalists are all spies!” he screamed at Harald. “You always make Serbs look bad! If I had my way, I’d tear the skin right off your faces!” He ripped the passports out of Harald’s hands and studied them while unloading a steady stream of hate. The guards were all standing around us with their machine guns leveled at our bellies. Finally the head cop came over and handed my passport back to me. “We know where you live,” he said darkly. “Write the truth or we’ll find you and kill you.”
As checkpoints go, it could have been worse—far worse. Albanian translators have been arrested and beaten at checkpoints, and the day before the attack on Prekaz, Harald and three other journalists were punched, dragged into a bunker, and questioned for an hour. When the police saw that Harald lived in Sarajevo, they accused him of being a Muslim—the predominant Albanian religion—and Harald had to prove he wasn’t by making the sign of the cross. Then the cops started going through Harald’s notebooks, demanding a translation of every word that was written down.
At one point, a cop spotted the name Frenki Simatovic in Harald’s notebook, then turned to his friend and said, “Look, he even has the name of our boss in here.” Harald had no idea who Simatovic was; he’d just written the name down during an interview and filed it away for future reference. Then they demanded to know if any of the reporters had ever been to a town called Prekaz. They kept asking over and over again: “Prekaz? Prekaz? Have any of you motherfuckers ever been to Prekaz?”
Prekaz is such a small town that before the massacre, people in Pristina—a city half an hour away—had never heard of it. Harald just kept pleading ignorance, but when the Serbs finally released him, he called his editors and told them to be on the lookout. “I have no idea where it is; it’s not on the maps,” he said. “But something’s about to happen there. Just check the wires for a town called Prekaz.”
The next morning the first shells started to fall.
Back in 1991, as Yugoslavia began its descent into the hell of civil war, the newly elected Milosevic had a somewhat delicate problem on his hands. He wanted to drive the Croats and Muslims out of large swaths of Yugoslavia, but he didn’t dare send the Yugoslav Army to do it.
The solution he came up with was simple. First, he surrounded himself with a trio of rabid nationalists— Jovica Stanisic, Radovan Stojicic, and Frano (“Frenki”) Simatovic—known collectively as the Vojna Linija, or the Military Line. The Vojna Linija had little association with the Serb Army; it was a shadowy group within the Ministry of Interior Affairs, which was known as the MUP. After the Vojna Linija was established, Milosevic began arming local Serb populations in Croatia and Bosnia, and training paramilitary forces. The weapons, distributed by Stojicic and Simatovic, were taken from police and army depots. The paramilitary forces simply came out of the country’s jails.
According to Marko Nicovic, a former Belgrade police chief who later had a falling-out with Milosevic, convicts were told that their sentences would be suspended if they went to the front lines. Many were only too happy to oblige. The best-known groups were the White Eagles of Vojislav Seselj, a virulent conservative later named to the Belgrade government; the Red Berets of Frenki Simatovic; the unnamed forces of Captain Dragan; and—worst of all—the Tigers of Zeljko Raznatovic. Arkan, as Raznatovic was known, was wanted by Interpol for bank robberies and murders committed throughout Europe.
