The New York Times

Wednesday, June 23, 1999

ATROCITIES

Mass Grave, Now Empty, Called Massacre Evidence

By JOHN KIFNER

JAKOVICA, Yugoslavia -- Serbian forces dug up the bodies of some 100 Albanian Kosovars from a mass grave here in late May and carried the bodies off, the municipal official in charge of burials said Tuesday.

"They dug all night, from 7 o'clock until 5 in the morning," said Faton Polloshka, the director of Cabrati, the city sanitation agency. "They used a backhoe, and eight of our workers were taken to help them."

The killings occurred during what Polloshka described as "terrible massacres between the 7th and 10th of May." He said his workers collected the dead and buried about 100 people in the municipal cemetery on May 14. On May 22, he said, they were exhumed. He did not provide details on how or where the victims were killed.

''Every dead body was taken by the Serbs," he said. ''We don't know where they were taken."

A large brown patch of dug-up earth -- roughly 10 yards wide and twenty-five yards long -- was apparent in the municipal cemetery Tuesday afternoon in the place that Polloshka indicated. The earth was mostly raw and still soft, indicating it had been dug fairly recently, but enough time had passed for a few tufts of grass to sprout.

Under a dark gray rainy sky, bits of blankets and clothing could be seen poking up here and there in the turned-up ground. On a piece of red plastic, someone had placed six pieces of human bones, apparently found in the area. A small flute, its holes caked with mud, was found at the edge of the patch.

Nearby, there were scars in the grass where it appeared that the supporting feet of the backhoe had been placed. Four rubber gloves were scattered on the ground nearby.

The latest disclosure of disappeared bodies came as investigators from the International War Crimes Tribunal, journalists and human rights researchers fanned further out through Kosovo finding more and more evidence of graves and widespread destruction. The war crimes investigators were seen concentrating particularly on a 10-mile stretch of the highway between here and Prizren, around Velika Krusa (Krush-e-Madhe in Albanian) where refugees have reported a series of massacres in late March.

Here in Djakovica, besides the leveling of the picturesque Ottoman-era Old Town, virtually every shop in the city has been destroyed, including a well-designed new market place and, U.N. relief officials estimate, about a third of the dwellings are uninhabitable.

The killing of the 100 people described by Polloshka occurred weeks after the Serbian forces pushed through Djakovica in March,

Polloshka, who has been responsible for keeping the city clean, including burying the dead, since 1985, has managed to keep a record of the names and occupations of the 140 other people his teams buried since the Serbs began their rampage here around midnight on March 24, the night the NATO bombing began. He has turned the records over to human rights organizations.

"They were found in their houses, dead, they were massacred," he said of the city's dead. "Many of the bodies were carbonized.

''In the case of the family Vesa, by the billiard hall" he said, ''from 21 bodies, there was hardly enough to make one grave. That was our most tragic case, but we found different bodies in other houses. There was no dead body in a house that wasn't burned."

But, Polloshka, an ethnic Albanian, said he still could not get the names of the roughly 100 people who were killed in early May.

He said the Serbian forces rousted people out of the Cabrat neighborhood, between the Old Town and a ridge of hills at the edge of the city that residents said had been a base for the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army.

About 700 men from the city, along with about 300 from outlying areas, were taken into custody by the Serbs and carried off to an unknown fate. What has happened to these captives is a major concern of people here. Many believe they have been taken to Serbian prisons, possibly in Leskovc or Krusevc.

More bodies continued to turn up around the countryside. In the village of Dvorane, several miles east of Suva Reka in southern Kosovo, half a dozen Albanian men stood in a chilly rain Tuesday looking down into a pit about 10 feet deep. Villagers said a well had been there, but it was apparently excavated by a backhoe; the stones that once lined the well's walls were stacked up beside two huge mounds of dirt.

At the rear of one mound lay two brown shoes, one of which still had a sock tucked inside with what appeared to be part of a decomposing foot. Hotem Kolgeci, 45, from the nearby village of Vranic, said Serbian soldiers had killed 22 civilians -- men ranging from 17 to 48 years old -- in the village of Bukos on May 2. Two days later, he said, two trucks picked up the bodies and brought them to the hole.

NATO soldiers have asked villagers not to search for bodies in the well, which they say is another 12 feet deep.

"We don't know what's in there," Kolgeci said. "But it must be something."