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THE SUNDAY TIMES (London)
April 22 2001
April 22 2001
The neighbour who burned with hate
Marie Colvin reports from Djakovica
From the archive: A selection of Marie Colvin's reports | May 21 2000 | January 2, 2000 | September 12, 1999
June 20, 1999
From the archive: A selection of Marie Colvin's reports | May 21 2000 | January 2, 2000 | September 12, 1999
June 20, 1999
In Djakovica, a quaint, cobbled town that used to be home to many of Kosovo's leading writers, artists and intellectuals, Bozhidar Dogancic was a nobody.
He lived near the bus station in a concrete, single-storey house with peeling paint and dirty curtains. His front windows looked out on to a dank garden of earth and weeds, darkened by unkempt trees that hid the property from passers-by.
Dogancic, known in his neighbourhood as Bozho, liked to sit on his porch and drink slivovitz from half-gallon bottles, shouting, singing and talking with friends. What he enjoyed talking about most of all was how much he hated Albanians.
The day before Nato troops entered Kosovo last weekend, Dogancic dumped all the food from his refrigerator into a rotting heap on his living room floor. He could not take it with him and he did not want to leave it for his neighbours. They were Albanians and Dogancic was a Serb.
Dogancic, 65, left Kosovo, knowing he could never return. There was too much blood on his hands.
IN ALMOST any other country, he would have remained nothing more than a resentful loser. Neighbours regarded him as something of a bully and avoided him. He rarely troubled them except when his noisy drinking sessions kept them awake at night.
But this was Kosovo and for 10 years, since Slobodan Milosevic rose to high office with passionate promises to protect the Serbs of Kosovo, Dogancic had also exercised power.
Milosevic rode a wave of Serbian nationalism that led to a decade of war in the Balkans. Dogancic did the same thing, on a smaller scale, in his little district of Djakovica. His power over Albanians enabled him to exact intoxicating revenge for slights, imagined and real.
The son of a saddler, Dogancic grew up in Djakovica's tiny minority community of Serbs and worked for local government. His job was to patrol the forests to stop people felling trees illegally. He was a handsome youth and married a pretty local girl, Radmilla. They had four children.
Albanians, who made up 90% of Kosovo's population, dominated senior positions in the government at that time and ran most of the businesses. Many had big houses and sent their sons abroad for education and work. Dogancic lived in squalor with little money and few prospects. Everything changed when Milosevic rescinded Kosovo's autonomy in 1990 and Albanians were kicked out of their jobs. Dogancic had what were considered the right opinions. He told anyone who would listen that Albanians should be deported from Kosovo. After all, he would say, they had Albania, didn't they?
His mentors were two pairs of brothers from similarly inauspicious backgrounds. Momcilo and Sava Stanovic, and their first cousins, Milan and Jokica Stanovic, are infamous among ethnic Albanians in Djakovica.
There was little education among them; Milan was a sheep farmer, Momcilo a building inspector's clerk. Under Milosevic's regime, however, they were able to establish a semi-autonomous dictatorship. Jokica Stanovic, who had friends in Milosevic's circle, was appointed mayor by Belgrade in 1991. He made Milan his police chief.
Momcilo, his cousin, became a local minister in charge of government property, including state factories. He gave Dogancic, the lowly forest patrol man, the job of director in a brick and tile plant.
In 1996 Momcilo took over as mayor when Jokica became a deputy in the Yugoslav senate. He built several Serbian Orthodox churches and soon became a priest. But his religious beliefs did not stop him from intensifying repression of Djakovica's ethnic Albanians.
He built up a private police force and was under investigation by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe for suspected war crimes when it became obvious that Nato was about to launch its airstrikes and the OSCE pulled out.
While Milan arranged for the deportation of countless local Albanians from Djakovica, Momcilo directed squads of special police and paramilitaries into the town. The separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had waged guerrilla warfare against these forces in the surrounding area since early this year. The hatred between them was fierce.
Djakovica, with its thuggish Serbian leadership, ruthless paramilitaries and poorly defended Albanian community, was about to became a microcosm of Kosovo as it was torn apart. Dogancic would exercise the power he held in his community to devastatingly lethal effect.
THE local Albanians had been growing increasingly fearful of Dogancic for years. He walked around with a pistol in his belt. Serbian police and members of the security forces in civilian clothes came in and out of his house. Whenever he had an argument in his part of town, the neighbour concerned would be taken into the local police station and beaten.
The danger in the rise of such a man is evident now in the devastation that surrounds his house. The homes of all his Albanian neighbours - mechanics, shopkeepers, barbers - are blackened ruins with overgrown gardens. No more than a cherished rose bush still blooms here and there.
Dogancic has gone, but there is no jubilation at his departure. His neighbours paid too high a price for living next door. Last week, as the first of them returned to begin clearing out their homes, they spat his name with fury and contempt.
The Serbs started burning Djakovica on March 24, the night Nato began bombing. About 100 high street shops were looted and then torched. The homes of professional men and anyone who had had contact with international organisations were set alight.
For the first few days, people were killed one at a time. Izat Hima, Djakovica's most prominent ethnic Albanian doctor, was shot dead on his doorstep. Paramilitaries cut the throat of Kujtim Dula, a lawyer who had defended political prisoners, in front of his wife.
But as the bombing went on, the Serbs launched a systematic campaign to murder the Albanians who remained in the town and to empty the surrounding villages.
Dogancic would walk through the streets pointing out houses to long-haired men in dark camouflage uniforms with black cowboy hats characteristic of the so-called Frenki's Boys, a paramilitary group that reports to Frenki Simatovic, Milosevic's state security chief.
"The paramilitaries didn't know the neighbourhood," said Xhavet Beqa, a heavily built man who got his wife and four children out to Albania but stayed in Djakovica, slipping back to his district through Serbian patrols. "They needed Bozho to tell them where to go. He told them who was in hiding."
Beqa said Dogancic, his wife Radmilla and their eldest son, Nebojsha, a 26-year-old policeman, had stood in the middle of his street, arms folded, as they watched Beqa's three houses burn. The paramilitaries surrounded Dogancic, he said, joking and congratulating themselves on a job well done. Radmilla also had a pistol.
After choosing which houses should be the first to burn, Dogancic asserted his authority over the fate of people. He meted out virtual death sentences, simply by identifying places of concealment.
Beqa led me through the overgrown back garden of the building opposite his home to a cellar where Dogancic had pointed out the hiding place of the Vesja family. They were poor and frightened and did not want to risk fleeing to Albania. Twenty-four people were hiding in the basement when Dogancic and the paramilitaries arrived.
Five men ran; they had been taken in by the Vesjas and had no relatives to worry about. Lurzim Vesja, a shopkeeper, stayed with his family.
Scorched bed springs and a child's partly burnt boot are all that is left to testify to their presence in the shelter. Nineteen men, women and children, including Lurzim, were led to a row of garages behind the house. The paramilitaries shot them in one of the garages and set fire to the row. Nobody escaped. They were people Dogancic would have seen every day.
Few traces of the massacre remain. There are bullet holes in the scorched grey walls and shells on the overgrown garden in front. The bodies lay untouched for two days. Beqa and other men from the neighbourhood who were too afraid to give their names - "I know we are free now, but you can't know how deep the fear is in us" - saw them that night, a charred huddle.
Finally, gypsies pulled up with a tractor and cart and hauled the bodies away for burial in the Djakovica cemetery under wooden markers with numbers and a date. "I saw them put the bodies in the cart," Beqa said. "I couldn't believe how small they were."
If you have ever seen a charred body, you know he was telling the truth. The human body, when burnt, is reduced to an almost childlike size. It is a horrible piece of knowledge that comes with reporting from Kosovo. In house after house, village after village, I have seen those bodies, so small that it seems they must be those of children, yet they are not.
Dogancic's reign of terror did not end with the Vesja family. Around the corner, amid the burnt-out skeletons of other houses, is the home of the family of Skandar Dylatahus, a barber. In front of the walled garden is a jar of pickles and a silverplated tray. This family also tried to hide rather than risk their men on the road to Albania.
Dogancic knew they had stayed. Nobody in the neighbourhood understands how, because they had laid in supplies and never gone out. But paramilitaries directed by Dogancic found 17 people in the basement of the two-storey home.
This time they were more merciful. They told 10 women and children to leave, saying: "Go to Albania, that is your home." They lined seven men up in the garden and shot them, then put their bodies back in the basement and torched the house. Dogancic stood in the road, again staring into the flames.
Today Djakovica looks like Dresden at the end of the second world war. Beautiful old buildings in the centre and big mansions in the suburbs have been reduced to blackened shells. On the main street, every shop is without its roof. In the old bazaar, where traders sold cloth, books, bric-à-brac and tiny cups of coffee, there are only charred walls.
The cemetery contains 238 new graves, each marked with a flat wooden stake. A name, or sometimes just a date and number, is written in marker or pencil. Semi-literate gypsies did the burying, so most of the names are misspelt. Next to the graves are two large areas of disturbed earth, each covering about 20 yards by 50. About 1,500 men are missing in Djakovica - the highest number of any town in Kosovo - and many are no doubt dead.
In the countryside within a few miles' radius, the atrocities committed by Frenki's Boys and other paramilitary groups with the aid of local agents such as Dogancic are no less in evidence.
In the village of Celin, to the west, Serbian forces from Djakovica set up on three hills on March 25, the first day after the Nato bombing began, and started firing artillery at 8am. Several thousand villagers hoping to escape to Albania made for another hill less than two miles away. There, they were surrounded by "Frenkis" who demanded jewellery and cash.
The first to die was Agim Ramadani, 23, a student who was accused of being in the KLA, told to run for his life and shot in front of his mother when he did so.
The villagers were goaded for most of the day. A Serb named Banzic Novica from nearby Opterusa recognised Hait Bytyqi, 35; they had worked together in a factory. "Hait, come here," Novica yelled. "I'm going to show you I'm your God. Give me 1,000 deutschmarks [£330]." Bytyqi's father collected the money from people standing around in terror, but Novica shot the top of his head off anyway. Bytyqi was the father of a young son and daughter.
Finally the men were separated from the women. Some lived; some died. Twenty-one are buried at one spot, eight lie in a shallow grave covered with daisies and thistles at another. Altogether there are 86 graves.
In Meja to the south, where more than 100 people are thought to have been shot in a single incident, I followed a smell to the bodies of three men, dressed in the rough suits of peasants, lying under the bushes. Many others are said to have been removed from a mass grave.
Momcilo Stanovic, the mayor of Djakovica, fled from his flat on the day of Nato's arrival. He was in a small police car with no escort.
Stanovic left behind rooms full of dark wooden furniture, oriental carpets and marble. Every cabinet is filled with foreign liquors. At the door is a bucket of empty beer bottles. From the two terraces where he drank, Stanovic would have seen Djackovica burning.
The flat is now inhabited by Skandar Dubruna, 62, a bearded, bespectacled intellectual whose family was active in the party of Ibrahim Rugova, the moderate ethnic Albanian leader. Dubruna and his wife Shyretta have painted their Albanian name on the door so that nobody attacks them by mistake.
"He burnt down our house," Dubruna said. "So I came and took his house."
It will probably matter little to Stanovic. He moved his family to the palatial villa he had built in Montenegro a month before the bombing campaign, and will no doubt join them there.
As for Dogancic, he and his family escaped with their belongings piled high on their Yugo car. They are unlikely to taste power again. But the enduring horror of Djakovica is that Dogancic was not alone. There were many like him: little men whose brief rise to unrestrained authority led to the destruction of a town and a society.
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