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M I N U T E S T O WA R : Picnic in Hell<br />
old begins: ‘I know what he is going to ask and I<br />
thank him very much’. And I thank him for the<br />
interview: ‘On the third of May at about 10am, Serb<br />
paramilitary forces entered the village. Immediately<br />
on arrival they started to massacre people and when<br />
they had killed them, they burned their homes.’<br />
He spoke for minutes...some of it was<br />
unintelligible but we recorded it all nonetheless:<br />
‘The dead are scattered like leaves on the ground.<br />
Snipers kill shepherds when they remain with their<br />
cattle in the field.’<br />
An Albanian woman whose eyes are wet<br />
interrupts. She is wearing a poncho or a bulky<br />
jumper She is articulate, not a farmer but maybe<br />
a student. She<br />
catches her breath<br />
and begins: ‘It was<br />
night, the policeman<br />
was holding her by<br />
the throat with the<br />
gun pointed at her,<br />
calling her, saying:<br />
“come, come!”’ That<br />
was something which<br />
touched me deeply.<br />
She was constantly<br />
crying, saying: ‘Oh, I have children, I have children.’<br />
From this group another woman in her fifties<br />
with a hooked nose adds:<br />
’We were all together yesterday and out of the<br />
blue the bullets were raining on us, above our heads.<br />
We escaped into a yard and we had to lie down with<br />
our bodies flat.’<br />
The old man in a dirty white turban continues<br />
with this horror movie of tales:<br />
’They burned us, they killed us, throwing the<br />
bodies onto the fire. They stabbed our little children,<br />
gauging their eyes. They had gauged my only<br />
grandchild’s eyes whilst he was alive, throwing him<br />
into the yard, leaving him in agony.’<br />
Everyone of these statements is allegedly<br />
real. I have not made it up and it is coming like<br />
staccato gunfire from their mouths. We were the<br />
first witnesses as they crossed the border so they<br />
hoped to tell us and therefore tell the world what is<br />
happening.<br />
I stood there stunned and exclaimed: ‘This is no<br />
holiday in hell; this is hell.’<br />
Even if we cannot escape from any form of<br />
suffering, in the embrace of suffering there is a<br />
release. But what can be done for these people?<br />
Closer to the border, a helicopter is hovering and<br />
ambulances wail. The chaos is everywhere made<br />
and intensified by a dry wind which has picked up.<br />
It all reminds me of Apocalypse Now. There is an<br />
OSCE monitor nearby. This monitor recounts and<br />
documents all human rights abuses. I walk past him.<br />
A refugee I had not seen ambles up and tugging my<br />
shirt tail starts to talk to in unintelligible Albanian<br />
to me. This ethnic Albanian Kosovar has come up<br />
when I am interrupted by the Englishman who had<br />
originally commented on the broken wheels five<br />
minutes before: ‘Yes, um well, well my translator will<br />
be over to help us both.’<br />
This refugee, a swarthy well dressed man in his<br />
fifties spoke. The translator paraphrases or at least<br />
renders the Albanian into a doggerel English as we<br />
both document the abuses: ‘First, paramilitary forces<br />
surrounded the village of Ibberdamaj and Berbati.<br />
Paramilitary groups….immediately afterwards they<br />
came out of their cars. They were shooting at us to<br />
kill us.’<br />
Then the OSCE monitor interjects: ‘Well hang on,<br />
you said as soon as they started to shoot, well what<br />
are you saying?’<br />
‘They were...they start shooting and as soon as<br />
the other people, they hear the shooting then they<br />
just run away. And we had no time to resist.’<br />
‘How many people were killed?’<br />
‘There were about 13 cousins...At that moment<br />
4 people were physically maltreated, then executed<br />
with a bullet, then cut with the knife. Because there<br />
is first of all they cut them with the,.. Then they<br />
execute them with a single bullet, now with a knife.<br />
The following day we managed to calculate, the size<br />
of the bodies were reduced to this format, the next<br />
day we were able to<br />
see the corpse, they<br />
were this size.’<br />
This refugee<br />
wanted to explain<br />
that he witnessed an<br />
execution of thirteen<br />
people, their bodies<br />
were then burnt<br />
and the bodies were<br />
reduced to the size<br />
of two and a half<br />
feet long. The human rights monitor from OSCE was<br />
then very specific about wanting to get a written<br />
statement from him and then whether he could<br />
actually verify the names of people and what had<br />
happened to them and whether he would recount<br />
that story again. The people killed were in their<br />
sixties.<br />
It is all harrowing. People are missing. People<br />
have had their children, separated from them. This<br />
is galvanising for the human psyche, and I can see<br />
how people are traumatised.<br />
Ray was also saying in the UNHCR press<br />
conference today: ‘Um, I think we’re certainly talking<br />
about many dozens, ah maybe in the low 100s,<br />
abducted, kidnapped, I don’t know what the right<br />
word is in these circumstances.’<br />
Another man in a blue shirt explains: ‘The first<br />
day was only the men can cross the border, the
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