“We Have the Right to Live”: NATO’s War on Yugoslavia and the Expulsion of Serbs from Kosovo
In the period before the 1999 NATO attack on Yugoslavia, the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) waged a campaign to secede and establish an
independent Kosovo dominated by Albanians and purged of every other
ethnic group. In October 1998, KLA spokesman Bardhyl Mahmuti spelled the
KLA’s vision: “We will never change our position. The independence of
Kosovo is the only solution…We cannot live together [with Serbs]. That
is excluded.”
Once NATO’s war came to an end, the KLA set about driving out of
Kosovo every non-Albanian and every pro-Yugoslav Albanian it could lay
its hands on. The KLA left in its wake thousands of looted and burning
homes, and the dead and dying.
Two months after the end of the war, I visited Hotel Belgrade,
located on Mt. Avala, a short distance outside of Belgrade. Those who
had been driven from their homes in Kosovo were housed in hotels
throughout Yugoslavia, and in this one lived Serbian refugees.
The moment I entered the hotel, the sense of misery overwhelmed me.
Children were crying, and the rooms were packed with people. The two
delegation members who accompanied me and I were shown all three floors,
and the anger among the refugees was so palpable I felt I could reach
out in the air and touch it. Nearly everyone here had a loved one who
had been killed by the Kosovo Liberation Army. All had lost their homes
and everything they owned.
Initially, many of them refused to talk with us, and one refugee
demanded of me in a mocking tone, “Can you get my home back?” It was not
until a while later that we discovered that due to a misunderstanding,
some of the refugees thought the NATO commander of the attack on
Yugoslavia, Wesley Clark, had sent us there. We were quick to correct
that misapprehension, and then people were more inclined to talk with
us. There was still, however, some residual reluctance based on three
prior experiences these refugees had with Western visitors, all of whom
had treated them with arrogance and contempt. A reporter from the Washington Post was said to have been particularly abusive and insulting.
Several refugees were too upset to talk. The eyes of one woman and
her son still haunt me. I could see everything in their eyes – all that
they had suffered.
