On March 28, Serb policemen and Army reservists searched the homes of the Topali family. They came again the next day and ordered the Topalis to vacate the houses. Two of the Topali brothers, Alush and Velija, left in a tractor and a car. Russian soldiers stopped them at the Hotel Park and demanded DM40,000 from them. Alush gave them all he had -- DM17,300.
They let him keep DM100 for his journey. According to Alush, they were stopped only 20 meters further down the road by police reservist Zoran Stanisic from Orahovac, who hit Velija twice with the rifle butt with great force, knocking him to the ground. Some policemen picked Velija up and took him in the direction of the hotel. At the entrance to the hotel, Velija was attacked by Stanko Levic and Aca Vitosevic, local Serbs in uniform. According to Alush, his brother died on the steps of the entrance to the hotel.
On March 30, a group of Serb policemen and reservists, some of whom wore red berets, killed Qazim (45), Sabit (33) and Fahredin (27) Dul at a police checkpoint on the road leading out of the town. As on previous days, they were going with their father to their farm to feed the sheep.
The police at the checkpoint looked at their ID cards and then gave the father back his ID card and ordered him to return to Orahovac. They tore up his sons' ID cards and started beating them before their father's eyes. The father heard one of his sons beg: "Boza, don't. You know us." While he was returning to the town, the father heard several gunshots. Five days later, he found their charred bodies in Bajram Shala's unfinished house 100 meters from the farm, near the checkpoint where they had been stopped by the police.
Xhulsime Shehu (58) was killed in her home on April 13. According to the testimony given by a witness (a member of the Shehu family), four policemen, two of whom were local Serb police reservists, entered the house. The witness heard a burst of automatic gunfire. After that, he saw two of the policemen come out of the house and start digging in the yard where the Shehu family had hidden DM70,000 in cash and DM20,000 worth of jewelry. The witness saw two of these four policemen several hours later, when they returned to inspect the crime scene.
On April 22, unknown persons killed Muhedin and Munavera Tara, the parents of Ismet Tara, the KLA commander in Orahovac.
On April 27, three policemen brought Hajdije Spahiju (33), in the presence of her mother, to the police station, allegedly for questioning. The policeman who drove the police vehicle was a local. When they entered the house, the policemen had a stack of file cards containing identity cards, including Hajdije Spahiu's identity card. After a while, her mother went to the police station and reported to policeman Dragan Dujovic that her daughter was missing. Two policemen took her statement and told her they would inform their superiors in Belgrade about it. After KFOR's arrival, the mother found Hajdije's grave in the village of Bela Crkva, in the yard of Nuhi Kelmendi. According to Kelmendi, he found her body in his yard on June 1. She had been shot to death.
Four Serb policemen took Arben Derguti (28) from his home on April 29, and he has not been seen or heard from since. He was driven away in a red van with Pristina license plates. According to Derguti's family, the uniformed men in the van included policeman Nenad Dujovic from Velika Hoca, the Orahovac police deputy commander, a drunken reservist with an earring and policeman Stanoje Vidovic (son of Budimir Vidovic) from Bosnia, who had been assigned to the Orahovac police station. The van was driven by a local Roma man.
On May 3, three policemen killed biology teacher Elmaze Kadiri and her mother-in-law Nurisha, and then set their house on fire. Neighbors managed to put the fire out before it engulfed the entire house. The family concluded from Elmaze's broken teeth and cut-off pieces of her ears that she had been cruelly tortured before she was shot to death. Three days after the murder, the police ordered Elmaze's husband and children to leave the house and go to Albania.
The brothers Sulejman (45) and Nekija (62) Dema, and Nekija's wife Shefkije (54) disappeared on May 4. According to their family, Vekoslav Simic, an Orahovac physician and friend of the Demas, came to Sulejman asking for his brother Nekija, who owned an appliance-and-plumbing store, because he wanted to purchase some material for the health-care station of which he was the director. As Nekija was not at home, Sulejman and Dr. Simic started looking for him. Witnesses say they saw all three of them, in the company of Yugoslav Army officers, in front of the store around 11 am. At around 12 pm, Dr. Simic came to Sulejman's house again and said that some reservists had entered the store and led Nekija, his wife and Sulejman away, but that he knew their commanding officer and that they would soon be sent back home. Their fate is still unknown.
Jermin and Emsala Abazibra and their daughters -- Sehare (25), Makvire (24) and Jasmine (14) -- left their home on May 5 after a group of uniformed persons, including a local policeman, Boza Damjanovic, entered it and ordered them to pack up and leave for Albania. The Abazibras left their home in a Golf, which witnesses saw on the road to Prizren. Witnesses say that their car was followed by paramilitaries in a red van and a white Lada. Two local Serbs, Aca Vitosevic and Igor Antic, were reportedly among the paramilitaries. Several days later, the police in Orahovac confirmed to relatives that five members of the Abazibra family had been killed. The relatives were given two identity cards, two pairs of earrings and two wristwatches.
Seven members of the Sharku family, one of the richest in Orahovac, were killed in the night of May 9. They were: Taibe (58), Ali (58), their daughter Azemina (36), her children Visar (13), Azra (10) and Venhara (8), and Egzona (8), daughter of Azemina's brother Haxhia. The bodies were discovered by Azemina's sister Iska, who visited her parents and sister on May 10. The victims were shot to death. It seems that plunder was the main motive for this massacre. DM400,000 worth of cash and gold was taken from their home.
Ajvazi Seram was in the home of a neighbor, Ismail Bekeri, on June 11, when five uniformed persons came in, saying they had to search the premises. Three of them took Bekeri to the basement, while two took Seram to the upper floor, where they beat him until he gave them DM500 and told them he had more money and gold in his house. They let him go home to retrieve this money and gold. Meanwhile, they killed Bekeri. The police waited for Seram to return, then took his money and gold, telling him they would not harass him any more.
On June 11, five uniformed persons entered the house of Hidayet Cena and his sister Lirije, asking for money and gold. Lirije gave them her jewelry, but they wanted money. One of them took Lirije to the upper floor to find more money, while the others forced her brother to deliver cash as well. They killed Hidayet and inflicted a serious stab wound on Lirije.
On June 12, Jonuz Hoxha (13) -- whose father was killed by Serb troops in July 1998 while fleeing Orahovac with a group of civilians -- was killed by one of the anti-personnel mines laid by retreating Russian volunteers who had stayed in Orahovac during NATO's bombing campaign.
Everyone in Orahovac, including KFOR and the OSCE, knew at the time that the KLA was operating prisons in the former police station and in the building that formerly housed the Fire Brigade Center. A woman whose son, Boban, and husband, Predrag, had been led away from their home by KLA troops asked a German soldier named Stefan to go to the Fire Brigade Center building and look for them there. He went there and called them by their names. Predrag called back, and Stefan took him by the hand and led him out of the building. The KLA soldiers stopped Stefan from searching the other rooms in their prison.
By the end of December 1999, KFOR had found the bodies of four Serbs who had gone missing in June. There is no information about the other kidnapped Serbs. The last abduction took place on January 3, 2000. On that day, Radivoje Lukic (25) left the Serb section of Orahovac for the center of the town while under the influence of alcohol. He never returned.
During a meeting with UNMIK and OSCE officials in Pristina on November 8, HLC executive director Natasa Kandic informed them of the disappearance of the five Serbs from Orahovac and of the allegations made by their relatives.
The OSCE's human-rights department had the same information as did the relatives of the missing. The security section of the KFOR headquarters in Pec had acquired the same information independently, but they also believed they could locate the place where the KLA was holding the kidnapped Serbs. On November 20, the local OSCE offices in Orahovac and Djakovica were ordered by UNMIK to investigate the abduction. Meanwhile, it was reported that the International Police had begun an investigation and that they were interviewing members of the family of the missing in Orahovac.
In Serbia, the displaced families of the missing asked the International Red Cross to establish contact with the abductors. The warden of the Nis prison allowed Ilija Mojsic, contrary to Serbian law, to talk to two Albanian inmates: Rexhep Oruqi from Orahovac, who was serving a five-year prison term, and the brother of Hekuran Hoda, arrested during NATO's bombing campaign. On November 25, the Nis prison warden delivered a letter from Hoda to Barbara Davis, chief of staff of the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the FR Yugoslavia, asking her to take the letter to Hekuran Hoda in Djakovica. In this letter -- which the warden read to the members of Davis' delegation, including Natasa Kandic -- the prisoner asked his brother, Hekuran Hoda, to get information about the fate of the Serbs and to do everything to get them released. While delivering the letter, the warden said he would release Hoda and Oruqi in exchange for the release of Mojsic's son.
Hekuran Hoda replied to his imprisoned brother that he had nothing to do with that particular abduction.
On November 30, the OSCE office in Djakovica asked the Humanitarian Law Center and its executive director, Natasa Kandic, to retract their report that Hekuran Hoda had been involved in the abduction of the five Orahovac Serbs.
As the OSCE is a part of the international administration in Kosovo, the HLC saw this request by the OSCE's Djakovica office as an act of pressuring a non-governmental organization in its investigations into violations of the rights of minorities, and it informed the human-rights section of the OSCE office in Pristina about this. To all intents and purposes, the conduct of the local OSCE office in Djakovica has shown that its employees are not competent to carry out the human-rights protection mandate given to the OSCE, and that their work is under the control of local political and military groups.
In connection with the abduction of magistrate Mojsic's son: in December 1999, Serbian police stopped Silva Oruqi at the crossing to Serbia and took her in for questioning. She was on her way to Nis, where she had intended to visit her husband, the imprisoned Rexhep Oruqi. She was interrogated by policemen who had worked in Orahovac until the retreat of Serbian forces from Kosovo.
UNMIK had not revealed the results of its investigation as of mid-January 2000. In the meantime, the KFOR command in Pec received information that three of the five kidnapped Serbs had been released shortly after being abducted, and that they had been transferred to Montenegro. The HLC investigated these allegations and found them to be nothing but rumors.
According to the vast majority of local Albanians, all of the Serbs from Orahovac and the nearby village of Velika Hoca, both those who have fled and those who have stayed in town, took part in crimes against Albanians, which is why the Albanians cannot coexist with them any longer. They say that the Serbs who were killed or abducted after KFOR's arrival were punished for their crimes. However, once the conversation becomes more personal, local Albanians start speaking from their heart, admitting that "it's hard for them (their Serb neighbors), because they have to suffer for what others did before fleeing."
By accepting this interpretation of political and ethnic violence, the international community has pardoned any crime against members of ethnic minorities.
On November 10 of last year, the District Prosecutor's Office in Pozarevac indicted police reservist Boban Petrovic (32) from Velika Hoca, near Orahovac, for the May 9, 1999 murder of Ismail Durguti (60). After being beaten up by Yugoslav Army members, Durguti was allegedly killed by Petrovic at Ria, between Orahovac and Velika Hoca. Djordje Simic, the police officer from whom Petrovic is said to have taken the official-issue pistol with which he killed Durguti, has been charged with attempted murder. Boban Petrovic is also accused of murdering Shefkije and Sezari Miftari outside their home in Orahovac. No trial date has yet been set.
The bus that now operates between Orahovac and Mitrovica once a week, with KFOR's help, allows Serbs to leave Orahovac unless they are on the list of alleged war criminals, and to return to their homes safely. The Orahovac Serbs have agreed, in the name of good will, that their delegation should visit prisons in Serbia and inform the Serbian public about this. Meanwhile, on January 5, the District Court in Pozarevac released 10 Orahovac Albanians who had spent 17 months in prison without trial.
The Serbs who are struggling to survive make no secret of the fact that Serb forces committed crimes against Orahovac Albanians. They do not hide their shame for the humiliation the Albanians were subjected to during NATO's bombing. The military and police authorities prohibited the Serbs from selling bread and flour to the Albanians. Many, however, did so secretly. Since then, the Orahovac Serbs have gathered at the Orthodox Church and demanded justice: "Let the law, equal for all, replace rumors and reports against alleged war criminals."