“This was The Piano Bar–my favorite cafe; nice music, nice people,” Visar said, running his hand gingerly across a smashed glass storefront in Pec’s center and studying the looted interior. We walked past Pec’s oldest mosque–windows blackened, silver dome broken like an eggshell–and through the ruins of the central market. Charred yet intact safes stood in the back of many burned-out shops. “These stores belonged to Albanian gold merchants,” Visar said. “The safes are probably still filled with gold.” He tensed as we drove slowly by a scrum of male Serbs huddled around a NATO tank. A burly man gave Visar a nod of recognition. “He was a big man in State Security,” Visar said. “Albanians in Pec were terrified of him. Now he must run to NATO for protection. He is finished.”
We entered a once prosperous neighborhood of small streets and alleys. F— NATO. THIS IS MY PLACE, read spray-painted Cyrillic graffito on a concrete wall. Visar’s house was a three-story white stucco building that had been torched by the Serbs in late March, three days after Visar and his parents had escaped across the border. Out of financial necessity, the Jakupis had moved in with relatives and rented the place to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and that had made their home a target. We stepped over the rubble of burned bricks, roofing tiles and half-melted shards of glass on the ground floor. Water from a broken pipe rained through the ceiling. The acrid smell of burnt wood was overpowering. Then we climbed a shaky spiral staircase to Visar’s third-floor bedroom, where he surveyed the wreckage and began to weep. “My friends told me only the top floor had been burned,” he said, fingering the charred remains of a pair of blue jeans. “I had no idea it was this bad.”
Up and down the street, people began to emerge from their ruined homes. A handful walked tentatively toward us, around downed power lines, and told us to stay away from a white Renault parked nearby, saying it was booby-trapped. For two and a half months they had been effectively held hostage by the Serbs. A paramilitary force manned by a sadistic commander named Frenkie had prowled the neighborhood, and a Serb military command post had been set up in a half-finished brick building across the street from the Jakupis’ burned home. Women had been ordered to hang children’s clothing from the balconies of abandoned buildings to “prove” to NATO pilots flying overhead that Pec had not been cleansed of Albanians. Some people were venturing outdoors for the first time since March, and they hadn’t known which neighbors were alive until they saw them in the street just now.
“Visar!” a pale, goateed young man shouted, rushing to embrace my interpreter. “My God, Ram!” Visar cried, hugging him close. “My cousins told me in Montenegro that you and your whole family had been massacred.”
“I felt like I was dead,” Ram said, with tears running down his cheeks. An interpreter for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the human-rights monitoring group in Kosovo, Ram had been in hiding for 80 days, living in basements, he said, “always on the run.”
Visar spotted a mustached man with a large belly. “Isa!” he exclaimed, rushing over to greet him. “You’re alive!”
“I am alive, but three of my children are dead,” Isa replied.
“When?”
“Just three nights ago, the Serbs came to my home. ‘Is everyone here?’ they asked. Then they opened fire with automatic weapons. I jumped out the window with my son. The rest of the kids were killed. My brother, his wife and their child as well. My wife is in the hospital. I took the brain of my 12-year-old daughter off the floor.”
Visar shook his head, distraught, and wandered back to the car.
