A Kosovo village struggles to overcome losses of war

Hanumsha Batusha hauls out a cushion for her visitors and steers them to the shade of a cherry tree in her yard. A spry septuagenarian, she has not forgotten the traditions of hospitality that continue to grace life in her village, even today, after so much suffering. She sits down on the grass, propping her elbows on her knees.

"I'm fine," she says, smiling, then adding, "But how could I be fine when I have lost three sons and five grandchildren?"

Few places in Kosovo endured more than Krushe e Vogel, a farming village of about 800 inhabitants, during the war here that ended with NATO's intervention in the spring of 1999. On March 26 of that year, Serbian military, police, and paramilitary forces rounded up ethnic Albanian villagers, apparently in retaliation for NATO bombing, and drove the women and children on foot toward Albania. They herded the men and older boys into a stable, gunned them down with automatic weapons, and set the building on fire. Afterward they looted and burned the village.

One hundred and two men and boys died in the stable, and in the three years since, the survivors have struggled to move beyond their loss. International relief organizations helped them rebuild their houses, often to a higher standard than the destroyed homes.

Once-burned houses sport new tile roofs and new doors and windows. Still unfinished houses of block and concrete rise above broken walls of sun-dried mud brick. The village has a new day-care center, a women's center, and a small factory that turns locally grown peppers into powder. A new primary school is set to open this fall.

Rebuilding lives has proven more difficult.

Almost every family in the village lost one, and often several, members. For many of the survivors, grief is compounded by new, unsought responsibilities. And yet even here, the passage of time has helped.

"When we came back, we talked about the war and our losses all the time," says Shpresa Shehu, a schoolteacher who runs the woman's center.

"There were days we didn't eat anything because our minds were so much on what we lost," she says. "Now we can't say our sorrow is gone. But we've gotten used to it. We have everyday problems. We have to live. We have to take care of the children and the houses. That is the difference. Somehow these things take our minds away from what happened."

For the women of Krushe e Vogel a turning point of sorts came in late spring. On June 11, two survivors of the massacre testified at the war-crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. The trial has been televised throughout the province, and on that day almost everyone in Krushe e Vogel was watching.

Most villagers already knew details of the massacre.

One of the witnesses, Lutfi Ramadani, said that after the war many people came to his house to ask what had happened. But for others, especially the village women, the broadcast from The Hague was their first chance to hear his story directly.

They had long resisted the truth. The dead had never been found, and others in the village had been reluctant to crush the women's hopes. "Somehow we hoped they were missing and would come back," says Shemsije Batusha, one of Hanumsha Batusha's daughters-in-law, who lost her husband, Milain. "But when we heard the witnesses in The Hague that day tell how they were killed and burned, and how only six survived, from that moment on we realized that they were not alive any more, that they were dead and not going to be back."

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