One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  “One day the SPDC”—State Peace and Development Council, the name of the military junta—“came and burnt my village, so I wanted to draw this,” he said, showing me the picture he produced when I asked a group of school kids to draw anything they liked. “I don’t know why they did it, burnt my village. I ran with my family into the mountains and crossed into Thailand. The army would have arrested us if they’d caught us trying to leave, but we snuck out through a secret way.”

  His drawing captivated me.

  Nailed to a cross, a young man cries out as soldiers fill his body with bullets. To the right, a soldier climbs a flagpole and takes down the unmarked flag. Bodies fall from the sky, dropping from an exploded airplane. On the far left, easy to miss at first glance, is a little form in purple, a boy hiding behind a tree (Figure 7).

  Nicholas’s blank flag, the flag of the defeated, shows a keen awareness of his situation. He is an illegal migrant hiding in Thailand, unable to attain legal refugee status and clearly unable to return to his homeland. He doesn’t speak Thai. He has no nation. The blank flag is central to his picture. Even as his little purple form—he shrugs when I ask if that is him—witnesses terrible violence, he also witnesses the political struggle occurring around him. He cannot verbalize the politics of the fighting, but he has a sense of them: it has something to do with that flag; the reason he and his parents fled is connected to that flag.

  Violent forced migrations, political struggles robbing children of their homelands, are not unique to the developing world. In the Serbian province of Kosovo, in the last years of the twentieth century, a policy of ethnic cleansing filled the roads with terrified people running for their lives and killed hundreds of fathers, brothers, and uncles. The violence displaced nearly one million people.

  One of those was a young girl named Nora from the village of Zahaq. She was about eight years old at the time she had to flee the country.

  It was in May. It was a sunny day. I was playing in front of my house where there were fruit trees. Serbs were hiding behind those trees. They came into our yard and asked for money and jewelry, asked where the men were. My father was in Albania fighting with the KLA [the Kosovo Liberation Army]. My grandfather was at my uncle’s house. So I lied to them. I told them they went out for cigarettes. They believed me, but they asked my mom about where my dad was.

  She told them that he had had an accident with a train, and they believed that too. I went with [my mom’s uncle] and my mom, but the Serbs caught us. They put a knife on my neck. They wanted to rob us and they saw my mother’s wedding ring and they told her to give it to them. It was hard to get off. She struggled with it. They said, “Hurry up or we’ll just cut off your finger!” But she got it off and they let us go. They still searched the house to see if anyone was hiding there, then they made us leave. We went to my uncle’s, but couldn’t stay there, so we went to my grandfather’s house, and he told us to leave the country. He said, “I’m old”—he’s eighty years old, or was then anyway. He said, “I’m old and tired. I can’t come with you. My legs won’t carry me on this journey.” He hid himself between some trees.

  They took one of her uncles, though. They shot him with a silencer and dragged him inside his house and burnt him there. They wrapped him in a blanket so he would burn easier. “We knew it was him later by how we was wrapped and that his face was not burned. I saw him after the house burnt down.”

  As she told me this story, I felt overwhelmed. So much could happen to a little girl on a sunny day in May. It happened near her school where we were sitting five years later. There were three other young people from the village with us, all of whom had also suffered terribly at the hands of the Serb paramilitaries. The others wanted to tell their stories too. Nora told them to hold on. Her frightful tale was not yet done and she wanted to make sure the narrative was complete.

  “We went to our neighbor’s home and lots of people were gathered there listening to the news. The paramilitaries came and beat us with rifle butts and clubs and their fists and told us to say good-bye to each other because they were going to kill us soon. We stayed there two more weeks, though, and the Serbs didn’t come back. We stayed two more weeks until some other Serbs came, put us in a line, and made us leave.”

  The children began to describe this line, which, at the time, they and all their families joined. It was a line of people and vehicles starting in the center of town and directed to head out of Kosovo towards Montenegro. There were buses on the road. Those who had cars loaded them with their families and whatever property they could fit. People rode on tractors and horse-drawn carts. People also walked. It was Gibbon’s highway “crowded with a trembling multitude.” It was along this line that the next wave of horrors occurred.

  “Army men in black masks stopped us,” Nora said. “They took some men from the line, who disappeared.”

  Mark, who had been eager to interject, finally cut in.

  “They took my father when we were in this line. They took him from right in front of me and two of my first cousins too, and shot them. But my father survived. He lay under the bodies until they were gone.”

  “They tried to take my father,” another boy, Karl, said. “They didn’t though. The truck driver that was taking us, turned around.”

  “I was with Karl on the same truck,” Valerie added. She brushed her long blond hair from her face. “They took my father and five of my uncles. They killed them.”

  Human Rights Watch reports that nineteen people were killed in Zahaq on May 14, 1999.

  “They killed my father later,” Karl said. “When the Serbs were pulling out [after three months of NATO air strikes on Serb positions], a yellow Mercedes came into the village, and the men in it shot him.”

  The retention of details amazed me, as did the way these stories played out for children of all social classes. In Africa, it had mostly been the poor who were forced to flee, as most of the fighting took place in or around villages. Wealthier citizens stayed in the cities, hired protection, or left the conflict areas altogether with resources to pay bribes and avoid refugee camps. The youths I met in the Balkans, in the villages of Zahaq and Lubeniq and Pavlan, were poor even before the war, and Kosovo remains the poorest province in the former Yugoslavia. But in this war the wealthy also had to flee and children of well-to-do families were no more protected from the terror of expulsion than anyone else.

  Eric, an energetic twelve-year-old, and his fifteen-year-old-sister Alice, are the children of a wealthy Kosovar Albanian businessman.

  “In the afternoon on the Saturday after the NATO bombing started,” Alice said, “the Serbs came to our house.”

  Eric interrupted her with a great deal of eagerness:

  “Captain Death came to our house.” The children didn’t know his real name. But according to Human Rights Watch, Captain “Death” (“Mrtvi”) was a known paramilitary and criminal leader in the city of Peja (Peč, in Serbian). His real name was Nebojsa Minic. He was directly implicated in the murder of six family members on June 12, 1999, but the siblings tell me: “He killed sixty-eight people.” They repeated the number: “Sixty-eight.” When I asked how they knew, the kids said they heard it somewhere. They added, “He killed our neighbor the same day he came to our house.”

  “When he came with the paramilitaries,” Alice continued, “the minute they came, my mom gave them ten thousand Deutschmarks, rolled in a tube like a cigarette. She told him it was for all the other houses, too. But he didn’t care. He burned our neighbor’s house with twenty-four people hiding inside.”

  The people got out of the house, and saw that the paramilitaries had killed one of their other neighbors. They were looking for all the men.

  “Captain Death came back a second time. He took my mother’s hand and said, ‘You survived because you could pay.’ My mother doesn’t remember this because she’s traumatized,” Eric told me matter-of-factly.

  “He came back a third time and asked to see the basement because he th
ought someone might be hiding there. People had been hiding in other basements, and he wanted to find my father because he was rich. He was marked for execution.”

  The children understood that it was not just that they were Albanian that put them at risk, but that they were wealthy. They knew that they had survived because they had money—their mother’s bribe to the captain—but they understood that their wealth might also endanger them.

  “When they came back that third time, my dad and my uncle were on their way to hide on the roof. When Captain Death and the other Serbs came through the door, my aunt was closing the attic, so my mom came clomping down the stairs, making as much noise as she could to hide the sounds upstairs. Death asked my mom, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Leaving,’ she said. ‘Oh no,’ Death said. ‘Not yet.’

  “Then he lined us up.

  “Right there,” Eric said, pointing out of the living room into the foyer at the base of the stairs. “There were my cousins there too. Thirteen people he lined up.”

  Captain Death put a gun in Eric’s mother’s back, and she told him that she had a Mercedes in the garage. He could take it if he wanted. Captain Death replied that he already had some Mercedes and didn’t need another one, but that they would go inspect the garage together. He shoved her there with the gun in her back, in case someone was hiding to ambush him.

  “Once he saw it was all clear, he left again,” Eric told me. He did not know how long they spent in the garage, and I did not want to push the question. Whatever happened in that garage was none of my business. I knew what the paramilitaries did to Albanian women.”

  Some time passed in our conversation. This was not an uninterrupted narrative that Eric gave me. I have edited down a conversation over several hours with the usual asides, meanderings, even a discussion about a popular Spanish soap opera. In that time Alice left the room to go watch television and gossip with her cousin. Eric continued.

  “The people from the burning basement came out and saw our dead neighbor. They were screaming and yelling. At the same time, we heard gunfire somewhere. We thought we were all dead. My oldest sister went out to check what had happened. She saw that our neighbor was dead, shot. She called out and everyone came and saw. They wrapped him in a blanket and buried him in the yard.

  “We stayed up all night. The men patrolled the area. Early in the morning the next day, we got some things to leave. My father and uncle argued about the Mercedes. My father wanted to leave it, my uncle said we needed another car. So he drove it and my father disguised himself and drove in the Peugeot. During the drive to Montenegro we were stopped many times by the Black Gloves—a paramilitary group, mostly armed volunteer thugs and criminals under the loose command of the military—the unit wearing ski masks, the executioners, poked my father with their guns and demanded money. He was using a fake name until we got to Tirana, in Albania.”

  Eric’s memory for the details is astounding. He also remembers when there was artillery fire near their house early in the war, and his mother picked him up to carry him, she slipped, and he fell. His father carried him the rest of the way. Eric thought it was important for me to hear this story too, to have a complete picture of his experience. He wanted to make sure I knew as many details as possible. He searched out and showed me a photograph of the neighbor who had been shot. I should see it, he said, and I could keep it if I needed to. I told him I didn’t, but I wondered why he was so insistent on every detail, on remembering events so precisely. He had been correcting his sister when she spoke, which might have been why she left the room.

  Other children showed the same attention to detail.

  In the village Lubeniq, a fourteen-year-old boy, Leo, told of walking with his mother and siblings to Albania.

  “The police came early in the morning, at six A.M., and made the whole village come out of our houses. They sent the women and children to Albania. They made the men stay. If we stopped walking to rest, the Serbs would say, ‘If you don’t get up in five minutes, we’ll kill you.’ They burned all the identification papers they found so we could not come back. When we left, I heard shooting. They killed eighty-four or eighty-six men.”

  Human Rights Watch reports that “between March 24 and June 10, more than eighty villagers were killed by Serbian forces.”

  Leo wanted to be very precise about the numbers—and his accuracy impressed me. The numbers must have come from adults around him, if not directly told to him then from his own active assimilation of information he overheard. Most of the children I met in Kosovo had this same impulse, get the numbers right, get as much information as possible about what happened, tell the names of the dead. It seemed to be a trend: The countryside is filled with memorials to fallen KLA soldiers, to civilians massacred. At a school in the mountains near the Montenegro border, a plaque commemorates an eighth grader who was killed in a mortar attack. The students I met, even the ones who were very young at the time of the war, knew his name and what had happened to him. Telling their story, for these young people, for this nation, seemed a way to validate their past, to prove they could not be expelled or exterminated. The story of individuals and the story of the people as a whole were bound together.

  “There were nine survivors that day,” Leo told me. “They were wounded, the rest were executed. Only twenty of the bodies have been recovered.”

  Leo, Karl, Valerie, and Nora, as well as many of the other youths I met, were bothered by the bodies that had not been buried, even if they were not the bodies of their family or friends. The unburied, missing bodies are a constant reminder of the horror these communities experienced. The wounds heal over time, but without the ability to properly mourn their dead, the scab leaves some painful grit underneath that never stops itching, will never stop until the missing dead can be put to rest and proper healing can begin. The stories they tell, five years after the war, are fresh and vivid in detail. I believe this is due, in part, to the fact that the story is not complete. Kosovo still does not have its independence from Serbia, though the UN administers it as a separate territory and NATO forces defend its borders with Serbia. No war criminals have been indicted in connection with the massacres or “cleansings” in Kosovo. This leaves the young feeling uneasy about the future. Their vivid memories are not “flashbulb memories,” moments burnt into their minds the way some Americans remember where they were when Kennedy was shot or what they felt, saw, and heard on the morning of September 11, 2001. They are survivors’ narratives; in a way, reminders that they lived through such things once, and that they could survive it again. They are, in all their horrific detail, celebrations of life for these young people, continuity of their experience, assurance that though some have died others go on. The children take the stories of their people forward.

  Telling their stories helps to create a sense of community. The children in Zahaq were eager to tell their stories, supported each other’s stories, asked each other questions to learn more about the escape from Kosovo, and filled in the gaps in each other’s memories.

  Barika, the Congolese to whom I gave a copy of The Little Prince, participated in a performance group that put on scenes about refugee life, that encouraged the youth to write poems about their experiences, and performed pieces about their history. Continuity of place is disrupted when the young are forced to flee their homes, but by sharing their stories they can maintain the narrative of their lives, both as individuals and as communities. Inviting willing young people into the process of telling can help them to heal, can help them to integrate their own suffering into a larger picture and, perhaps, combat the isolation so many of the young survivors of violence feel. Of course, the nature of this narrative matters too. The story can stir nationalism and ethnic hatred as much as it promotes psychological healing, as the Kosovo Serbs and Albanians taught me.

  “Everyone was in the same position after the war,” Nora told me toward the end of our discussion in Zahaq. We had left the classroom in which we had been speaking, and the five of u
s walked around the school. They wanted me to see the ways in which their building was broken. They were very concerned that I understand the present conditions, not just talk about the wars of the past.

  “No one could talk about what happened,” she said. “There was too much hurt. Everyone was in shock.”

  “How can I explain it to you?” Karl interrupted, looking around at the schoolyard, where a group of children were playing soccer and others were laughing and staring at us. “One day I lost my father and my grandparents.” He looked at me in silence.

  “But life continues,” Valerie added. The others concurred. “Life continues.”

  THREE

  “We Can’t Stay Here”

  Migrants and Refugees in Hiding

  Siha suggested that maybe I didn’t see the fear.

  “The children don’t say it, but their parents are afraid and they are afraid.” He had stopped drawing a picture of himself flying a jet in order to tell me about the fear that permeates the lives of the Burmese, then he returned to his paper. We were sitting on the floor of his aunt’s house. As I had noticed was his habit, he poked his tongue out of the side of his mouth when he drew. His aunt told me that he would rather be playing video games than anything else.

  Siha denied it instantly. “My favorite game is soccer. I love to play sports. I don’t just play video games.” He feigned anger at the false accusations against him, but smiled widely at his aunt. Everyone in the room laughed loudly, Siha, his aunt, my translator, and me.