Giving Eyewitness Credibility

...Helpful Montenegrin officials in Rome got him a Yugoslav visa and he managed a boat ride from Bari, Italy...

...IN HIS new book, Matthew McAllester brings the Kosovo ground war into searing focus...

...Under these circumstances, can outsiders succeed in persuading Albanian Kosovars—through recently held elections or any other means—to reconcile themselves to being a part of Serbia, regardless of how desirable this may seem for policy reasons...

...Despite some progress, the precarious task remains unfinished, partly because of the West's unwillingness to become too deeply involved in nation building and to provide sufficient means for economic revival...

...The foot soldiers were extreme Serb nationalists, crazies, criminals, and thugs...

...She nearly survived in an icy mountain hut just inside Kosovo, but ultimately died with others in her family in the final Serb assaults...

...These and many more deftly drawn portraits show imperfect, ordinary people responding in very human ways to extraordinary uncertainties and deadly dangers...

...This is consistent with Tim Judah's findings in Kosovo: War and Revenge, and with other reports documenting the prior preparation of what was called "Operation Horseshoe...

...He somehow endured while most around him were brutalized and driven out...

...Killer Nebojsa Minic is driving around Belgrade in his Audi making sure his casino stays profitable...

...This meant, first, calming the highly volatile situation in Serbia, where resentment, corruption and xenophobia still played powerful roles...

...rather, it was simply the existence of another increasingly vigorous tribe that competed with them for political power...

...He cites Serb sources who say the banishment project had been planned for months...

...Once in Podgorica, Montenegro's capital, he realized there was no way he could get Yugoslav permission to legally enter Kosovo because NATO's air campaign was getting under way and Milosevic was launching his fateful countermove aimed at driving out the Albanians...

...But broader conclusions emerge from the individual narratives as well...

...One of his subjects is Nebojsa Minic, a hardened young Serb thug who became the head of the infamous Munje special police unit...

...He wonders whether his reporting triggered Yugoslav Army attacks in valleys near the Kula pass just before the war ended, causing the death of some KLA fighters who had helped him...

...But it is less than three years since Slobodan Milosevic's unspeakable mass cleansing of Kosovo Albanians filled television screens with images of torn bodies, torched buildings and overamillionnewly homeless, freezing people clawing their way to safety in Montenegro, Macedonia and Albania...

...Yet Serb claims to Kosovo are almost as strong as ever...

...Two of the Albanian guides were captured and tortured on the way back from one of the missions...

...This group, with the Frenkis and other paramilitaries, carried out the robbery, rape, murder, and burning that cleansed Pec of tens of thousands of Albanian inhabitants...

...McAllester maintains it wasn't the Muslim religion of most Albanians that the Serb paramilitaries hated...

...On the other hand, McAllester is less convinced it was the NATO bombing campaign that gave rise to Milosevic's Albanian expulsion...

...The Western coalition that brought down Milosevic—and would later send him to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague—became anxious to preserve its democratic gains in Belgrade...

...Why Pec was singled out for the savagery is not clear, although the nearby Orthodox Patriarchate, the spiritual heart of Yugoslavia for Serbs, gives the town special significance...

...then to the collapse of the Milosevic regime following NATO's devastating bombing of Belgrade's infrastructure...

...Most analysts now agree, however, that Milosevic was moved to carry out his threat only when NATO bombing began...

...As a result, the world's sympathy for the aspirations of the Montenegrins and the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians changed into a wariness bordering on hostility...

...But the West's main emphasis, as well as Russia's, was now on Yugoslavia's political reconstruction, so that it could again be at least a stable partner in the Balkans and perhaps someday return to respectability as a member of the European Community...

...Since September 11, this has been exacerbated by unarticulated yet distinguishable anti-Muslim sentiments: Although most Kosovo Albanians are proAmerican, many are Christians, and in any case few are Islamic true believers, the tide has clearly turned in favor of the Serbs...

...After watching thousands of Kosovars fleeing from Pec to Montenegro's relative safety—on foot and in whatever vehicle would carry them through the fog and snow of the freezing Kula pass—McAllester and one or two other journalists crossed into Kosovo several times anyway...

...Throughout, McAllester is transfixed by the depth of the viciousness and inhumanity he encounters, but he also searches his own conscience...

...It would also create two more nonviable ministates and open the road to a greater Albania—with explosive implications for Macedonia, Greece and Bulgaria, and the potential for another Balkan war...

...Another of his subjects is Isa Baia, a hardworking and decent, but not entirely blameless, Albanian butcher...

...Indeed, the power of McAllester's extraordinary book lies not in its comprehensiveness orits literary polish—though there are many brilliantly moving and perceptive passages—but in its shocking authenticity and deep moral concern...

...Staying with refugees and KLA fighters in cramped shelters, they repeatedly risked being captured or killed by paramilitaries and Yugoslav Army forces scouring the terrain...

...The loot, and there was plenty of it, went chiefly to the senior players...

...Their objective was to give eyewitness credibility to the otherwise mainly secondhand media reports of Milosevic's ethnic cleansing, more brutal and thorough in Pec and its surrounding villages than anywhere else...

...They, in tum, used "unofficial" paramilitary outfits to do the dirty work...

...That remains very much an open question...

...With local guides they climbed over the cruel, deeply snow-covered "mountains of the damned" (as they are really called), fighting cold, hunger and fatigue...

...Like The Scream, Edvard Munch's famous painting, Beyond the Mountains of the Damned cuts through all other issues and insists on renewed attention to the excruciating pain suffered by the victims, and in a few cases the perpetrators, of Milosevic's vicious assault on the province's Albanians...

...and shortly thereafter to the rise of a fragile reformist alliance more palatable to the West, headed by a Serbian nationalist constitutional law professor, Vojislav Kostunica...

...One gets the sense that he risked his life not simply to pursue a story, timely and important as it was, but because of the enormity of the evil being done and his conviction that, in a world of bland policy abstractions, what happened in those days inside Kosovo had to be told...

...He also investigates the fate of Zenjipe Zekaj, the old Albanian peasant woman who refused to flee...

...The perilous effort produced a notable series of firsthand accounts that bolstered support for NATO's air strikes...

...Today Kosovo's wounds are gradually healing, even though the Albanians' memories of what they suffered are likely to last for a long time...

...There was a price to pay, though...

...British-born McAllester, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the TWA Flight 800 crash, was a Newsday Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem when his editor called late in March 1999 to tell him to go to Montenegro to cover what looked like an impending war...

...As is so often the case, policy was dictated by events...

...For the final breakup of Yugoslavia would inevitably reignite Serb chauvinism and undermine the new government in Belgrade...

...Few perpetrators have been brought to justice...

...In the view of key Europeans and Americans, though, the heart of the matter was arresting the centrifugal forces not only in Montenegro but in Albanian Kosovo...

...Soon, of course, the focus of the news shifted to General Wesley K. Clark's barely successful NATO campaign ousting Serbian forces from Kosovo...

...These fears were reinforced by Montenegro's continuing insistence on an independence plebiscite, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) revenge operations and incursions into Macedonia, and the pervasive corruption and criminality that are largely the consequence of sky-high unemployment...

...McAllester's interviews convince him that Milosevic did indeed direct the ethnic cleansing through competing security organizations...

...Reviewed by George Jaeger Former NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs It seems histories ago...

...But his children were murdered in cold blood in front of him by Munje thugs just after Milosevic surrendered and Albanians began to think they might be safe...

...He interviewed Albanian victims, their Serb persecutors and bystanders in an attempt to fairly depict what happened...

...Certainly other senior war criminals would be tried, even though that was a source of friction...

...After the war, when the surviving Albanians went streaming back to their homes in Kosovo, McAllester returned to Pec and the mostly burnt-out surrounding villages...

...McAllester is still struggling with the ethical fallout: Is there a limit to the level of risk a journalist should take, even to get a very important story...