RACAK, Yugoslavia (AP) - For six hours, Rame Shabani lay motionless, his face pressed to the dirt, while Serb police and army units shot and mutilated 25 men on a hillside above the Albanian village of Racak. He escaped by throwing himself into a ravine when they opened fire. (Read photo caption below).
Now with former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in a U.N. prison, Shabani's memories have gathered the weight of testimony.
``I heard their screams as they were being massacred. They were begging for their lives,'' Shabani said, sitting cross-legged on the floor of a spartan room decorated only with a photograph of the victims' coffins blanketed with Albanian flags.
When they were finished they sang a nationalist song: ``Who is saying, who is lying Serbia is small? Serbia is not small. Serbia is not small.''
A bullet had ripped a hole through Shabani's leather jacket and nicked his belt, but spared him. He was meant to be a witness, and could provide key testimony at Milosevic's war crimes trial in The Hague, Netherlands.
``I am not afraid any more even to stand in front of him,'' Shabani, 34, said with a steady gaze.
He imagines the scene: ``That day is going to be interesting for me, to say I saw people with their hearts cut out, with their eyes gouged and ears cut off. A 70-year-old man decapitated.''
There was symmetry in Milosevic's delivery Thursday to the U.N. tribunal for atrocities in Kosovo. The day was St. Vitus' Day, Serbia's biggest religious holiday, and it was 12 years since he awakened the nationalist fervor that sparked four Balkan wars with a speech at a Kosovo battlefield where Serbs were defeated by Ottoman Turkish troops 600 years earlier.
``They weren't wrong, all the Balkan prophets who have said it started in Kosovo and it will end in Kosovo,'' the Kosovo Albanian daily Koha Ditore wrote in a special issue announcing Milosevic's demise.
The Racak (RAH-chak) massacre on Jan. 15, 1999 marked the beginning of the end for Milosevic.
It wasn't the first massacre in Milosevic's final Balkan campaign, this one to evict the Albanian majority from the southern Serb province of Kosovo. But this time, international monitors observed the Serb assault from across the valley.
After the Serb retreat, they entered the village and found mutilated bodies strewn in houses and yards. In all, 45 people were murdered, three of them women, including the 25 dead on the Racak hillside. The others were murdered in and around the village.
The world was outraged - and the outrage eventually coalesced into the 78-day air campaign that drove Serb fighters out of the province.
The Racak killings were cited in the original indictment against Milosevic and four members of his inner circle. But it didn't stop there. There were other massacres: Bela Crkva, Velika Krusa, Djakovica, Crkolez, Izbica. And more were added to the indictment this week, the tribunal announced.
Crouched on her living room floor with two small nephews and a younger brother, Krenare Popaj studied the list of 65 men, women and children from Bela Crkva killed on March 25, 1999, just 12 hours after NATO launched its attack. Her father and a brother are there, Ethem Popaj, 46; Kreshnik Popaj, 18.
As long as Milosevic was free in Belgrade, the indictment was just a piece of paper. But now the wheels are turning fast toward a trial, and the indictment may bring Popaj to The Hague to face Milosevic.
Popaj already has testified at the first local war crimes trial in Kosovo, which ended in the conviction of a local Serb police officer on June 14. Cedomir Jovanovic got 20 years in prison from an internationally administered court in Prizren.
The satisfaction she feels at the conviction is overwhelmed by the loss. She wears black, at 20, and her pretty face is devoid of lightness.
``It feels like a different life completely,'' she said. ``There is no resemblance to the old life. There is no happiness in the village.''
The road to Racak has been renamed Rruga William Walker for the American diplomat who announced the massacre to the world. In typical Albanian fashion, the houses are hidden behind concrete block walls enclosing small compounds where extended families live in separate dwellings.
Shabani was sleeping in a one-room building on the family's courtyard when his mother rushed in at quarter to seven on Jan. 15, 1999 to alert him to the shooting.
``I asked if it was big or small. She said big,'' Shabani said. Serb tanks had taken position in the hills opposite Racak and pounded the area with artillery.
Serb police and army units first entered the village on foot. They found Shabani with a group of villagers hiding women and children. A Serb police man slapped his 8-year-old daughter in the face when she cried out as he was led away.
The men were beaten with boards the forced to walk up the steep hill single file, where waiting Serbs opened fire. The wooden boards, Shabani said, were taken by investigators as evidence.
Shabani is certain of the identity of only one of the attackers: the Serb police commander from nearby Stimlje. Others from the area wore masks. The police from Serbia were outsiders, unknown locally.
Still, Shabani is sure they got the right man.
``Someone else did it but most of the blame is his,'' he said. ``In all the massacres from Bosnia to Kosovo, he is guilty because he's the landlord.'' It was his house - and he made the rules.
The Hague is too good for Milosevic, Shabani said.
``I would smoke a cigarette. I would beat him until he had open wounds, I would pour salt in the wounds, then I would leave him to live like that,'' he said.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Rame Shabani an ethnic Albanian villager in his house in the village of Racak, Kosovo, Friday, June 29, 2001, while speaking about what he witnessed during a massacre. With Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic held in a U.N. prison, Shabani could be among the witnesses to atrocities in Kosovo called to testify against him. Rame, 34, survived the Serb massacre of 45 ethnic Albanians in the village on Jan. 15, 1999, and has been interviewed multiple times by the war crimes investigators. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu).