Kitabı oku: «On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin», sayfa 7

This week will see the first steps towards Netanyahu’s ‘new Israel’. The West and Israel’s Arab neighbours are hoping Netanyahu will be more pragmatic than his campaign rhetoric suggested.

But there are few early signs of moderation. He owes enormous debts to right-wing nationalist and ultra-orthodox religious parties, which themselves won unprecedented numbers of seats in the Knesset. To put together a governing coalition Netanyahu will have to give the right-wing and religious parties ministries and a say in policy.

The lineup for his cabinet includes retired generals Ariel Sharon, the former defence minister who launched the 1982 Lebanon war, tipped for the finance portfolio, and Rafael Eitan, candidate for the Ministry of Domestic Security (police), who as Sharon’s chief of staff enforcing the siege of Beirut announced the Arabs were ‘trapped like drugged bugs in a bottle’. Netanyahu’s new Israel is likely to bear little resemblance to the vision many have had in their sights in the past three years.

Israeli bulldozers rev up for showdown in Jerusalem

JERUSALEM

16 March 1997

Sasson Shem-Tov drives a black Jaguar and wears sunglasses whatever the weather. He does not usually take much interest in politics. But this week he finds himself in the middle of a dispute between Israel and the Arabs that risks bathing his country in blood.

Shem-Tov is about to order his bulldozers into Arab east Jerusalem to help build a Jewish settlement that the Palestinians have vowed to stop by any means. Even America, which is usually supportive of Israel, has denounced its plan to build 6,500 homes for Jews on a hill within sight of the church spires of Bethlehem. On Thursday the United Nations general assembly called for construction to stop.

Yasser Arafat was so angry that he twice refused to take calls from Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. It is not only the settlement plans that have provoked Arab ire: Netanyahu recently announced that the first step of a three-phase withdrawal from rural areas of the West Bank, mandated under the Oslo accords, would include only a fraction of the territory Palestinians expected. The prime minister then ordered the closure of four Palestinian offices in Jerusalem, a move whose legality is being debated.

King Hussein of Jordan sent a bitter letter charging that the Israeli prime minister was ‘dragging the peace process to the edge of the abyss’. When a Jordanian gunman opened fire on Israeli schoolgirls on Thursday, killing seven of them, commentators in both countries suggested he had been angered by Netanyahu’s intransigence and insinuations.

Shem-Tov, a wealthy Israeli construction magnate, is unperturbed. ‘We are going in next week,’ he said over his car telephone. His yellow bulldozers were already in place near Har Homa, the pine-covered hill Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 war, which he has been contracted to clear for the new homes. To him, it is just business. But for the right-wing Israeli government, the settlement means much more.

If built, Har Homa will close the last gap in a half-moon of Jewish settlements constructed on hilltops around the outer edges of Arab east Jerusalem. By encircling the Arab area with these self-contained Jewish townships, right-wing Israelis want to create ‘facts on the ground’ to ensure they will never have to cede an inch of Jerusalem to the Palestinians, who claim east Jerusalem as their capital.

Under the Oslo accord, the final status of Jerusalem is supposed to be decided in talks scheduled to conclude in 1999, but Palestinians argue that there will not be much to talk about if Israel keeps building. Netanyahu showed no sign of backing down. ‘I am building Har Homa this week and nothing is going to stop me,’ he said in an interview. The Israeli cabinet on Friday reaffirmed his decision, and government sources said the bulldozers are likely to move in tomorrow.

The army will no doubt be called in to keep back protesters, who have vowed to lie down in front of Shem-Tov’s machines. Palestinian leaders have pledged that the demonstrations will be peaceful, but emotions are running so high among Palestinians that they are widely expected to explode into violence. ‘The minute the bulldozers go in I think only God knows the consequences of what will happen,’ said Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian minister involved in the Israeli–Palestinian negotiations.

Yesterday Arafat made a last-ditch effort to thwart Netanyahu diplomatically. Amid Israeli condemnations, he gathered American, European and Arab sponsors of the peace process to an emergency conference at his seaside headquarters in Gaza to seek their help in stopping the Har Homa settlement and putting the peace process back on track.

Although the Americans used their veto in the United Nations vote, they showed their opposition to the settlement plans by sending Edward Abington, the American consul in Jerusalem, to the talks, despite a direct Israeli request that Washington should boycott the meeting. The Palestinian president is making no secret of his anger. ‘The situation is really serious,’ Arafat told envoys to yesterday’s meeting. ‘We are facing a plan to destroy the peace process.’

The conference in Gaza is not expected to make any difference on the ground. Arafat called the meeting to send a signal to Netanyahu that he is not alone; the governments who sent envoys wanted to reassure Arafat of support, which they hoped would head off an explosion of Palestinian violence.

The threat of bloodshed is no secret. Under the codename Thornbush, Israeli army units with tanks have been practising manoeuvres to re-enter cities on the West Bank controlled by Arafat’s Palestinian authority, in case Palestinians fight to stop the building at Har Homa. Israeli intelligence sources said yesterday that the army wanted to be better prepared than it was in September, when 60 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers were killed in clashes after Netanyahu’s decision to open a tunnel in Jerusalem.

Given the reluctance on both sides to fight, there is still a good chance violence can be avoided. Crises have come and gone since Netanyahu’s government took over from Labour in May, and generally he has compromised.

Nor is Arafat in a strong position. His army is no match for the Israeli forces. If he had to fight, the peace process that would finally win a homeland for Palestinians would be shown up as a failure. He would then be vulnerable to Islamic extremists.

Netanyahu needs the support of the ultra-right-wing parties in his coalition government. But he may well have miscalculated the strength of anger his moves have inspired among Palestinians. The test of that will come when the bulldozers close in on Har Homa.

Arafat encircled in battle for Jerusalem

6 April 1997

In his first interview with a foreign journalist since the latest Middle East crisis erupted, the Palestinian leader tells Marie Colvin in Gaza why the new Israeli township must be stopped.

It was an odd spectacle: Yasser Arafat marched briskly around his modest office, arms swinging, eyes fixed on the carpet. He might have been deep in thought. But the diminutive Palestinian leader calls his compulsive pacing ‘speed walking’, a form of daily exercise that seems a perfect metaphor for his political predicament: he has little room for manoeuvre.

Sweating in the heavy military jacket he wears in all seasons, he marched round and round on Friday, skirting the conference table and ignoring the breathtaking view from his windows of the sparkling Mediterranean sea. After half an hour’s wear of the dull, grey carpet, he sat down, mopped his forehead with a yellow Kleenex and turned his attention to a visiting reporter.

On his desk were reports of yet another day of violent Palestinian protests in the West Bank against the decision by Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to build a new Jewish settlement in Arab east Jerusalem.

‘I am asking Netanyahu to understand exactly the sensitivity of the question of Jerusalem,’ Arafat said, swivelling his chair to face the sea, then turning it abruptly back again. ‘I am astonished at how he does not understand it. Or perhaps he understands it but insists on challenging the Palestinians, Arabs, Christians and Muslims.’

On the eve of Netanyahu’s summit with President Bill Clinton tomorrow, Arafat knows he has no alternative but to continue the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. Yet if he accepts the new Jewish township he will lose any credibility among his own people.

From the Israeli side, Arafat is faced with overwhelming force and an intransigent prime minister. The Americans, meanwhile, are pressuring him to halt street protests. They also want him to arrest extremists who have dispatched three suicide bombers to attack Israel since the bulldozers began clearing the way for homes to be built for 30,000 Jews on a pine-covered hill known as Har Homa to the Israelis and Jebel Abu Ghneim to the Palestinians.

An Arab League decision last week to sever Arab ties with Israel gave Arafat some support for what he calls ‘the battle for Jerusalem’. But the backing of other Arab countries has been largely rhetorical. Thus Arafat feels very much alone as he marches in his headquarters by the sea.

For his part Netanyahu, say those who know him, believes that if he can force Arafat to accept the new settlement, the Palestinians will ‘lower their expectations’ in future peace talks. Yet Arafat, already under attack for conceding too much to the Israelis in the Oslo agreements, cannot give up any more if he is to survive as leader.

‘Netanyahu must stop this settlement on Jebel Abu Ghneim,’ he insisted, adding that this was a condition for Palestinians returning to the peace talks. ‘Netanyahu must return to the honest and accurate implementation of the peace process. Nothing less.’

Arafat says he has ‘no contact’ with Netanyahu these days. He has ordered his security chiefs to stop sharing intelligence information with their Israeli counterparts. Netanyahu’s generals have warned that this is dangerous. Since Arafat took over Gaza and the West Bank cities, shared information from Palestinian security forces has prevented several planned attacks against Israeli targets.

But the Palestinian leader has lost faith in any idea that Netanyahu can be a partner in the peace process. Instead, he sees him as dangerously dependent for his political survival on the support of religious and ultra-right-wing parties who believe in Eretz Israel, or greater Israel.

‘I am sorry to say Netanyahu is following the ideology of the (Jewish) fanatic groups,’ said Arafat. ‘He must remember he is committed to Oslo, which was signed by the previous Israeli governments, or we will be at a real impasse.’

For a few moments, Arafat stared through his heavy black-framed glasses into the middle distance, as if trying to see the way ahead. There was none. ‘We are at a real impasse now,’ he sighed.

One possible hope is American mediation. ‘The peace process now needs the attention of the American administration – especially President Clinton,’ the Palestinian leader said. ‘The agreement was signed under his supervision. This is not a bilateral agreement. It is an international agreement.’

Arafat has not yet received an invitation from Washington to take part in a meeting with the Israelis. But some analysts believe the Americans are trying to work out a deal. Sources in Washington say the Clinton administration is trying to piece together a compromise that would include delaying the settlement, rather than definitively stopping it, while simultaneously speeding up the schedule for final negotiations.

At the moment, however, the Americans, who have generally supported Netanyahu’s position that the Palestinians must stop their protests before peace talks can resume, seem intent on winning concessions from Arafat.

Last week Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state, telephoned Arafat twice to seek his approval for three-way talks. She urged him to try to calm the violence in the West Bank, arrest Islamic extremists and resume security co-operation with the Israelis.

In one lengthy telephone call, Arafat explained that as Netanyahu had ignited the crisis with his ‘violent’ action of sending in bulldozers, she should be asking the Israelis, not him, for concessions. He could not return to security co-operation before the political negotiations resumed.

‘Let’s not get into a discussion of which came first, the chicken or the egg,’ Albright responded. To which Arafat replied, cryptically: ‘But we have to remember that in the end there is the hen and there is the egg.’ The response of the new secretary of state is not recorded.

Kosovo

The centuries of conflict over a sacred heartland

8 March 1998

Like earlier Balkan wars, the battle in Kosovo, the impoverished southern province of former Yugoslavia, has its roots in history. For the Serbs the region is the sacred heartland of their long-lost medieval state. For the ethnic Albanians who make up 90% of its population, it has been home for centuries.

The rise of virulent Serbian nationalism was the trigger for the current conflict. In the Yugoslavia of Josip Broz Tito, the former communist leader, Kosovo, although extremely poor, enjoyed a degree of formal autonomy within Serbia.

Under Slobodan Milosevic, the bullet-headed Serbian nationalist, everything changed. In 1989, two years after he came to power as Serbian Communist party leader, he visited Kosovo and proclaimed himself the protector of local Serbs claiming to be the victims of discrimination. He rescinded Kosovo’s autonomous status later that year.

The province is seen as the spiritual home of the Serbian nation: in 1389, at Kosovo Polje, the Serbs lost a battle with Turkish troops that consigned them to 500 years of rule by the Ottoman empire.

Milosevic’s initiative to reclaim Kosovo prompted riots in 1989 and 1990. He sent tanks against the protesters and their leaders fled or were killed.

The ethnic Albanians have never given up their demand for independence. They have ignored the state network, setting up a ‘parallel society’ of schools and hospitals. The driving force behind the policy of passive resistance has been Ibrahim Rugova, known as the ‘Gandhi of the Balkans’ – a quiet intellectual who is president of the self-styled republic of Kosovo.

The present violence appears to have been provoked by younger, more militant Kosovans who feel frustrated at Rugova’s failure to win concessions for them. The Kosovo Liberation Army, an armed guerrilla group, emerged 18 months ago, claiming responsibility for the killings of Serbian policemen and informers. It appears to be funded by Kosovan emigrés in Germany and Switzerland.

By last month the attacks had grown so lethal that the Serbian police withdrew from much of the Drenica region, a stronghold of separatists northwest of Pristina, the capital. Milosevic responded last week by ordering troops to raze villages there.

The fear now is that fighting in Kosovo, which was largely unaffected by the conflicts that engulfed Croatia and Bosnia in the early 1990s, may lead to a wider Balkan war. This could drag in Albania and Macedonia, which has its own ethnic Albanian population. Turkey is sympathetic to fellow Muslims in Kosovo, while Greece could be drawn in on the side of the Orthodox Serbs.

Kosovo’s silent houses of the dead

PREKAZ

15 March 1998

All 11-year-old Basorta Jashari knew was that the artillery shells had stopped crashing into her house. For hours, the noise had been unbearable.

As she hugged herself tightly beneath the table her mother used to prepare bread, the ceiling had collapsed and the walls had appeared to explode. Now it was the silence that was terrifying. Choking on smoke and dust, she screamed for her mother.

Weeping as she crawled through the rubble, she found her sisters, Lirie, 10, Fatima, 8, and seven-year-old Blerina. She tried to shake them awake and was covered in blood by the time she realised they were dead.

Then Basorta saw her brothers: Selvete, 20, Afeti, 17, Besim, 14, and Blerin, 12. They had always seemed so strong. Now, all were dead.

Finally, there was her mother, Ferida, whose dark shiny hair and beautiful voice Basorta had cherished, lying with her limbs protruding at impossible angles. She would never again respond to her daughter’s cry of ‘nene’ (mummy).

Basorta climbed through a hole in the wall and ran round the house, shouting: ‘Anybody … is anybody still alive?’ When nobody answered, she crawled back under the table.

The pause in the shelling was all too brief. Basorta would spend the night and the next day alone, with her family dead all around her, as the Serbs’ rockets came again and again, smashing into the whitewashed house with red-tiled roof that had once been home.

A bright, happy pupil at school, Basorta was the sole survivor of an attack that can now be revealed as nothing less than a calculated, cold-blooded massacre.

The house in Prekaz, a village in a pastoral landscape of neatly tilled fields and rolling hills, had sheltered 22 members of the families of two brothers, Hamza Jashari, Basorta’s father, and Adem Jashari, her uncle – ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the southernmost province of what remains of Serb-ruled Yugoslavia.

Their deaths were no accident of war. I pieced together the horror last week from the account Basorta – now in hiding in the nearby town of Srbica – gave to relatives who managed to escape from other homes in Prekaz. I saw the gaping holes in the roofs and walls of the three Jashari homes in the compound – one for Basorta’s grandparents and one each for Hamza and Adem – and the brown pockmarks left by close-range machinegun fire on the walls.

In the muddy farmyard lay strewn the detritus of domestic life: a little boy’s shredded sports bag, postcards from relatives in Germany and a satellite dish dented by bullets. The nose cones and tailfins of two rockets were scattered amid the debris.

Yesterday all that moved in the compound that once teemed with children were two black and white cows and a flock of chickens pecking at the rubble. On the other side of the dirt road that runs in front of the compound were 51 fresh graves with mounds of dark earth and wooden crosses.

These were the final resting places of the Jasharis who died in the house, four relatives who were killed nearby and neighbours who got in the way of the Serbian forces.

There is little doubt that the Jashari brothers were connected to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a militant force that emerged last November dedicated to fighting for the interests of the ethnic Albanians who make up 90% of Kosovo’s population.

They had grown impatient with the policies of the mainstream Kosovo Democratic League. The league advocates passive resistance to the strong-arm tactics of Slobodan Milosevic, the nationalist Serbian president of Yugoslavia, who revoked the province’s autonomous status 10 years ago.

However, this was not the killing of suspected terrorists in a firefight, nor the ambush of dangerous outlaws. It was a military assault on three family homes without warning: on men, women and children asleep in their beds.

The Serbian offensive in the Drenica valley, a region of farming villages that is the stronghold of Albanian resistance, began on 28 February, the day after four Serbian policemen were killed in an ambush as they chased KLA guerrillas. The Serbs moved first against the village of Llaushe, killing 24 Albanians. Then they prepared to attack Prekaz, where the Jasharis were the principal family.

Jetish Durmishi, a bus driver, was alerted to danger when a friend telephoned from his home near the local police station in Mitrovica with the warning that a convoy of buses full of Serbian police was moving towards Prekaz.

Durmishi escaped to the woods, leaving his family behind; in the past the Serbs had targeted only men. He saw what happened from the woods above the Jashari compound.

‘Within minutes it seemed, the police came and the village was surrounded by a cordon of Serbs,’ Durmishi said. ‘They were standing about half a yard apart all along the road and up across the hills.’

The artillery fire came at 6am from a Serbian base above Prekaz. There was no warning. The first to die were the Agas, members of a gypsy family who panicked and tried to flee their house.

The mother, a small boy and a girl were gunned down in their garden. The next victim was Nazmi Jashari, who ran a kiosk in Prekaz selling cigarettes and sundries and lived opposite the main family compound.

He tried to carry his elderly mother, Naile, out of the back door, and was shot in front of her. The signal was clear. Anyone seen leaving their home would be a target for Serbian snipers.

The extended Jashari family gathered in what they thought would be the safest room, which had a new brick wall. But they were trapped: they faced gunfire if they came out or bombing if they remained inside. Soon, the shells were coming through the roof, then the walls. Basorta’s last memory of her family is that her uncle, Adem, was singing Albanian folk songs above the noise to keep up their spirits. She remembers the moment he stopped singing. Then, for 36 hours, there was only the sound of the bombs.

When they thought everybody inside was dead, the police entered the house, throwing grenades into several rooms ahead of them. One officer stood guard while another sprayed the bodies with bullets.

Perhaps they had had their fill of killing when they found Basorta cowering. Perhaps they thought she was too young to accuse them. Or perhaps they could not look a terrified schoolgirl in the eye and shoot her. But she is the reason the truth can be told.

‘I tried to pretend I was dead,’ she said to her uncle Hilmi. ‘But one of the soldiers put his hand on my chest and he felt I was alive.’

Still dressed in her red shirt and black trousers, by now covered with blood, she had to step over the bodies of her family to leave the room, surrounded by Serbs. She was taken to the military base nearby and interrogated for three hours.

Basorta believed her only chance was to lie. She denied that she was a Jashari, claiming her father was abroad and she was merely a guest in the compound. ‘They asked about my father and about Uncle Adem,’ she said. ‘I told them nothing, nothing.’

The Serbs dumped her on a road in Srbica and she ran to the home of a school friend. Yesterday, shocked and finding it increasingly difficult to speak, she was being moved from house to house for protection.

Unbeknown to Basorta, the bodies of her father, mother, uncle, aunt and all her cousins were lined up by the police at a bus depot in Mitrovica last week.

When nobody from the family turned up to identify them and friends tried to insist on post-mortem examinations, the Serbs dumped them in the graveyard they had dug opposite the remains of their house, leaving the coffins poking through the earth. The surviving villagers came back in the night to finish the job with respect.

All that was left of Basorta’s family was a pile of numbered black bin bags at the bus station, each filled with the bloody clothing they had been wearing when they died.

Kosovo guerrillas fight Serb shells with bullets

25 April 1999

Marie Colvin, the first reporter to enter Kosovo from Albania, is with a KLA unit fighting to open supply lines. She braved sniper fire and shelling to send this report.

At night, the foothills of Kosovo are silent except for the sporadic sound of gunfire. The silence makes them even more terrifying to walk through. Serbian snipers are in the woods but we do not know where they are. The anticipation of a shot at any moment is unnerving. Nobody speaks.

There are no civilians left in these woods or villages. It is dark and cold and when the shooting starts the crossfire can be petrifying. Bullets slam into trees.

I walked in single file on Friday night with a KLA special forces unit advancing towards the distant lights of the city of Djakovica. The Serbs were 500 metres away.

We walked through a village of six houses. All the red roofs had been holed by shells and half of one house was a pile of rubble. First the Serbs had driven out the ethnic Albanian farmers, then the KLA had driven out the Serbs. There is little for the families to return to.

Our goal was a gully in the forest overlooking Serbian positions in the village of Batusa. It was cold and wet and I slipped off a log when I was trying to cross a stream. A soldier held me up with the butt of his Kalashnikov.

Camp for the night was in camouflaged tarpaulins strung over branches. A pile of sleeping bags stashed earlier was sodden with the cold rain that had fallen all day and into the night. It is difficult to sleep in a flak jacket on a slope; it is like being an upended turtle with a detached shell. I keep slipping down the slope.

A patrol set out into the darkness and the night was broken intermittently by gunfire: single shots, automatic weapons fire and the crack of snipers’ rifles resounding off the hills. At 1am there was a long exchange of fire. Shells boomed intermittently though none landed close. One man in a returning patrol said he had killed a Serb, but nothing is sure here.

The watch came in for breakfast and a soldier passed round packets of cigarettes, bread and tins of sardines. This unit travels light. We overheard the Serbs on the radio asking to go back to their bunkers.

Every night has been like this for the past two months for this unit on the front line of the KLA offensive. The last weeks have been the worst. The Serbs have not attacked on foot; they have just shelled. Their tanks and artillery are beyond the hills. Two shells landed during breakfast.

It is heartbreaking for these men to hear Nato planes fly overhead on their way to Belgrade and Novi Sad. Everyone asks me when Nato will start bombing Serbian tanks and artillery and when the Apache helicopters will arrive.

The men in this special forces unit are different from the raw recruits one sees in most of the KLA camps. They have been fighting together for a year and seem like the units seen in old war movies.

There is ‘Doc’, who looks after communications as well as the wounded and to whom most of the men turn in time of crisis. Their commander was killed by a sniper 10 days ago. Another soldier, Morina, remembers his village and how the old men wept when he left. Another refuses to get out of bed, saying he cares more about the cold than the Serbs.

Few have heard from their families for months. They accept that there will be no news until the Serbs leave.

The KLA holds a small but strategic foothold in Kosovo at this point. The group I am with has so far penetrated about 8 kilometres from Kosare, a Serbian border post captured by the KLA just over two weeks ago.

Kosare is in a small cleft between the mountains and the KLA holds the mountains, including a towering, snow-bound peak where KLA soldiers sleep in 3 foot of snow. They will dominate the valley as soon as they take Batusa, the next target.

The KLA is trying to meet up with other units inside Kosovo who have been besieged and are running low on food and ammunition. They can hear that the Serbs are low on food and ammunition and constantly requesting to go back to their bunkers. The spirits among the units are rising.

There is still a big question of whether any of these units will be able to join up with the inside forces because of the superior armaments of the Serbs. They have tanks and artillery and the KLA is fighting with Kalashnikovs and a few modern Nato-issue guns; but their spirit and courage are extraordinary.

On the first day when the KLA fought its way into Kosare, the Serbs replied with a welter of shells; now shells fall three or four times a day. Shards of broken flowerpots cover two unexploded shells in a concrete courtyard outside the former Yugoslav barracks – now KLA headquarters in Kosovo – and there are six shellholes in its red-brick facade.

When the sun came out for a moment on Friday, I took a bowl of bread and soup outside for my lunch. Within minutes there was a whistle of a shell, which burst 100 metres away. As I moved inside, another whistled down.

In between shells, the men waited to go on their 24-hour shifts at the front, smoking, sleeping, talking about home. The uniforms are from Switzerland, Germany and America – all bought by the KLA recruits on their way to war. One man wears a black jacket that says ‘Let’s go!’ on the sleeve. Most have good boots but some set off to battle in black rubber wellingtons.

Those returning from patrol collapse onto iron bunk beds still in their clothes. The beds are warm from those who have left to replace them.

It is a barracks with no comfort. The windows have been blown out by shellfire. Off-duty soldiers cook on wood-burning stoves, heating up big pots of stew from tins left behind by the Serbs. There is no electricity. There is a generator but the base commander thinks it makes too much noise so it goes unused. At night those who cannot sleep stand in the halls lit by a fire and talk of home – never of war.

Coffee, cigarettes and sometimes bread arrive by donkey from Albania. Soldiers cluster around to greet them. Days are spent cleaning out the barracks. A sodden pile of detritus from Serbs is in the courtyard – fatigues, sweaters, playing cards, empty soft-drinks bottles and letters. Soldiers amuse themselves by looking through photographs of Serbs in uniforms with their girlfriends.