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Serb helped to stop execution of his Muslim neighbors
Wednesday, October 07, 1998 By Peter Smucker, Special to the Post-Gazette
ORAHOVAC, Yugoslavia -- With five of his Muslim neighbors lined up before a Serbian police firing squad, a retired Serbian policeman jumped from his sick bed, got down on his knees and begged that they be spared in the name of an Orthodox Christian saint.
Serbian police units rampaged through Orahovac in their latest offensive against Albanian separatists, shooting at anything that moved, say residents who survived the mayhem. In tactics documented by U.N. and Western human rights reports, the Serbian forces went house-to-house, dragging out Albanian males whom they suspected of sympathy with ethnic Albanian guerrillas in the Kosovo Liberation Army. Scores of ethnic Albanians were killed and later buried in mass graves outside of town.
Muhedin Bekeri, a Kosovar lawyer, feared he was the next victim of Serbian-style justice.
"We were up against the wall and they cocked their machine guns," he said, sitting next to his wife, both of whose brothers were killed and buried in an unknown grave outside of town.
Fortunately for Bekeri and four close male relatives, Cerovic was watching from his window as the horrific scene unfolded.
Though recovering from a serious illness, Cerovic sprang to his feet, ran out his door and fell to his knees before the firing squad.
"I begged them not to do it in the name of God and St. Sava," he said, sitting with his wife, looking out the same window. "I said I know them, I guarantee they are not KLA members and they are not even a little guilty."
Cerovic's pleas of mercy for his neighbors drew the attention of other Serbs, also appalled at the possibility of a summary killing on their block. Men, women and children emptied out of their homes and surrounded the trigger-happy Serbian police units who with more cajoling took the advice of the neighborhood, lowered their guns and released the five Albanian men. The former police chief says he was also repaying his Albanian neighbors for having put in a good word for him with ethnic Albanian guerrillas who only two days earlier had invaded the town in a surprise attack.
"They most probably saved my life, too," Serovic said.
Cerovic and Bekeri are nostalgic for the days when Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo lived together without the current war that has left half of their city in ruins.
Cerovic is adamant that Serbia can solve its own problems without any form of NATO intervention. Indeed, he warns that if Western powers make good on NATO bombing threats, Serbs will fight back. He said the fighting could draw in other countries, including Russia.
But his neighbor, Bekeri, says that the current political stalemate has gone too far for Albanians and Serbs in Yugoslavia to solve their own problems.
"We need NATO troops on the ground and a kind of protectorate for two or three years so we can have peace and equal rights," said Bekeri, a former judge.
Serbs in Kosovo are outnumbered 9 to 1 by Albanians, but the Yugoslav army and Serbian police have beaten back a fledgling insurgency this year to impose virtual martial law across the region.
Philip Smucker is a free-lance writer based in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
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