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<michael.benson@pristop.si>: NYT: Ajrulah Ramadani goes home |
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - <nettime-l-temp@material.net> is the temporary home of the nettime-l list while desk.nl rebuilds its list-serving machine. please continue to send messages to <nettime-l@desk.nl> and your commands to <majordomo@desk.nl>. nettime-l-temp should be active for approximately 2 weeks (11-28 Jun 99). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - From: michael.benson@pristop.si Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 14:38:09 +0000 Subject: Ajrulah Ramadani goes home [orig not to nettime] What follows is written with a real purity and economy of means by Ian Fisher. Too bad it's not fiction; in fact, it's in today's New York Times. But it's still a nice short story, especially given the outcome. (Or at least, some of the outcome.) Greetings, Michael Benson ---------------- HOMECOMING By IAN FISHER [orig in NY Times] VELIKA KRUSA, Yugoslavia -- Ajrulah Ramadani woke up early Tuesday in Albania, packed a small plastic bag of clothes and came back to Kosovo. He is a relatively prosperous man who lived here on a farm with his three brothers and their families -- 43 people in all -- and he wanted to see if anything was left. The first person he met was Hamit Hoti, 85. Hoti's hands held a cane, his feet rested on the fallen gutter of his house. The house had no roof. The dried-up body of a dog, a bullet hole in his side, lay a few feet away. "Are you safe?" Ramadani, 39, asked the old man. "Do you recognize me? I am Shaban's son." Hoti looked confused. "I don't recognize the young people anymore," he said. "I am blind. I am an old man. Are you safe?" "Yes, thank you," Ramadani said. He offered a cigarette. The two men smoked. "I was hiding like a dog," Hoti said. "I was running. For two days I was hiding anywhere I could in the fields and other houses -- without food, without water. "I don't know where my family is," he told Ramadani. "Have you seen any of my family?" "I just came from Albania," Ramadani said. "Lots of your family is there." Hoti wavered somewhere between tears and a smile. "It's enough for me to know they are safe," he said. "Thank you very much." Ramadani said: "We won. We won. We won." Then he met Xhelal Duraku, 35, who had been hiding in a nearby village until Tuesday. They walked up a grassy hill, thick with wildflowers, then down a small slope. They smelled rotting flesh. Duraku climbed down the slope, which abutted the top of another roofless house, and pulled two charred watches from a cinder block. The watches belonged to the two men in the mounds of dirt at his feet. A shoulder bone poked from a mound. Duraku said two of his relatives -- Isa Duraku, a teacher, and Nuhi Duraku, the director of a cooperative farm -- were buried there by other villagers, who told him where the watches were hidden. He said his relatives were killed by Serbs in a massacre in this village -- where as many as 150 people died, human rights officials say -- and their bodies partly burned. In the house below lay an ash pit of bones, which a German soldier who walked by later said seemed to belong to a goat. Down the hill, near the main road, is a graveyard with recently plowed dirt, some 10 by 20 yards in size. "I don't know how it all happened," Duraku said. Like Ramadani and his family, he fled while the killings were going on. Ramadani went down the gravel road toward his house. A rotting body of a cow lay crumpled next to a destroyed car. A frightened Rottweiler poked his head out of a school, the windows smashed, the filing cabinets ransacked, and then went back inside. Ramadani walked up a slope and peered around a wall to see his house. "My bulldozer is here," he said. "I had three trucks." He looked again. "Ah, the trucks are gone. Also the tractors aren't here. Only this bulldozer -- no -- one tractor is here. "I bought this piece of land from a Serb 10 years ago. I paid 800,000 German marks. Now they have come back and look what they did." He spat. The two houses where he and his brothers and their families lived were barely standing. Both roofs were gone, the windows were smashed out and carbon licked the paint around the frames. The ground was spattered with red roof tiles. A skinny dog jumped from the basement. Ramadani looked happy. "Meca, come here!" he said, and the dog came and he scratched her head. "Meca!" He lit another cigarette. He started to go up his front porch, spilling over with burned shoes, but thought better of it. It might be booby trapped. Tears filled his eyes. His brothers' laundry was still on the line. A sock hung on a tree. He wiped his face and said his next step was to let his family, living in someone else's apartment in Albania, know that nothing is left. "What can I do?" he asked. "I will tell them the truth. I will tell them everything I saw." Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company ----------------------------- Michael Benson <michael.benson@pristop.si> <http://www.ljudmila.org/kinetikon/>