Rozaj, Montenegro, on the Kosovan Border, April 5, 1999

Mehije has the deadest eyes. She sits on a pile of old blankets in the corner of a converted factory and silently watches me cross the room. Except for her eyes her face is still. When I kneel next to her, she stares wordlessly, oblivious to the whimpering two-year-old at her feet—her daughter, Duka.

It is cold in the factory, but Mehije wears only a sweater, muddy bedroom slippers, and thin cotton socks, pink ones. She has a long messy plait running down her back. She does not return my tentative smile; instead, she reaches behind her back and hands me a package of loose rags tied with a blue ribbon. She motions for me to open it, and when I do, I see that the bundle of rags is alive, a tiny baby with gaping bird mouth. It makes no sound. It is Mehije’s seventh child, a boy, born four days before in the woods while she was fleeing the Serbs.

Mehije registers my shock. Then she begins to talk about her flight from Kosovo. She is an ethnic Albanian from the village of Mojstir, and she has to think to calculate her age: 38. Married to Abdullah, a farmer. When she left Mojstir, it was burning. It is now a place that will cease to have any history, like the more than 800,000 people who have trudged over the mountain passes out of Kosovo, leaving behind a gutted country.

Before March 1998, when the war escalated in Kosovo, Mehije had a simple life that she did not question: pigs, cows, the children in school, Abdullah earning a meager living. But in the past few years, as Serb forces grew more prevalent in the area and Serb civilians more antagonistic, it became harder for Albanians to find employment, and there was an increase in tension. Throughout this last pregnancy, she had a nagging, ominous feeling.

“We felt something different, something strange in the air” is how her sister-in-law, Senia, who is sitting on a blanket next to Mehije, describes it.

Mehije does not understand military strategy, NATO maneuvers, political insurrection. She doesn’t know that 4,000 people an hour are pouring over the Kosovan borders and will probably never return to their villages. She does not remember Yugoslav president and Serb leader Slobodan Milošević’s rabid speech to the Serb minority in Kosovo on April 24, 1987. It was a speech that played to the Serbs’ many resentments, recent as well as ancient. It was a speech that set in motion a hideous cycle of nationalism and ethnic hatred, first in Slovenia and Croatia, then Bosnia, and now spiraling wildly out of control in Kosovo.

She doesn’t care about any of that. The only things Mehije ever knew were how to be a wife and a mother, how to bake bread, milk cows.

This is what happened: Sunday, March 28, was the fifth day of the NATO bombing, a campaign that does not make sense to her and her neighbors (“Our lives were easier before NATO got involved”). It was also Bajram, an important Muslim holiday, traditionally a day when children are scrubbed and dressed in their best clothes and families gather to eat special food, like roast lamb. Mehije was in her kitchen when the door burst open and her Serb neighbors—people she had known all of her life—pointed guns in her face and ordered her family out of their house. Her neighbors were not masked. She saw their faces, saw the anger and the determination.

“Take nothing. Just go quickly,” they said, waving their guns. Mehije and Abdullah rounded up the children, put some bread in their pockets, and ran. “I had the birth pains when I was running,” she tells me. But despite the warning of an imminent labor, “I ran anyway.”

The family did not have a car, but found neighbors who were fleeing on a farm tractor. They stopped in a sheltered forest near Mojstir and tried to build temporary huts from branches. Other villagers—Mehije thinks around 200—were there, too, foraging in the snow for wood to make a fire, for small animals to eat, for water. Families were separated; there was the sound of wailing children. People kept asking: Have you seen my father? Have you seen my sister? Most of them were lacking papers: the Serbs had liberated them of their documents, making sure they would never return to Mojstir, in the same generous way that Serbs are charging refugees to cross the border out of Kosovo.

In the forest, Mehije’s group heard reports of what was happening in their village. Their houses were on fire. Everything they owned had been either destroyed or loaded onto trucks and driven away.

Mehije stayed in the forest for three days. Her labor began. The temperature dropped to freezing. Then the same Serbs who had ordered them out of their village came back and ordered them to march up the mountain and over the border to Albania, a walk which would take three days. “Go back to your country!” they jeered. “Your village is burned! You have nothing left.”

“I had never been to Albania before,” Mehije says. “My family has always lived in Kosovo.” But she did not argue. She gathered her six children and began to walk. She started to time her contractions, which were coming closer together.

The baby, whom she called Leotrim, came while they were wading through waist-deep snow. Mehije walked until she could not walk anymore and then she dropped to her knees. The men cleared a space for her in the snow, and she lay on twigs. Senia, who has an eighth-grade education and no nursing experience, acted as midwife. There was no water, no blankets, no food, no privacy. Mehije says the baby came quickly, within three hours. Senia cut the cord with a knife. Afterward, when her sister-in-law handed her the baby, Mehije remembers thinking that this last child came into a world of confusion, of terror, born under a strange, foreign sky. He will never know his home.

“He won’t remember this,” Mehije says now, holding Leotrim. She is still in shock: she has the look of a raw, bleeding animal that someone has kicked and beaten. She repeats herself, as if by saying it she can make it reality: “He won’t remember any of this.”

She says the baby has nothing, not even diapers. She says she has not seen Abdullah since the family arrived in Rozaj, a town on the Montenegrin-Kosovan border about 50 kilometers from her home. She is worried for his safety.

“We heard they were taking away men and boys,” another one of the women sitting near her on a mattress says in a frightened voice. It is a chilling thought, because everyone in the room remembers what happened in Bosnia, at Srebrenica, when the supposed U.N. safe haven finally fell in July 1995: the men were rounded up and sent to the forest and never returned.

I stand and say I will go to the village to try to find Abdullah (who, it will turn out, is fine; they had been inadvertently separated in the chaos of the march) and to get some things for the baby at the apothecary. On the way out of the factory, I pass an old man with a bloody stump instead of an arm. He wears a beret and is sitting upright in a wheelbarrow, smoking. He is talking to himself, muttering the same thing over and over in Albanian. No one is listening to him.

This is what it is like: no matter how many times you listen and record someone’s story, no matter how many refugees you see crossing over mountaintops wearing plastic bags on their heads to protect themselves from the freezing rain—you don’t ever really get used to it. And yet, when there are so many, it is easy to dehumanize them. They have the same faces, the same stories; they come down the road with their lives in two carrier bags. And by the time they get herded into abandoned schools or warehouses, you forget that once they had lives and read books, that they have birthdays, wedding anniversaries, love affairs. You forget they had a favorite television show, a dog or a cat that they loved.

This is what ethnic cleansing means for them: they lose their history, their identities, their sense of belonging. Nothing feels safe anymore. Anything can happen.

Travnik, Central Bosnia, October 12, 1992

A different conflict, the same war. The intensive-care unit of a makeshift hospital. The smell of blood and urine. A low, primal moaning, like that of an animal. I follow it to find a 12-year-old boy with his torso ripped open from chin to pubic line, writhing in agony on a bed. Shrapnel wounds in his intestines. A Muslim, he was trying to escape from Turbe, his burning village, when the Bosnian Serb army lobbed a shell into the fleeing column of people.

The boy, named Salko, got separated from his father in the confusion. Someone got him to the hospital, but he’s been alone for nine days, and the exhausted doctor has only enough painkillers to give him an injection once a day. “You cannot imagine the pain he is feeling,” the doctor says.

I sit by his bed. Salko has a long, thin face, gray eyes, lank blondish hair plastered to his face with sweat. His mouth is gaping with pain. It seems unlikely he will live.

“What do you expect?” says a passing nurse, not unkindly. “He barely has a stomach left.”

Zagreb to Dubrovnik, March 25, 1999

The day after the first NATO bombs fall, I catch a flight from London to Zagreb, the Croat capital. Despite the pilot’s announcement that the plane has been diverted to Slovenia because the airspace over Croatia is closed, we do land in Zagreb—the first plane in two days. Outside the airport, there are joyous taxi drivers waiting.

“At last! Passengers!,” Marko, my driver, says, rubbing his hands. Having lived through three wars in eight years, he knows that war always brings profit to the lucky ones. My destination is the border between Kosovo and Montenegro, a 10-or-so-hour drive through Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro. Marko says he could also drive me down the highway toward Belgrade and leave me at the Croat-Serb border if I want. “You can walk over the border to Serbia,” he says. “Me, I’ll never go there again.”

The Croats are frightened. Not only have the air strikes ruined their chances for a decent tourist season, but they are terrified of being sucked into that black hole from which they recently emerged. They are only now, six years after their cease-fire with the Serbs was declared, starting to recover psychologically. The Croats were not blameless in their war—in 1995 they ethnically cleansed the Krajina region of an estimated 170,000 Serbs who had lived there for generations—but they have also suffered. The mental images from the Croat war are indelible: air raids in Zagreb; vicious battles in eastern Slavonia; 400 men taken from the village hospital in Vukovar, 260 of them executed and dumped in a mass grave.

Marko drives me as far as the Croat city of Dubrovnik. Residents of this medieval coastal town, which eight years ago withstood a nine-month siege and daily bombardment at the hands of its Montenegrin neighbors (who are now being bombed by NATO), have more sanguinary feelings about the air strikes than do their countrymen in Zagreb.

“This bombardment comes as the justice of God,” Miso, a former Croat commander who defended the city, tells me. “It comes as a puncture in this awful balloon of evil.” He is not a vindictive man, and says that the Croats “are not a bellicose people.” But he cannot forget what happened here. Essentially, this is the story of the Balkans. This place is haunted by the dead. There is too much weight of history, too much destruction, too many grudges and blood feuds to forget.

I rise at five a.m. the next day and thumb a lift to Bosnia with a Danish U.N. worker going to Sarajevo via Republika Srpska (the Serb-run territory in Bosnia). Several hours into the journey, a radio report comes in: 20 men in Goden, a remote village in Kosovo, were lined up in front of the school and shot through the head. Clean, methodical killing like the other recent massacres in Kosovo: March 1998, 52 coffins lined up in Prekaz; and in Racak, January 1999, 40 more ethnic Albanians murdered.

We do not know it yet, but today another massacre is taking place in the village of Mala Krusa: around a hundred men executed by Serb forces. At great risk, a survivor, Milaim Bellanica, will record the aftermath on a family video camera. He will smuggle the tape, which depicts gruesome images, to the BBC. He will later say, “I have done this so that my son and my grandson, the next generation, will never forget what the Serbs have done to the Albanian people.”

Though the NATO campaign is just beginning, already there are casualties. A Stealth plane is shot down somewhere near the road on which we are driving. In Belgrade they are jubilant with their victory: like winning the lottery. At the demonstrations, they carry placards which say, SORRY, WE DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS INVISIBLE.

The Dane and I stop to eat. A Serb farmer at a roadside stand is roasting a whole lamb gored through its midsection with an iron stick. He gives us plates of greasy hunks of meat. We eat with our hands, silently. An unsmiling youth brings bread, offers loza, a local brandy, preferred drink of the Serb forces. It is around 11 a.m. and the farmers gathered around another wooden table are deep into their loza. I remember the Serb gunners dug into trenches high above Sarajevo: they were always drunk by lunchtime. The safest time to get into the city was early morning because they were sleeping off their hangovers.

I turn down the brandy.

We enter Bosnia. The Dane says that Muslims from the Bosnian-Serb border are flooding into Sarajevo on buses, fleeing from the NATO bombing. “They are terrified that once again the Serbs will turn on them,” he says. I think of the sick irony of the situation: people finding refuge in Sarajevo. During the siege, I remember families risking snipers and minefields to cross the airfield at night to escape from the place. The first thing you saw when you entered the city was graffiti on a burned-out building: WELCOME TO HELL.

Farther down the road, we pass signs with arrows pointing toward towns in eastern Bosnia. We pass through Olovo, once a front line, blackened, leveled, and we pass the roads leading in the direction of Gorazde and Srebrenica. We begin to talk about the recent massacre. The Dane says quietly, “It is not a good thing if they are taking the men away.”

In Srebrenica, they separated the men from the women. Despite the fact that then U.N. commander General Philippe Morillon swore “I will never leave you” and the place was called a U.N. safe haven, it fell in July 1995. Five thousand people are still not accounted for. Seven thousand Muslims were slaughtered. It is difficult to imagine 7,000 skulls, 7,000 sets of bones. Counting 10 dead bodies is horrific enough.

Near Srebrenica, April 17, 1993

Chain-smoking, I am hunched over a ham radio, the only contact a group of fellow journalists and I have with Srebrenica. The Serb infantry has broken the Bosnian front lines southeast and northeast of the town. Fourteen international aid workers and 30,000 terrified civilians are trapped inside.

The voice, desperate and broken by static, comes over the radio describing the town: “like a scene from hell.” There are dead in the streets. Hand-to-hand fighting. A U.N. command post was hit by a mortar.

“The Serbs are getting closer,” says the voice. Every day for two weeks we have spoken to the voice. I feel as if I know him intimately. Once, he asked if we had cigarettes, and what kind. Now he is being surrounded on all sides by Serbs. Shortly, he will be killed, and we will sit by and listen, unable to do anything. His voice has taken on a new note: high-pitched panic.

“We beg you to do something, whatever you can. In the name of God, do something!” The room is silent. We are paralyzed by our helplessness. “Does the world know about us?” continues the voice. “Does Clinton? Does John Major?”

The lucky ones, the refugees from Srebrenica, the ones who got out, are wandering the streets of Tuzla like the walking dead. Amputees, rape victims, people slowly going mad. And 13-year-old Sead, blinded by shrapnel while playing football. He knows he should have stayed in the basement during the worst bombardment, but it was a beautiful day and he wanted to go outside.

“I wanted to play,” he says to me. Then he turns awkwardly in the bed. He has not yet gotten used to this new gift from the Bosnian Serb army, his blindness. “I would give anything to know what happened to my eyes.”

Rozaj, March 30, 1999 (Day Seven of the NATO Bombing)

The Kosovan city of Pec, a place of deep historic and mythic symbolism for the Serbs, is burning. It has been bombed by NATO, and simultaneously torched by the Serbs, who are making the ethnic Albanians pay for the bombing campaign by running them out of their surrounding villages. All around the city, the refugees are fleeing, mainly on foot. The weather has turned bitterly cold—below freezing in the mountains—and the refugees are not dressed for it. They are wearing bedroom slippers and hand-knit cardigans. Few have hats or gloves or proper winter gear. When they fled, they took only what they could hold in their two hands. I used to ask people what they took with them when they left. Wedding photographs? Baby pictures? Birth certificates? Most of them would look at me blankly: “We take nothing,” they said. Meaning, they took nothing personal, just the closest thing at hand.

I am standing on a border mountain pass while people trudge by on their way out of Kosovo into Montenegro. A woman, Anna, waits for her brother at the crossing. “Where is he? Where is he?” she asks, wringing her bare hands, examining every face that goes by. She is crying; she says she has been standing at the crossing point for four hours and he has not come in with the column of people. “I must find him. My brother. They may have taken him. They were taking away some of the men, and he is young. Please tell me, where is he?”

We drive down the road to look for him. Hundreds of people pass, in groups of five and six. A woman walks by pushing a pram with a baby inside, surrounded by three small children clutching hands. A man rides a bicycle in the snow, falling over every few minutes; stoically, he keeps picking the bike up and continuing on. Anna’s brother appears. He is a teenager, pale-skinned, with dark hair. He is wearing a jean jacket and has a teary look. Anna leaps into his arms, hugging and kissing him. Then she begins to kiss and hug me.

Some people walk alone. “A lot of people are crossing, but a lot of people are dead!” a woman screams at me later. She is a teacher, from Pec, and she is hysterical, weeping:

“They are dead! Hospitals are burning! They are killing teachers, doctors, anything alive. They are animals. No—animals do not treat one another like this.”

Others are silent. That horrible stillness in the snow. An old woman, heavyset, wearing a scarf, stares straight ahead in deep shock, plodding up and up the mountain toward Montenegro. My colleague, a British journalist, puts her in his car and we drive her to the top of the pass. She stays in the heated vehicle and does not say a word, for hours. A child with Down’s syndrome stumbles through the snow, laughing maniacally. He falls face-first into the snow. His mother chases him, tears running down her cheeks. Another mother sits in the snow with her four children, huddled, shivering.

When I offer the old woman sitting in the car a piece of bread she looks at me but does not take it. Nor does she push it away. She seems dead already.

Kula Pass, on the Montenegrin-Kosovan Border, March 31, 1999

Sometimes there is an arrogance to this profession. When reporters become careless, we tend to think of ourselves as indestructible. Because we are outside the conflict, observing, it is easy to forget that we are not protected by some higher power.

Sometimes you get strange vibes and you have to trust your instincts. Sometimes, if you ignore these instincts, you get into trouble. Earlier this day, a photographer said that he had seen drunk Serb soldiers at the crossing point. Soldiers aren’t supposed to be wandering over the border, inflaming an already tense situation. Montenegro has been in a state of jittery panic all week because Milošević replaced the local army commander. There have been rumors of an army-led coup against the pro-West government. (Montenegro is still part of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation even though there are strong leanings among many Montenegrins to pull away.)

Later in the day, while using my colleagues’ satellite phone on top of the border mountain pass, I look up and see for myself four or five Serb soldiers: aggressive, unsmiling, wearing dark glasses on a cloudy, gray day. They should not be on this pass. It is a surreal, menacing sight. But I need to stay to continue reporting, and, while the other journalists leave the mountain, I sit in an armored car belonging to two French television journalists, trying to keep warm.

One hour later. This time, the Serb soldiers swarm through the snow very quickly. What I hear next chills me. It is a man screaming: “No!” When I look out the window, I see one of the French journalists, half lying in the snow. He has been pushed down. His arms are above his head, in an instinctive act of surrender. A Serb soldier has a kalashnikov cocked and aimed at his head.

There are about 10 of them, Serb soldiers who have come over the border from Kosovo. They drag the Frenchman out of the snow and begin hitting him, kicking him. I am too stunned to feel frightened. It is the first time in seven years covering the Balkan war that I have seen Serbs actually strike a journalist.

If they are beating him up, I think, this is not good. In my encounters with the Serb army I have seen anger, stupidity, arrogance, cruelty. But this is different. In Bosnia, I was once held for three hours, strip-searched, and liberated from the £3,000 they found stuffed down my trousers (“You can get it back after the war, in Belgrade”).

“You can’t do this,” I had said when they sent me walking into the darkness without any transportation or cash.

“We can do anything we want,” one of the commanders said, grinning. “We’re winning the war.”

But this time, this is something else: these men are completely out of control. They seem far more emotional and disturbed—this is personal. We are no longer journalists, observers. We are part of the NATO conspiracy.

“You bombed Belgrade! You bombed Pec!” they scream. One sees me and drags me out of the car. They demand our passports: two French, one British.

“Mirage! Mirage!” one screeches, a reference to the French fighter jets. “NATO! Clinton!”

I look down, thinking it wise not to make eye contact. One of the journalists tries to explain that we are not responsible for the actions of our governments. The Serbs spit on the ground and scream. There appears to be no officer in charge, which makes them more crazed. One, who speaks Italian with me, vacillates between reason (“We’re going to take you to Pristina and arrest you for being spies”) and madness (“You’re going to die like people in Belgrade have died”).

They are claiming we have wandered into Kosovan territory. “We’ll go now,” I say weakly. “We’ll go back to Montenegro.” (Borders in this part of the world are entirely fluid; there are no signs saying, WELCOME TO KOSOVO. DRIVE SAFELY.)

“You’re a NATO spy! Now you’re going to know what it feels like to be bombed and burned,” the Italian-speaker barks. He shouts orders at a very young soldier. This one has pale red hair, wears a camouflage cowboy hat, and has wild, unfocused eyes. He keeps pulling out his pistol and aiming it at the terrified refugees, who continue walking single file past us, eyes dropped, trying not to be drawn into the situation.

The young one turns to me. “You we arrest,” he says, pointing to me and clasping my wrists together as if they were handcuffed. “Because you have Italian blood. But the French, we kill.” When they search the car, they find a photograph of one of the French in Bosnia with the U.N. The photo was taken on a rainy day and he had borrowed a soldier’s jacket to protect his camera.

“NATO spies! Spies!” the young soldier yells. He appears delighted that they have hard proof with which to abuse us.

Later, looking back, I will realize they don’t have a plan, that they have no idea what to do with us. They take all our gear—cameras, sat phone, mobile phones, armored car, passports, other documents—and tell us to turn our backs to them and march down the mountain and into Montenegro. I don’t want to turn my back. They fire over our heads. We run, jump into the back of a truck carrying refugees. A Serb-army jeep, coming up the mountain, blocks our truck. These soldiers tell us to get out; we are marched back up to where we started.

This time, they make us sit in the French journalists’ car. We hear shots—not fired in the air. When I turn around, I see they have lined up refugees. They are stealing their cars and rifling through their bags. One of the French says to me, “Don’t turn around.” I see one Kosovar boy who earlier was ferrying refugees up and over the mountain in a flatbed truck. The soldiers are beating him and hitting him with their guns; he makes noises like a whimpering dog. He falls to the ground like an empty sack.

Another shot. Into something. I do not look back this time, out of cowardice and fear. The three of us sit stunned, waiting. Then the soldiers decide to take us to Pristina, in Kosovo.

“Follow us,” says the Italian-speaker. “Drive slowly. Stay behind us. Now you will see what it is like to get bombed. Our commander will decide what to do. Prison, for a long time.” He clasps his wrists together to indicate chains, and laughs.

We drive through the snow, down the other side of the mountain, passing hundreds of refugees going the opposite way. The ride is silent. In my bag, I still have a mobile phone that does not work and my notebook, full of a week of documentation of refugees: phone numbers of their relatives, testimonies, first and last names. I have been searched by Serbs before. I know how they react when they see what is written about them. It is not good to have the notebook with me—neither for me nor for the people I have interviewed.

Very slowly, I rip up my notebook. My colleague throws it out the open door, very carefully, watching to make sure the soldiers ahead of us do not see. It lands in the snow in the middle of the road. It leaves a black mark in the whiteness.

We drive about 30 kilometers. Then, somewhere inside Kosovo, the soldiers get a radio call. We see the Italian-speaker answering. Then he stops the jeep, gets out, and lights a cigarette. He tells us to get out of our car. It will soon be evening and we are now in an isolated spot, away from refugees, away from any witnesses. We are on the side of a freezing mountain. No one with any power to do anything about it had seen us taken. If we disappear, no one will know. The thought of rape has not crossed my mind—I am more worried about getting shot in the back.

The soldier smokes his cigarette thoughtfully while we wait. Then, slowly, he walks to the rear of the jeep. He stands outside the door thinking, then hands back our gear. “Get out of here,” he says, in good English. “There are Albanian terrorists [the Serbs’ phrase for the Kosovo Liberation Army] everywhere. It’s very dangerous. Go away. Never come back.”

Then he does the oddest thing. He kisses me on both cheeks. He hugs the French, almost as though he is trying to demonstrate communion: that we are all in a place where we do not want to be. He crushes the cigarette under his heel, jumps in the jeep, and speeds off toward Pec.

We drive back into Montenegro. When we get to Rozaj, we hear that the Serbs on the Macedonian border—on the other side of Kosovo from Montenegro—had taken three American soldiers hostage around the same time as the other soldiers got us. A male refugee approaches me as I set up the sat phone in the back of the armored car in the pouring rain.

“It’s you, thank God,” he says, speaking perfect English, touching my shoulder gently. “We saw them march you off. We saw them take you at gunpoint. You were very lucky. God was with you.”

His name is Mustafa, and he says he is a professor at the University of Pristina. He speaks, in addition to English, perfect French, Italian, and Danish. He has been living with his family in Denmark, and came to visit his sister in Pec when the air strikes began.

As an intellectual who has frequently entertained Western journalists in his home, he says that he was targeted by the death squads, the Serb paramilitary. He says he was worried about Arkan—the indicted Serb war criminal (real name: Zeljko Raznatovic) who, along with his paramilitary squad, the notorious Tigers, has been accused of some of the worst atrocities during the Bosnian war. It is rumored that Arkan and his men have gone down to Kosovo to help their Serb brothers—a terrifying thought.

Mustafa asks me if I can help get him and his wife and four children, who are sheltered somewhere on the mountain, out of Montenegro as soon as possible.

“If Milošević marches into Montenegro, which everyone says he will do soon,” Mustafa says in a soft voice, “I will be killed. All of our lives hang on very little here.”

We sit and have a coffee in a noisy bar blaring hip-hop music. I cannot stop shaking, from cold and nerves. I say I will phone the Italian Consulate in the morning.

“God was with you today,” Mustafa repeats, adding sugar to his Turkish coffee. His eyes have the look of someone haunted. Like all of the refugees on the border, he has seen too much in the past few weeks. “Usually the Serbs just shoot. They don’t have a change of heart.”

Mustafa will get out. He and his family will take the ferry from Montenegro to Italy and fly to Denmark. He is now safe, and will probably never return to Kosovo.

Race, a Serb Stronghold in Montenegro, April 4, 1999 (Easter Sunday in the West)

“Quite simply, Serbia had already lost Kosovo—lost it, that is, in the most basic human and demographic terms,” wrote the British historian Noel Malcolm last year before the Serb offensive began and before the NATO bombing. But he did not foresee, as NATO did not foresee, the die-hard feelings of the Serb people, solidified during the bombing campaign, and how unwilling they are to give up their spiritual heartland, their Jerusalem.

Kosovo, to the Serbs, is more than a political stronghold: it is sacred. Here are some of their greatest monasteries and the remains of their most revered saints. It is also the place of their holy battlefield, Kosovo Polje, which they had lost before, in 1389, to the Turks. The place has taken on mythic proportions. During the Balkan war of 1913, which reclaimed Kosovo from the Turks, one Serb soldier wrote:

The single sound of that word—Kosovo—caused an indescribable excitement. This one word pointed to the black past—five centuries. In it exists the whole of our sad past—the tragedy of Prince Lazar [who lost the battle of Kosovo Polje] and the entire Serbian people.… Each of us created for himself a picture of Kosovo while we were still in the cradle. Our mothers lulled us to sleep with the songs of Kosovo.

Kosovo’s fate was more recently sealed when Milošević gave his April 1987 speech: “Yugoslavia does not exist without Kosovo! Yugoslavia would disintegrate without Kosovo! Yugoslavia and Serbia are not going to give up Kosovo!” In 1989, he would revoke Kosovo’s autonomy within the Yugoslav federation, fire Albanians from state-run institutions, and ban the teaching of the Albanian language and its literature.

In Race, a remote, Serb-dominated village outside of Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, they support the current push to drive every “Turk” (Albanian, Muslim, the same thing in their eyes) out of Kosovo. Here, there are no “servants of NATO” and no “traitors.” This is a hard-core, barren place, a village carved out of a gray mountain. This is Slobodan Milošević country, full of simple people who might not have supported him before but will now go to their graves for a greater, united Serbia.

On the drive out, through the stony mountains, I see graffiti which chill me: ARKAN, the indicted war criminal. And the Cyrillic symbol for “Only unity can save the Serbs,” which was often painted on burned-out houses in Bosnia and Kosovo.

In a small café I meet a farmer and his wife and three children. They sit under a portrait of Slobodan Milošević, the adults drinking beer. The children eat sweets and drink Cokes and laugh. The farmer, Rajko, is at first hostile, then buys me a coffee and tries to explain his position: his family has lived in these hills forever and ever. He considers himself a Serb, not a Montenegrin, and he will die fighting for Greater Serbia if the Montenegrin separatists follow the pattern of the other former Yugoslav republics and try to break away.

“Someone is going to stay in this country,” he says. “And it will be a Serb. They can’t shoot every single one of us.” He says that he does not believe what is said to be happening in Kosovo to be true. There is no such thing as ethnic cleansing—people are fleeing the NATO bombs and the “Albanian terrorists.” Kosovo belongs to Serbia, emotionally, historically, and politically.

I leave feeling more depressed than on any other day of the trip. Not only are these people living in denial, but it is clear that the Kosovo conflict is rapidly destabilizing the rest of the region. That night, in Podgorica, there is a demonstration in the town square by Milošević supporters. It is billed as a peace effort, but the square is full of people waving anti-NATO, anti-Clinton signs and wearing targets pinned to their chests. Journalists are advised not to go, as the anti-Western feeling has been building up. All day the city has been rife with tension.

I wander through the crowd, listening to the dreadful Yugoslav rock. An aging rocker screams, “Serbia! Serbia!” I listen and try to blend in and not look like a journalist. Momo, a Montenegrin friend of mine, leads me by the hand and tells me not to speak English.

I do what he says. But what I feel from that crowd, standing in the middle of it, is a naked antipathy toward Westerners that I have not felt before, a surging sense of anger, suspicion, hatred.

Podgorica, April 7, 1999

It is two days before Serb Good Friday, the day after the anniversary of the devastating German air attack on Belgrade in 1941 (when, ironically, Serbia was aligned with the Western powers). Milošević asks for a cease-fire to respect the upcoming Orthodox Easter. It is a joke: cease-fire in the Balkans means playing for more time.

I meet an 80-year-old man who cannot give his name, a general under Tito, who drove all night from Belgrade to Podgorica when he heard the rumors that a coup d’état was imminent here. “I am old, but I can offer some advice,” he says earnestly. He tells me old war stories: In December 1941, when he was 21, he led a partisan battalion of 431 men in guerrilla warfare against the Germans and the Italians. During one battle, he remembers “fighting from early morning to early night.” They ambushed Italian tanks. They fought hand to hand. In the morning, it was his job to count the casualties: 180 wounded, 82 dead. “And that was the saddest morning of my life.”

But he believed in something, so he fought to the end of the war and was highly decorated. After the liberation of Belgrade, he became a general at 26, and later a respected diplomat.

“In those days, we lived so close to death that you became older and more clever with double speed,” he tells me.

The next day, I find him drinking coffee in an outdoor café. NATO bombs have fallen on Montenegro, hitting Serb-army targets. Belgrade, where his family is, is in flames. The Pentagon has found evidence of mass graves in Kosovo. More refugees are pouring over the border, bearing more stories of atrocities. The war NATO thought would be over in a few days appears to be drifting into an abyss.

The general is distraught. His hand trembles as he holds the coffee cup. He has lived through the destruction of his country by German warplanes, then the renaissance of “brotherhood and unity” for all Yugoslavs under Tito. He watched the war in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia. Now, aged 80, he has come to offer his services to the Montenegrin separatists who may have to fight against Milošević. He is frightened at what he is witnessing.

“Everything is ruined,” he is saying in a shaky voice. “Everything is ruined. There is no more fraternity and unity. The last 10 years, everything is ruined.” He pauses and puts down his cup. “I lost so many friends during World War II, so many young people trying to create a new country. Now everything is falling down because of ideas. Who are these people? Are they insane? Why are they cleaning out Kosovo?”

Somewhere Inside Southwestern Kosovo, May 10–12, 1999

I have managed to cross the border into Kosovo with a special-forces K.L.A. unit. A major Serb offensive is under way to take back territory the K.L.A. won two weeks ago. It also happens to be the night of the heaviest NATO bombing in Kosovo since the campaign began over a month ago. I am lying in a muddy ditch with a helmet that has no strap, getting bombed by Serb planes trying to hit us—and by NATO planes trying to hit the nearby Serb ground forces. Shells and rockets fall intermittently.

I am with a young soldier, an Albanian born in Kosovo who has recently been living in the U.S. and Canada. Dardan is 25 years old, handsome, wearing a Polo Ralph Lauren hat under his helmet. He has also lived in London, where he was so good at mixing cocktails that he was voted the fifth-best bartender in Britain. He’s proud of that fact, and proud that he paid for his own plane ticket from Vancouver to arrive here at this front line to fight with the K.L.A.

Dardan has never fired a gun before. Now he’s got a Chinese-made kalashnikov to defend his country against the Serb offensive, which has been going on for four days. In the dark there is chaos: every time a plane roars through the sky and drops a bomb with a terrifying dense thud, we do not know where it is coming from.

“Who’s bombing us? Who’s bombing us?” one of the younger soldiers yells to an older soldier. No one knows, but someone says that four soldiers who died earlier, hit as they lay in their tents, were victims of NATO. There is confusion about how many people are dead, how many are wounded. This is what war is: confusion, uncertainty, not knowing which direction the shooting or the rocket fire is coming from.

For two nights, we have slept in ditches on muddy slopes covered in soldiers’ excrement, surrounded by wounded soldiers whose flesh has been ripped away by hot pieces of shrapnel. I have always thought of myself as squeamish. But when you are under this kind of intense fire, some things become irrelevant. There are people around me dying on dirty stretchers, and they are young.

I once asked a Bosnian soldier how old he was. “Eighteen,” he replied. Then he added, quickly, “Don’t look at me like that. I know what you are thinking.” What I was thinking was this: I don’t know if this kid is ever going to reach his 19th birthday. And I hated Slobodan Milošević for making him fight this war when he should be at parties or sitting in a café looking at girls. One of his comrades showed me a helmet with a picture of a model from Victoria’s Secret taped inside. “If I ever get out,” he said, “my girlfriend is going to look like this.”

Lying in the ditch, Dardan and I are talking to each other as if we were meeting for the first time at a cocktail party.

“I left Pristina in 1992,” he says. “My whole generation left. We didn’t want to get drafted by the Serbs and fight against the Bosnians. But I came back to fight for my country. To fight for freedom. To be an Albanian inside Kosovo is no life at all. That’s why we’re here—liberation.” His voice is drowned out: heavy machine-gun fire. The Serbs are attempting to encircle our camp. There are eight soldiers at the end of our ditch who are meant to guard us from an infantry assault.

“Split up! Split up! Fifty meters apart! Move down the canyon!” shouts one commander, who has taken control. Though my night vision is poor, I grab my pack, my helmet—which will do me little good if I get hit by a grenade—and run. I have no flak jacket; neither do the soldiers around me.

“Split up—if one of you gets hit, all of you won’t die! I need all of you alive!” the commander barks. A young soldier is crying. Another soldier, his body and face torn up by shrapnel, is squatting in the mud motioning me to bring him water. He is weeping with fear and pain. He is shitting himself. I wipe his forehead, and then throw myself back on the ground as another rocket lands. I am facedown in the mud. Then I run down a ravine, stumbling on rocks until I find a tree. I sit against it, leaning uphill.

The battle continues as day breaks. During a lull in the fighting I wander over some hills and find the wreckage of a Serb plane that has (allegedly) been shot down by NATO. Near the river bordering our camp I find the tents of the four soldiers who were supposedly hit by friendly fire. It may also have been the Serbs, no one really knows. Three were young soldiers, one was an older man with a beard. I see one of the bodies being taken away, in a military jeep, to a morgue in a nearby town.

I see a cow with its hind legs blown off, covered in flies. Then a white horse, startled by the bombs, apparently dead of a heart attack, lying on the side of the hill. And everywhere I look are the craters of mortar fire and bombs. In the middle of it all is a small, white, idyllic farmhouse—untouched. Someone has left washing outside, hanging on the clothesline.

I make my way to the front. The soldiers here, dug into their trenches and foxholes, are tired but strong, and I feel oddly confident of their ability, even though we are pinned down by a 15-minute firefight. In an abandoned stable serving as a bunker, I stumble onto a unit of soldiers pumped up by a recent victory. They are high-fiving and hugging one another. I am told the K.L.A. has managed to take out two Serb tanks and kill 60 Serb soldiers. In a David-versus-Goliath war, that is a major victory.

That night, during another pause in the fighting, we eat bean soup and bread for dinner. The tents are eerily quiet. The mood is different than it was before last night’s bombardment began, when the soldiers were singing K.L.A. songs. Tonight we sit up in our sleeping bags, tension growing. One of the commanders tells me to prepare for a horrible night.

Someone lays out the plan: when the bombing begins, we are to run out into a ditch because the Serbs will certainly be targeting our tents and can pick up body heat with infra-red lasers. We are to run in the darkness, one by one, and be prepared for aerial, artillery, and possibly even infantry attacks. “Be prepared for everything,” one of the commanders tells me. My fear is an infantry attack: what will the Serbs do if they find me inside the camp?

As the night and the wait drag on, one senior commander, whom I know from the war in Bosnia, is sketching plans for an offensive. A soldier, a devout Muslim, is praying. Another, a Swede, a former U.N. soldier in Bosnia who has come to Kosovo as a K.L.A. volunteer, is cursing silently as he tries to fit his boots—which he will need instantly once the bombardment begins—inside his sleeping bag. One of the young soldiers is snoring gently. I can smell the breath of the man lying next to me. At around one a.m. I drift off, forgetting momentarily where I am.

We are all awakened at three by the whine and crash of a bomb dropped by a Serb plane. I too am sleeping with my boots on, and I fumble to sit upright and get out of my sleeping bag.

“Journalist! Where are you?” calls out the Swedish soldier. “Ten seconds and exit!”

“No lights! No matches!” someone screams.

I push the tent flap aside and plunge into darkness, sliding down a hill on my back, unable to get my footing.

From three to six a.m., lying in a muddy trench, I watch the sky lighten, the stars just marginally brighter than the illumination of the bombs. At dawn, some of the soldiers build a small fire. I drift in and out of a painful sleep on the muddy slope, covered by a blanket that one of the commanders has placed protectively over me. As if in a dream, I see an old village woman taking her sheep up to pasture in the middle of the bombardment. She is completely unfazed. I watch her with a mixture of horror and fascination.

Around seven a.m., I wake for good, thanks to the thud of a shell landing nearby. I see Dardan, the young bartender, looking out into the sky, which is bright blue flecked with pink and orange—a Turner painting. It is perfectly, painfully beautiful.

Dardan is smoking a cigarette. I can see only his silhouette. He looks like a soldier from World War II with his old helmet and his kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. He is staring at the sky in amazement, his mind far away from this place, this time, this war. He is shouting, to no one in particular, “Look! Look at that beautiful light! Look at that light!”

Then he sees that I am awake and he turns to me: “Janine! Look at that sky! We’re still alive! Isn’t it wonderful—we’re still alive!”

Kukës, Northern Albania, May 14, 1999

Yesterday I left the K.L.A. and crossed over into Albania. The heavy bombardment by Serb forces is continuing. I hear the K.L.A. is getting shelled by rockets, mortars, and tanks. I hear that there have been many K.L.A. casualties. I keep thinking of Dardan. I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive.

Eighty-four years ago, the American reporter John Reed, author of the famous account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, traveled throughout war-torn Eastern Europe. Reading his Balkan reports, one has an awful sense of history endlessly repeating itself; no one here has learned from past mistakes. What Reed wrote then could easily be lifted from any newspaper today: “In the Serbian schools the children are taught not only the geography of old Serbia, but of all the Serbian lands, in the order of their redemption—first Macedonia, then Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia.… Now Kosovo is avenged and Macedonia delivered.”

In the Balkans, one is always aware of that weight of history. “We are in a time vacuum here,” the Sarajevo poet Mario Susko once told me. “We are trapped in a terrible cycle of everything happening again and again, and we cannot stop it.”

Before crossing into Kosovo I had visited Cetinje, the capital of old Montenegro, where I found the onetime summer palace of the Petrovic family, the last Montenegrin dynasty. Montenegro was recognized as a kingdom in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin. In 1918, in the aftermath of World War I—which had started with an assassination in 1914 in Sarajevo—the kingdom of Montenegro ceased to exist with the single stroke of a pen. It was annexed by Serbia, swallowed up into Yugoslavia. The Petrovic dynasty, which had ruled for 222 years, crumpled. King Nikola fled to Italy and died in exile.

In his old summer palace, I felt a sense of tragedy and irrevocable sadness. A local historian let me in and opened up the shutters, flooding the dusty place with weak sunlight. I saw King Nikola’s books, his Turkish weapons, a medal given to him by Queen Victoria. I saw ancient sepia-print photographs, and his wife’s silk-and-lace dresses, and the polished Chippendale dining-room table. I saw the ghostly piano imported from Leipzig. No one visits here anymore.

“We do not have a romantic history,” said the man who gloomily guided me through the rooms. “We have a tragic one. We have no freedom to choose our own destiny.”

“Destiny” is a word that is used often here. There is a sense that it is history that controls the Balkans and not the other way around. But the late British writer Rebecca West would have argued that point. After traveling throughout Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II, she concluded that what was done in Yugoslavia was always carried out with a fatal plan. “Why did the Yugoslavs choose to perish? It must be reiterated that it was their choice, made out of full knowledge,” she wrote. “On none of them did their fate steal unawares.”

When I look at a map of the old Yugoslavia now, what I see are not borders but people I knew and loved, or people I met for only a day or an hour. During the 1991–95 wars in the former Yugoslavia, more than 2 million people out of a pre-war population of 24 million were displaced; in Kosovo now, another 800,000 and counting have fled. I think of their empty houses, of the things they left behind, or else of the people who are homeless, mutilated, dead. The dentist living underground in central Bosnia, to whom I once gave a packet of aspirin, causing her to burst into tears. A young mother walking up a mountain path in Kosovo, or the teenage champion swimmer who lost a breast during a mortar attack in Sarajevo.

Nedzarici, Serb-Held Sarajevo, December 17, 1992

This is my strongest and most terrible memory: A road gutted with shell holes. Temperature: 15 degrees below zero. A nursing home, ironically called the Center for the Protection of Old People and situated between two front lines. A Serb sniper situated in a house 25 meters away.

Ten old people dead in three days, frozen to death in their beds, and no one to remove the bodies. Most of the staff ran away when the heavy shelling began. The U.N. can’t decamp because of the heavy fighting. A 78-year-old man went outside to chop firewood to try to keep the place warm and got shot between the eyes.

I step over broken glass, broken bricks, seared blankets. It is so cold my breath comes out in puffs. The windows are all shot out, replaced by U.N.-supplied plastic.

A long, frozen hallway. Corpses wrapped in dirty blankets. Empty rooms. I open one door and count six dead bodies, still in their beds, not yet wrapped and laid on the floor. Faces frozen in their last expression. They die at night, the coldest time, alone.

The farthest bed is occupied by a pile of rags. I bend over, and a tiny arm, no bigger than a child’s, reaches up. A tiny hand grabs my arm. It is not a pile of clothes, but an ancient woman, still alive, with lavender-colored eyes and broken teeth. Her skin is translucent with the cold.

“Zima,” she whispers. Her lips are split. She does not have enough calories in her system to focus, to concentrate on my face. “Zima.” Winter.

Exhausted by her effort, she drops my arm. I try to talk to her. Speak to me, I say. Stay alive, at least until a doctor gets here. But I know, as she does, that there is no doctor coming.

The woman says she once played the violin. She doesn’t remember if she is Muslim, Serb, or Croat. She is from Sarajevo, that’s all. Then she pulls the covers over her head and retreats under the blankets. She becomes, once again, a pile of clothes.

Janine di Giovanni is a Paris-based foreign correspondent and Vanity Fair contributing editor.