>Kosovo 'cleaner' tells how villages were emptied
>Interview: Truck driver who joined 2,000 ethnic cleansing volunteers says
>some went further than their instructions
>By Maggie O'Kane in Belgrade
>Tuesday April 27, 1999
>His neighbours call him 'the cleaner'. But the cleaner wants to
>talk about human rights. Two yellow budgies in Milan Petrovic's
>Belgrade kitchen peck gently in their grubby cage as he
>explains the rules a Serb 'ethnic cleanser' must follow in
>Kosovo.
>'We're not allowed to kill them; no beating and no mutilation
>allowed,' he says of the 10 days he spent in Kosovo driving
>thousands of families from their homes.
>'We give most of them 24 hours to get out. The rich ones and
>they're all criminals you know, with satellite TVs and big houses
>were tougher to move. But if you push hard enough, they all go
>in the end. They're cowards, those Albanians, they run like
>rabbits. Most of the cleaning was done by the time we got
>there.'
>Milan Petrovic is 50 and has only two teeth left in his bottom
>jaw. In his flat, a giant TV looks down on a stuffy kitchen. As he
>speaks he smooths out the creases on a checked tablecloth.
>'The western media told a lot of lies about what we did in
>Kosovo. We respected human rights.'
>At first he insists 'there was no raping - a Serb soldier wouldn't
>be interested in raping an Albanian woman, it would be against
>our nature. Don't get me wrong, there were some pretty ones
>and even if we did want to, we didn't, because the army didn't
>allow it'. Later his story changes.
>His daughter, Daniela, 17, pipes up: 'Albanian women smell bad
>because they eat a lot of lamb fat and you can smell it on their
>skin.' Mr Petrovic swings his Zippo lighter between thumb and
>forefinger and announces he's going back to Kosovo tomorrow
>'to do some more cleaning'.
>He usually drives a truck for a living, but when the war started he
>signed up: 'Every Serb should have signed up and shown our
>disgust for Nato.' A day later, he was on his way to join about
>2,000 other volunteers gathered in the southern city of Nis, the
>staging post for Kosovo. 'We came from all over the country.
>One guy turned up who was 72. They told him he was too old,
>that the limit was 65.'
>Before they left for the village of Silovo, to start driving families
>from their homes, the deputy to general Pavocic, who was
>running operations in Bosnia, gave them their orders: 'No
>killings, no beatings and if they don't have the papers give them
>24 hours to get out.'
>Mr Petrovic is a family man. He fishes in the pocket of his black
>slacks for a few dinars for his eldest daughter who is going out
>with her friend, as his disinterested ex-wife wanders around the
>kitchen. He does feel very sorry for those Albanian children he
>kicked out, but if they belonged to Albanians they didn't have the
>right to be in Kosovo. 'I had to follow my orders and anyway, I
>knew there would always be someone to meet those women
>and children.'
>And the men? 'If I'd been in charge, I would have executed the
>KLA terrorists on the spot with their families, but my orders were
>to hand them over to the army. I don't know what they did to
>them they're probably holding them as prisoners of war.'
>There were, he now concedes, occasional lapses among the
>volunteer cleaners. 'One in a hundred, I'd say, did raping or
>killing and that kind of thing, not more. About six guys in my
>unit got a bit out of hand one night and started killing Albanians.
>But they only killed three or four of them before they started
>taking stuff out of their houses. The next day our army came
>and took the six of them away.'
>Milan Petrovic saw little of Nato's war. 'We heard the planes way
>up above us, but I think they were concentrating on Pristina so
>they didn't give us any trouble.'
>His days of cleaning had a rhythm. 'Six or seven of us would go
>from door to door. We'd get one of the Albanians who lived in the
>village to help us out. He'd have to tell us who was who, how
>long they'd been there, and where the terrorists were.That made
>things a lot easier.'
>He believes the job of the cleaner requires some of the skills of a
>psychologist. It's easy to tell the innocent Albanians from the
>terrorists. You can see it from the expression in their eyes, the
>moment they open the door. The terrorists have that strange
>look. They're scared and you can smell the fear coming off
>them.
>'First we say: 'Have you any weapons?' And then we look at
>their faces and know the answer. If they're telling the truth only
>one of us goes into the house and looks around. If they're not we
>take them. The people who aren't terrorists, but don't have a
>right to be here, are cleaned out in 24 hours.'
>Twenty-six-year-old Dragon is also a Serb from Belgrade. He
>was 18 when he was sent to fight in the Croatian war. Only three
>of the nine colleagues he shared his billet with survived. 'Kosovo
>is not worth my life. It's not part of the 20th century,' he told his
>friend Marina on the day he came to her house in a Belgrade
>suburb and asked her to hide him.
>Unlike the 20,000 Serb deserters that Nato claim have fled
>across the Drina river to hide in Bosnia, Dragon has no friends or
>family to flee to. Nato may be inflating the numbers, as part of
>its own war propaganda, but there are other signs that he is not
>alone and that desertion is a problem. On Friday, 86 men
>appeared before a military court in the city of Kragujevac. Ten
>were sentenced to terms of between five and six years.
>Nowadays in Belgrade the army does not deliver the call-up
>papers in person. It's enough to stick them in the letter box and
>let the neighbours know the army has come calling. Another
>new law means that a young man must tell the police of his
>movements so they can keep tabs on him.
>Marina's promise to hide Dragon could get more difficult as
>tension in the capital rises. 'The other night, I was stopped by
>this idiot who lives on the second floor,' she said. 'She asked me
>if I knew that the man on the third floor was a spy. I said why
>and she said 'His father was Bulgarian'.
.......
Oddmund Garvik
Guardian Unlimited | Network home
http://www.guardian.co.uk
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