Looking into rubble of everyday ordinariness

It sounds terrible to say it, but there is the danger in Kosovo of bomb fatigue

It sounds terrible to say it, but there is the danger in Kosovo of bomb fatigue. The Serb officials want to show off the NATO destruction to civilian sites, and there is no shortage of supply.

In the centre of Pristina, banks are levelled. An office conference room with theatre-style seating sits exposed on a street, its walls ripped away.

But after a while it all begins to look the same. In homes the broken accoutrements of ordinariness are everywhere, clothes and books and dishes left shattered and abandoned in a flash.

One can become rather forensic during these excursions. Is there anything buried to explain it all? A military map or signs of an army installation? Reporters even sift through pieces of metal, trying to find identifying marks on bomb fragments.

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One day, walking around Pristina, keeping my head literally down to avoid eye contact with the omnipresent soldiers who seem to loiter in the streets, I turn on to a street called Kosovo. It is a particularly dusty, bombed-out street.

One home is nothing more than a mound of rubble, and a Serb accompanying me reports that this house belonged to the brother of Fehmet Agani, the deputy leader of the Albanian independence movement who was killed a few weeks ago.

Agani, a deputy to the Albanian leader, Ibrahim Rugova, was apparently trying to flee Kosovo when the train he was on was turned back at the border. On his way back to Pristina, Agani (67) was removed from the train. His body was later returned to his family, and charges have circulated ever since about who killed him, the Serbs or rogue KLA members.

So this was his brother's home, and also his shop, a pharmacy. The mound of rubble is filled with water-logged books and political documents from several Kosovan Albanian political parties. Stepping through the debris, I extract an over-sized, soft-cover book of photographs and text, Kosovo, A Chronicle, 1981-1995. It is a 246-page history of the independence movement by photographer Ilaz Bylykbashi.

I quickly stuff the book, which is soaked and filthy with its pages stuck together, into my bag. Back at the hotel, I lay the book open on the windowsill, letting the sun dry it out.

The book is an education. The photographs are surrounded by paragraphs of text in four languages, French, German, Albanian and English. It begins with depictions of the Albanian student revolt against the Serbian regime in 1981. It shows pictures of the 1,289 Albanians sentenced as political prisoners between 1981 and 1986.

Later, the book describes a well-known allegation that Serbs poisoned 7,000 Albanian schoolchildren between March 20th and 23rd, 1990, with high quantities of Sarin and Tabun gas. It claims that toxics experts from the UN confirmed at a conference in Paris that such substances were found in the bodies of Albanian schoolchildren. There are numerous photographs of sick children being rushed to hospitals.

I am familiar with this story, and I have heard the outraged Serb denials that such an event took place, including the not unreasonable assertion that it would be very difficult for Serbs to have poisoned just one segment of the population.

Elsewhere, the book shows gruesome photos of mutilated corpses, victims, it says, of Serb torture. It describes harassment and imprisonment of Albanian intellectuals, and concludes by saying that Kosovo is "an international problem". It was published in Pristina in 1996.

Like most things unearthed here, the book raises more questions than it answers. Was Mr Agani's brother's house bombed by another NATO mistake? Why were all these books left there? Where is Mr Agani's brother now? And have all the Albanian leaders and intellectuals fled Kosovo or been killed?

A few days later, a colleague is sitting having coffee in a cafe near the hotel. An unassuming man carrying a bag of groceries walks by. The BBC's Jacky Rowland recognises him as Adem Demaci, one of the earliest leaders of the Revolutionary Movement for the Unification of the Albanians, convened in the early 1960s.

Jailed first in 1964, he began his third prison sentence in 1975, and was not released until 1990.

She ran from the cafe and stopped Mr Demaci, wondering how this radical 64-year-old revolutionary could still be walking the streets of Pristina. It turned out that Mr Demaci had just been detained by police for an hour after being spotted talking with a Western reporter in another cafe. The reporter and Mr Demaci were released after a thorough check revealed everyone's papers to be in order.

Mr Demaci told the BBC that he would not leave Kosovo. Yes, he had been harassed, but he would not flee. His radical fervour has not abated, although his targets now include Mr Rugova, whom he considers a traitor to the cause of Albanian independence.

"Kosovo is the biggest prison in Europe," he said.

With that, I learned that Mr Demaci can now be found any day of the week in Pristina, strolling through the open market in town, carrying his bag, shopping for vegetables.