Kosovo's newest, biggest killing field so far discovered is also its most beautiful.
The slopes of Mount Kopavniku rise abruptly, steeply, from the Dugagjinit plain, a rocky wall with jagged peaks that yesterday slashed the unseasonal grey rain clouds.
And somewhere in that carpet of thick green trees that covers the lower slopes lie the bodies of several hundred civilians, representing the greatest slaughter yet found from the Kosovo war.
Nobody knows how many lie there. The mountain is strewn with mines, and visitors trample up its steep paths at their peril.
But war crimes investigators say as many as 350 men, women and children may have been slaughtered here, most in a single day as they ran and scrambled up the mountain to escape a Serbian offensive that raged through their villages below.
Every day brings a trickle of local farmers to the village of Ljubenic, at the foot of the mountain, on their way up looking for missing relatives. On April 7th Serb forces swept through villages of Dugagjinit on a broad front, pushing from the east and blocking escape routes to the north and south to the town of Decani.
The villagers had only one escape route, through Ljubenic and on up through a ravine towards a rocky peak, Kershi i Ljbubenic. But they were heading into a trap: Kershi lies near the apex of three borders, Kosovo, Albania and Montenegro, and has been at the centre of battles between the Serbs and the KLA for the past year. And up beyond Kershi, Serb forces dug into bunkers were waiting. As the farmers scrambled up mountain trails they ran into a hail of fire. "I watched them come up the hill. They came in groups, sometimes maybe 20, sometimes 100. When they got higher the Serbians were shooting down at them. There were shells and bullets everywhere, everywhere you ran," said Ramadan Veselai.
Ramadan is one of the few who survived. He was already hiding on the mountain, having fled with 50 people from Ljubenic when Serb forces massacred more than 70 villagers a week before. Now his refuge among the trees became a deadly killing ground. "We ran up the mountain, we ran down the mountain, we lost nine people in all. Four were women, two were children. Everywhere we went were the bullets."
Italian NATO troops have roped off the narrow stony road that fades into a steep track up the ravine to where the bodies are. But local people continue to climb beyond it searching for loved ones. "There are a lot of mines but they want to know," said one man in a blue shirt hitching for a lift back to the local town, Pec. "Some guys went up there two days ago. They came back with 12 bodies."
The week before the great slaughter, a few days after NATO began its air strikes on Kosovo, Serb forces began the ethnic cleansing of Pec. On the night of March 31st a man from the town arrived in the village and warned them that the feared paramilitary forces were on the way. At 6.30 the next morning they arrived.
The owner of the small village shop, Sefer Shoshi, was told to gather the villagers together, as they were to be shipped en masse out to Albania. He walked up the main street, calling on his neighbours to come out and gather on the main road.
Luckily for the Veselai family, Shoshi walked no farther than the mosque, and his calls were not heard by Ramadan. He stayed in his house until a few minutes later, when a shot rang out. He went to the window to see villagers being marched down the road, then saw a neighbour staggering the other way. "Run for your life!" he shouted. He did, and stayed in the mountains for three months, sneaking back occasionally to take food from the womenfolk allowed to stay in the village.
As he ran up the hill that day, Serb forces separated the menfolk from the women. About 70 men were gathered outside a farmhouse. One man tried to remonstrate with the three Serb soldiers, each armed with a machinegun, who stood before them. One of the soldiers shot him dead. Then another soldier, the youngest, shouted: "You guys killed my brother. Now I'm going to kill you." And all three Serbs lowered their machineguns and poured bullets into the tightly packed group.
The bodies have since been taken away by the Serbs, though anoraks, shoes and a Nike bag, all torn by bullets, lie in the mud. Among the carnage was one miracle in the shape of 57-year-old Bushati, who survived 36 bullet strikes to his left leg and torso.
"I took 36 bullets," he said, pulling down his trousers to show the mass of holes that pepper one side of his leg. He was lucky. The weight of bodies protected him from worse damage, and he managed to lie still for 40 minutes as the Serbs moved among the heaped men, shooting those who moved. Finally he gathered eight other men, one of whom died soon afterwards, and they limped away, eventually crossing into Albania.
"I don't know how I survived. I have bullets everywhere," he said, showing his Albanian hospital medical report in which the doctor, in the space left to describing the wounds, simply wrote "Shume plag ne trupe" ("Many wounds to the body").