Kosovo Albanians Rummage for Dossiers, Discards at Serbian Police Site

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia — Nazmi Salihu paused for a moment, then stepped forward into what just a few months ago was the belly of the beast.

He was tentative at first, but his courage grew as he sifted through the hundreds of thousands of files that had exploded from their cabinets in March, when a NATO bomb ripped through the provincial headquarters of the Serbian police.

The building had been secured by armed North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops until sometime last month. Now, the nerve center of an agency that for a decade was viewed with fear and suspicion by most of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians has become part provincial archive, part Home Depot. Some come in search of the truth, others to pry loose tile or aluminum window frames to rebuild their war-ravaged homes.

Kevin Kennedy, a spokesman for the U.N. mission in Kosovo--a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic--said international war crimes investigators “did a sweep” of the building for relevant documents earlier this summer.

Still, the place is littered with files marked “State Secret” and “Highly Confidential.” There are surveillance photos and logs, orders for officers to shadow suspected political opponents and a list of political prisoners dating back to 1945. There are rosters of police employees, and deployment figures and strategies. Whether or not there’s evidence of anything sinister, the place is a treasure trove for the curious.

It didn’t take long for Salihu to begin playing detective. He stuffed several documents in the back pocket of his blue jeans, including the military ID card of a man with an ethnic Albanian name.

Also wandering the halls of the bombed-out building were Mystret Gashi and Florim Emini. Gashi, who is 27 and wore a lonely, sad expression on his face, said his father was clubbed to death by Serbian police during the Kosovo air war when he failed to come up with enough bribe money at a checkpoint. Emini, 30, said he received a severe beating himself 10 years ago when he made the mistake of walking down the street dressed in black pants and a red sweater--Albania’s national colors.

“It was easy to get in here before,” Emini said. “But it was hard to get out.”

Today, the building--it’s one of several in a massive police complex--is a skeleton of crumbling concrete and twisted metal. The middle floors of the eight-story structure imploded, leaving deep craters between the third and fifth floors. The walls are covered in soot from a fire that engulfed several floors. Documents are everywhere, in places 3 feet high, covering several hundred square feet. Every window is gone.

Left unguarded, the building is a playground for children, who run up and down a heavily damaged interior staircase. They throw documents out the window, which flutter in the wind and land at the feet of NATO troops walking below.

Mainly, though, the kids are there to help their fathers, brothers and uncles carry out any item that can be salvaged to help rebuild their homes, many of which were looted and torched by Serbian troops carrying out the “ethnic cleansing” campaign of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

“Everything we see that is useful we take,” said Bashkim Ferati, crowbar in hand. “Our town is completely destroyed.”

On a recent day, Ferati and others carried out everything from desk tops to chunks of drywall to shutters to scrap metal and wood.

Fatmir Zenili, his face covered in soot, chiseled loose squares of tile from what once was a bathroom. He too had been arrested. It was last year, he said, when he was confused with a group of student demonstrators and was beaten so badly he vomited blood.

But that’s not why he feels entitled to help himself to what remains of the police building.

“This is a property that was built by the Albanians,” he said.

Canadian Maj. Roland Lavoie, spokesman for the NATO-led peacekeeping force known as KFOR, said he did not know when the building ceased to be guarded.

The ethnic Albanians there last week said they noticed it was free of guards sometime in July, and that’s when they began to haul away whatever they could in tractors, trucks and vans. In interviews, they all defended what they were doing, saying it was the Serbs who damaged their homes and now they are simply trying to fix them.

But Ferati, the man with the crowbar, questioned whether it was wise for so many documents to be allowed to blow in the wind or to be carried off by the curious.

“People will take things and not really know the value they could have,” he said.

Others said it made little difference.

Ali Gashi and his 12-year-old boy came looking for window frames to replace those in their fire-damaged home. The elder Gashi said he stumbled onto some documents relating to the imprisonment of men he knew, and who he knew were innocent of the political crimes they were charged with. But after flipping through the pages, he tossed them aside. He didn’t even remember which floor of the building he’d found them on and seemed perplexed by a reporter’s interest.

“We are already used to these things,” he said, returning to his window frame. “This is nothing new to us.”