kosova

I just went to a film screening here on campus. It was a documentary by polish director Maria Warsinki called, "Kosova: War Criminals." It was very powerful. Warsinki was also there for discussion after the film. The Kosovar Ambassador was in attendance as were several other officials from that embassy and other embassies as well.

Many of have seen Schindler's List. Cross the power and pertinentness of that with the filming style of Blair Witch and realize that this was the real thing. This is will give you some idea of what this documentary was like.

Warsinki went into Bosnia with the support of the Kosovo Missing Persons group. Much of the film was the camera following doctors and scientists through massacre sites(which were people's houses) and trying to count and identify bodily remains. There were times when the camera was literally wandering around looking for bodies - and then would find one. But, the Serbs had tried to hide evidence of the massacres so there were never bodies just lying around. Instead they had to empty mass graves and do autopsies on each body to find how they were killed as well as some way of identifying them. One time they had to dig 15meters into a well, by hand, to try and find just two bodies that were believed to be down there. They were.

The film showed several corpse that were either simply skeltons or too decomposed to be recognized as human bodies. Some were not. Some doctors had to sift through ashes, pointing out the piles of burnt human fat and melted skin, to try and find skulls and other clues as to how many bodies were in that particular pile. This is necesarry to find out exactly who has been killed because Milosovich is still believed to be holding 2,000 Albanians in Serb prisons. It is hoped that these prisoners will be released if Milosovich does lose office.

Another large part of the film was the testimony of survivors and witnesses. There was never any sort of narration. The story was told entirely through video and local testimony. We heard from the woman whose next door neighbors had shot and killed her husband and daughter after forcing the three of them to lie in the street. She asked them to kill her too, but they said they would rather maker her suffer. We heard also from the teenage man who had been taken with the group to be shot. He was shot three times, but woke up as the slayer were leaving with a corpse on top of him which he had to struggle out from under so that he could run to hide in the woods. His wounds were, when the film was shot THIS SUMMER, still red and swollen.

There were many Albanians, some who had recently lived in Kosovo, in the audience. The young woman sitting across from me was trembling and sobbing when the lights came up after the screening and continued to shake throughout the discussion.

As one of these Albanians pointed out, with pride, none of the Albanians ever talked of hate or revenge. Despite their ability to point across the home at the homes of their assailants, or see the famous leader of war criminals on their streets, they did not speak in anger. They spoke in extreme sadness of suffering and fear.

References to the holocaust were frequent. It did indeed have the same feel of genecide, but it also felt more hateful and chaotic. Nazi soldiers and officers killed Jews. But, Serbian neighbor was killing Albanian neighbor.

Many of the questions asked of Warsinki took a political tone. She eventually asked for the Ambassador's input. He spoke, in a trembling voice, for the need to "forgive but NOT forget."

This is Warsinki's fourth film on the Balkans. She spoke of the desire to let the people of the world know what is going on in the region.

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