Kosovo - The Battle for Orahovac

By Dejan Anastasijevic - Vreme, Belgrade, FR Yugoslavia, July 25, 1998

Eerily empty streets, demolished, emptied and looted shops, destroyed and bullet riddled cars, and a thoroughly demolished center of the city demonstrate how bad it is when a town in the Balkans becomes a target of liberators. This time it was Orahovac's turn. Orahovac is a town famous as the center for production of good wine and brandy; during five days of clashes it had the misfortune of being "liberated" twice: once by the Kosovo Liberation Army (OVK) and the other time by the Serb police and army.

On Wednesday, July 22, when the journalists were finally allowed to visit Orahovac, we could see for ourselves that the town was really free: freed from a majority of its former inhabitants and their mobile property. Although the Serb authorities are promising that the electricity, water and telephone links will soon be restored and that "life will return to Orahovac" it is likely that some time will pass before these promises are fulfilled.

An Ideal Targert: The battle for Orahovac had been prepared carefully for a long time and was supposed to be a change in the OVK tactics: previously OVK had mostly been active in villages where it had developed strong support base among the population.

"The plan was to at first attack smaller towns without Army barracks in which the Albanians are in overwhelming majority, and later to move onto larger centers," a source close to OVK said for Vreme grudgingly admitting defeat.

In many ways, Orahovac was an ideal target: there is no Army barracks in the town, and over 80 percent of the inhabitants are ethnic Albanians; moreover, the control over Orahovac would bring significant advantage to OVK because it would lead to the widening of the corridor between Drenica and the border belt in the southwestern part of Kosovo. However, the Albanians also hoped that this action would strike the decisive psychological blow to the Serbs after which the entry into Pristina (Serb) - Prishtina (Albanian) would have been only a matter of months, if not weeks.

The battle began on Friday around seven thirty in the afternoon, with the attack on several strategic objects in the center of the town (police station, post office, health center and hotel). In the days before the attack, OVK had secretly brought large forces from the nearby stronghold in Malisevo to the suburbs of Orahovac; on Friday, these forces were ready and waiting for a sign to attack. It seems that a majority of the population (in both ethnic groups) was aware, or had a premonition, of what was coming, but couldn't believe that it would really take place.

"I couldn't believe that our neighbors would do something like this to us," said later Andjelko Kolasinac, president of the municipality, explaining that at the start of the attack he was headed to his barber, an ethnic Albanian.

Nevertheless, the same president of the municipality, several days before in an interview to Politika Ekspres publicly stated that he "expect[ed] a strong attack of terrorists on Orahovac".

Some people took the situation more seriously. Many Albanians, as well as many local Serbs, had sent their wives and children away. In the village of Velika Hoca, the only larger Serb majority village near the town, old trenches were strengthened and new ones dug, while the town hotel "Park" was quickly turned into a Special Police base.

The takeover of the post office, school and health center went practically without problems: the members of OVK simply walked into these buildings, shooed away the frightened staff, and took a part of them as prisoners to Malisevo. The official Serb sources claim that a number of medical workers from the health center, including the nurses and a doctor from Krajina who worked there, were among the hostages.

"The worst thing is that we don't know if they took the nurses to take care of their wounded or to rape them," says one of the Orahovac Serbs who was lucky to be in Prizren on Friday. The rumor is that almost one hundred civilians were abducted, but it has been impossible to get the exact number and names until now.

SNIPER: However, the attack on the police station and hotel "Park" presented OVK with far more difficulty; the battle around those two buildings and oneethnically clean block of buildings where the Serbs had set up their defenses raged without a break during the fighting. At first it seemed that OVK had an advantage because all three points were surrounded and exposed to merciless fire. Although both sides used light artillery, snipers were "busiest" around the town, while the population ,without water and food, hid for days in cellars awaiting the outcome of the battle with fear. Although OVK had light mortars and small caliber guns and Serbs had much heavier artillery in Velika Hoca and the positions in the hills west from the town, it seems that an effort was made to avoid large scale destruction.

"See, we haven't destroyed anything here, and we liberated the town nevertheless," said police colonel Milan Sipka, proudly showing the post office building which had no traces of damage although allegedly it was one of the OVK strongholds during the battle. However, some fifteen building in the center of the town didn't have the same luck: they were thoroughly demolished with mortars and light artillery.

Since after three days of fighting the situation was virtually the same both sides, it seems, decided to intensify propaganda and proudly claim victory. On Sunday and Monday, all newspapers in Belgrade had the same title on the front page - "Orahovac liberated" - while the OVK commanders in their turn claimed that there were no more policemen in the town. During all that time neither side allowed journalists to visit the town. The decisive turnaround happened on Monday when the Army and police brought strong reinforcements from Prizren and Djakovica. OVK had expected something like that and prepared deep trenches and bunkers in the village of Bela Crkva on the road between Prizren and Orahovac. This journalist visited the village several hours after the end of clashes and saw evidence that strong resistance had been offered there: according to the local policemen, the Army and police needed several hours to break into the village in spite of overwhelming advantage in firepower. From that moment the battle was over: realizing that the attack had failed, OVK pulled back toward Malisevo and the Army and police entered Orahovac.

It is impossible to establish the exact number of victims since both sides, it seems, are trying to reduce the number of their casualties. The Albanian sources claim to have less than 40 dead and that only a few of them were OVK members while the rest are civilians. Also, they claim that many had been tortured before death. These claims cannot be independently confirmed and some of the photographs of the alleged victims published in Albanian press were actually taken four months ago in Drenica. The official Serb sources admit two killed policemen and nine wounded, while there are allegedly only four civilian victims. If one has in mind that the battle raged for four days, this balance sheet appears to be rather optimistic. Also, the Police claims that out of more than 200 Albanians arrested after the battle, only about twenty people are still held in jail.

In the end there remains hope that both sides have learnt some lessons from the whole story: Albanians that the military victory in Kosovo is much further than it seems, and Serbs that it pays off to treat civilians well and that Kosovo cannot be defended by force. The real battle for Orahovac will be won when its inhabitants return to their homes.

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