Hadi Bakali stood with his wife Mandush staring at the Italian bersaglieri and contemplating the traffic. The pavement where the couple stood was littered with rubble, broken glass, roof tiles and electrical wires, and the shops behind him were gutted. Yet Mr Bakali, a 61-year-old retired teacher, wore an almost drunkenly happy smile. "We stayed here, and we survived," he explained. "We live in the only street that was saved from this disaster; it happened by chance."
Djakovica is only 10 km from the Albanian border. The Kosovo Liberation Army had strong support here, so Serb forces punished its 60,000 residents with special fury. On May 10th, ethnic Albanians fled from their homes to escape fighting between the Serbs and the KLA.
They were stopped at a small bridge which the Albanians call Ura Talichit. There, the men were separated from the women and children. As the men were marched back through the devastated town centre, 15 of them were shot dead. "We don't know what happened to the others," Mr Bakali said, "but I have heard some people are buried in the vineyard."
The retired teacher momentarily lost his smile. "They slaughtered one of our neighbours," he said. A battle between Serbs and KLA guerrillas started on May 7th. The Bakalis' next-door neighbour, Mentar Shtaloja, took in two fleeing young men. Alerted by the presence of their vehicles, the police came searching for them at 6 a.m. on the morning of the 8th.
"We saw everything from an upstairs bedroom," Mr Bakali recalled. "The police shouted, `Open the door, open the door' in Serbian and Albanian. One of the young men escaped, but they caught the other one jumping out of a window and shot him in the leg. Then they broke into the house and pushed Mentar Shtaloja up the stairs. They fired their pistols in the air for fun, not to kill him. They slashed his throat and chest and stomach. They cut him like an animal until he died, and he lay there for five days before we could go and get him."
The whole central market of Djakovica, a bazaar that covered at least one square mile, was destroyed by the Serbs, "all in one day, on the 10th of May", Mr Bakali says. "They did it during the night, and they gathered children, mostly gypsies, to help them."
The Serbs and gypsies moved down the cobblestone streets of the old town, dousing buildings with petrol and then setting fire to them. It looks like they returned later and threw grenades or dynamited the ruins. Small stubs of white walls are all that is left standing, filled in with piles of bricks and broken roof tiles. An old Singer sewing machine lay rusting in one shop - everything, I have learned in Kosovo, rusts quickly after it is burned. The only recognisable object in most of the shops are old black cast-iron stoves.
"They are like cannibals," Mr Bakali commented. "Look what they have done." Was there not a single good Serb in Djakovica, we asked, no one who tried to stop the destruction? "We thought there were," Mr Bakali answered. "But there were none. I didn't think there were people like that in the world. Not one of them tried to help us."
At the far end of the market, the 16th century Djamia Hadumit mosque is still standing, its minaret snapped in two. The nearby Islamic studies centre was burned down, along with its library.
"In this house, three people were killed, burned alive," our guide murmured, pointing at the blue and white sign on the gate of No 23 Ferid Grezda Street. "They knocked them unconscious with gas canisters, then they set fire to the house."
As in Suva Reka and Prizren, two other large towns we drove through, the KLA is omnipresent in Djakovica. An armed, uniformed KLA man checks cars as they enter town, and the red and black Albanian flag flies over Djakovica's PTT building. The huge, modern but run-down Hotel Pastrik - only days ago the headquarters of the Yugoslav army in Djakovica - has been taken over by the KLA.
As we say our farewells before heading north towards Pec, Mrs Bakali raises her hands to the sky and says, "Clinton, Blair, Albright . . . we love them." Tears of gratitude well up in her eyes, and I ask her about the KLA. "We love them too," she say. But the tears have gone and I sense hesitation. "We love them - but we want them to be controlled."
There are more KLA checkpoints on the road to Pec. But KLA country stops just before Decani, and the town which was thoroughly "cleansed" by the Serbs a year ago is a creepy, deserted place of torched buildings, almost as methodically destroyed as central Djakovica. The Albanian towns of south-west Kosovo were destroyed so thoroughly that you have the impression the Serbs were afraid to leave anything undamaged.
In Decani, the giant, city-block-sized police quarters is empty. The even bigger Yugoslav army barracks was flattened by NATO bombers. A red and white bus with all its windows broken is parked on the roadside. Wolf-like dogs prowl the streets; you smell the stench of dead animals all over Kosovo, and wonder if any of the rotting flesh could be human. Bright yellow plastic envelopes marked "Humanitarian Rations, Food Gift from the People of the United States of America" litter the pavement. Water pours from a broken pipe, but not a soul moves among the ruins.
Beautifully set in the foothills of the mountains marking Kosovo's border with Montenegro, Pec was Kosovo's second city, with a population of 80,000. We arrive there hours after the Italian Kfor troops - and before the KLA, in time to see two Serbs driving off a last truckload of looted goods. As we watch a woman and girl root through the rubbish tip across the street, an Italian officer says there are at most 3,000 people left. A few Albanians have gathered on a street corner, to greet the KLA fighters when they enter the city. Police and the Yugoslav army abandoned squad cars, trucks and transporters in their rush to meet the NATO deadline.
The bazaar in Pec suffered the same devastation as Djakovica's market. Its mosque has been torched. "The Serbs started to send people away on March 25th, the second day of the (NATO) bombardment," a Sister of the Order of Mother Teresa in Pec says.
"The Albanians were told, `Go to the city centre. Take nothing with you. The buses are waiting.' Their neighbours put on uniforms. They were ordered by the government to do so, and they risked four years in prison if they refused. Their own neighbours told them to go, and afterwards, they burned their houses." The worst burning took place after Serbia accepted the peace agreement on June 3rd. "There were three indescribable days of burning, burning, burning," the nun said.
The Catholic nuns in Pec were cut off from the world for nearly three months. When they ventured into town to go shopping, Serb civilians and soldiers spat on them because they ministered to the Albanian Catholic minority. One day in April, the nuns saw a car full of militiamen pull up in front of the Catholic church and shoot down an Albanian man and his two daughters.
"One girl shouted, `Baba' before she died. She was only 8 or 10 years old, one Sister says. She does not know what happened to the daughter who survived long enough to be taken to hospital. The murdered Albanians' blood still stains the pavement black in front of the church.
Unlike Mr Bakali in Djakovica, the nuns in Pec encountered some Serbs who showed compassion. Yugoslav soldiers brought 35 old Albanian women who had been left alone in their houses to the convent. But how could they explain what the Serbs of Pec did to their own neighbours?
"There was such jealousy between them," the Sister said. "The Serbs wouldn't allow the Albanians to work, so the Albanians went abroad and became rich and sent the money back.
The Serbs were working for the State and earned nothing, and it made them so jealous to see the Albanians getting rich around them."