THE HAGUE: A Kosovo farmer accused Mr Slobodan Milosevic of "unimaginable" cruelty towards ethnic Albanians, at his war crimes trial in The Hague yesterday.
Mr Fehim Elshani (67) took the stand minutes after one of his compatriots pleaded ill health and refused to answer any more questions from Mr Milosevic, who is defending himself before the UN tribunal. The withdrawal of Mr Agim Zeqiri (49), the first victim called, was a setback for the prosecution. Mr Elshani was clearly on edge and kept his gaze turned from Mr Milosevic. But the wiry Albanian Kosovar turned out to be a combative witness.
"It is unimaginable the things you have done," he thundered at the former Yugoslav president, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity.
"There were three elderly women burned by your forces. I was involved in it myself. I buried one of them together with her son." Mr Elshani said the Serbs assembled some 20,000 ethnic Albanians in his Kosovo village of Nagafc and their aim was clear: "They wanted to exterminate the people." They ended up deporting them to Albania.
His testimony basically echoed that of Mr Zeqiri, a farmer from the neighbouring village of Celina, who testified on Wednesday on the days of terror after the start of NATO air strikes in Kosovo on March 24th, 1999.
Both men described how Serb troops went on a rampage of burning, shooting and looting. Mr Zeqiri lost nearly all of his family and was almost beaten to death in the head and kidneys before being deported.
Mr Elshani, a former accountant before losing his job, was luckier.
"I saw everything burning around me," he said. "I heard the voices of soldiers, I heard an officer ordering them to go back and burn that house." The witness described how he and his family barely escaped death from a knife-wielding Serb policeman who burst into his cellar, cursed his mother and said: "Now I will cut your throats like sheep." Fortunately, at that moment two other Serb policemen who knew him arrived on the scene and prevented the massacre, said Mr Elshani.
He said some ethnic Albanians were paying the Serbs up to 24,000 German marks (about $54,000) for safe passage and others were robbed outright.
Mr Milosevic tried to link events to the Kosovo Liberation Army. But Mr Elshani said: "These are provocative questions. I have declared I have never had anything to do with the KLA."
Mr Elshani rebuffed Mr Milosevic's suggestions the shooting around him was the result of KLA military operations and that Serb troops were actually herding the villagers together to help them: "If that is what you call help, I'd like to see what the opposite is."
When Mr Milosevic implied that he had never actually seen the Serb forces, Mr Elshani said: "When they came to take us from our lands, I saw military forces."
Testimony is due to resume on Monday.