| Pristina,
14 June Thomas Dworzak, photographer for US News & World Report and myself the very first from the Macedonia NATO intervention force to reach Pristina at 10:09 AM Saturday morning, on a motor scooter. Went into Kosovo with the Gurkhas, a real army, these soldiers the best I've ever seen. We found them lined up on the Macedonian side of the road waiting for the signal to begin, sitting there in the cold pre-dawn, brewing their tea. At first light, a roaring wave of helicopters carrying the Paras flew over us into Kosovo, in order to secure the road. Slowly, the advance began. I walked through the initial few kilometers, found several Serbian police that the British overtook, and finally reached the head of the column, where the British brigadier leading the operation was taking no chances with each of the bridges we crossed. He had his engineers blow up anything that could be mined or an obstacle, like the wrecked cars littering the road. After several hours we reached the first town, Kacanik, where we met the air-landed Paras and Steve Erlanger of the NYT, who drove down from Pristina. He told us that the road was open. So we took the Skopje number plates off of the scooter, hid cameras, and off we went, questioning each patrol of slowly advancing British paratroopers if there were any more of them ahead. Finally we met the lead element, who thought we were insane to go in ahead of them. But for us it was a perfect spring day, wind in our hair, no checkpoints, and we caught up with and then started passing the withdrawing Yugoslav army convoys... Impossible to describe emotions. We joked to ourselves, "The closest to the liberation of Paris we'll ever get!" When we got to the main boulevard, everything felt almost normal, very eerie, not really that different from seventy-eight days before. Little sign of NATO bomb damage. Yugoslav Army and police packing up. Armed Serb civilians everywhere. Hardly an Albanian to be seen, and then as we scootered through town, we saw that the neighborhoods were all empty, that almost all the houses had been looted. We had lunch with Paul Watson of the LA Times, who has famously been in Kosovo pretty much the whole time. Then we went down to the main traffic circle where we found a chaotic scene of Serb families trying to prepare an organized departure, when several car loads of mean looking guys in leather jackets showed up, cradling their AKs and demanding that everyone stay. Angry words were exchanged and finally the ruffians drove off, their rifle barrels sticking out of their car windows. We were in Kosovo without visas, only with our KFOR press cards, and having outran that jurisdiction for the time being, we had to wait for them to catch up! We were out of gas for the scooter, and afraid to register at the Hotel Grand without papers. Exhausted, we fell asleep in our old haunt, the deserted and completely quiet Media Center. No one else arrived for six more hours, and the first British troops not in strength until the next day. Serbs leaving burning a few houses, lots of gunfire. The first Albanian revenge attacks beginning. And I found out that two German journalists got killed; doing exactly what Thomas and I did, running ahead of the NATO armies. |