CACONIK, Kosovo.
WHEN Xheli Raka returned home with his wife and three children after two months in forced exile in Macedonia, he hardly recognized the ancient town where he’d spent his entire life.
The dusty road he lived on for the past 22 years was filled with debris, burned-out cars and spent bullet shells. The neighborhood grocery store was wrecked; the corner cafe, too.
When he reached his apartment building, there was a special Serbian mark painted in yellow – indicating to police units in the area that the building had been “cleaned” of its Albanian residents.
And then he saw the sign posted outside his door: “Attention! Do not go inside without a license.”
“I was very afraid,” Raka said through a translator.
“I thought it meant that my apartment had bombs and traps. We were warned that the Serbian police were doing that.”
When he went inside, what he saw made his heart sink.
The place was completely trashed, the windows shattered – everything valuable taken by Serbian police during their rampage through this southern Kosovo town.
But despite the awful scene, Raka said he was “very happy” to be back home.
“This is nothing, I will fix it,” he said as broken glass crinkled under his feet and his children sat looking dazed, unable to move about in the pile of broken furniture in the four-room home.
“This is the place where I was born. I had to get back.”
Raka’s story is one of thousands now playing out throughout Kosovo as refugees flood across the Macedonia border and begin the long, difficult process of rebuilding their shattered lives.
For Raka, anything is better than the hardships he endured during the past three months.
His town, built on the steep slopes of a mountain, was the scene of fierce fighting between the Yugoslavian army and the Kosovo Liberation Army.
In April, Serbian police stormed through the town. Locals say more than 150 men were massacred. There is a grave where 81 people are buried just across the main highway.
Raka remembers having to cower in his apartment with his family for six long days while a handful of Serbian storm troopers took up residence on the second floor of the building.
“They were drinking alcohol and shooting off their weapons all day and all night,” he recalled.
The family fled, walking 20 miles to the Macedonian border.
His 3-year-old daughter, Ilirjiana, still has trouble standing and walking because of that long march, he said.
In Macedonia, Raka stayed with a nephew.
“It was very, very hard,” said his wife, Arife. “We had no money for food and the humanitarian assistance did not get to us.
“We ate only because people gave us food. Most of the time all we ate was macaroni.”
Like many returning Albanian Kosovars, the Rakas won’t find life any easier at home.
Raka pointed to an old, idle cement factory down the highway where he used to work.
The factory is now a NATO danger zone, planted with so many land mines and booby traps it’s doubtful it will ever be opened again.
The Rakas don’t know what to do about Ilirjiana, who sat listlessly throughout our visit and had to be carried from room to room by her father.
“I don’t know where to find a doctor,” Arife said.
By mid-afternoon there was a glimmer of hope in the Raka household – they got the stove working again. Soon the smell of onion and carrot soup replaced the stale stench of ethnic cleansing.
“This I can replace,” Raka said, waving his arm throughout the remains of his apartment.
“But you can never replace freedom and today we are free,” he said.
As we departed, he apologized for not offering a cup of coffee, a tradition in Albanian households.
“Next time you come here, you will come inside and sit down and have coffee with me,” he said, a look of hope on his face.