Another surreal day of combat here in Kosovo. We drove down to Prizren (Kosovo’s #2 city) to check out a tip on heavy Yugoslav Army concentrations near the village of Hoca Zagredsa, and the police stopped us from going in.

So we found a back road, outflanked the cops and basically drove into a Serb operation in full swing, tanks firing, automatic weapons, anti-aircraft guns, blasting away at a village, from which we could see plumes of smoke rising. Around one heavy shell every forty seconds, and lots of the lighter stuff in between. Refugees in tractors passed us on their way to nowhere, because the Serbs didn’t let them into Prizren or anywhere else, all this under the Serb guns, and we started to take pictures but got stopped and almost beaten up; they told us to fuck off.

Then we spent the rest of the day frustrated, trying to get back in, stymied at every turn, the refugees actually returned, while there was still shooting, with assurances that the OSCE, the UNHCR (and us) could go with them, and of course we were stopped, so this amounts to a forced repatriation.

And while we were negotiating, the Serb commander had the gall to suggest that “the journalists were in the village, and they ran away when the shooting started,” to which I had to say, “No, sir, actually we were instructed to leave and we, uh, followed these instructions against our will.” Finally as the sun set we gave up and drove like hell back to Pristina, having a flat tire on the scary Suva Reka-Stimjle road.

The whole time there was a little dog sleeping in the shade under our car, and in between talking with the police and army, we kept trying to get the dog out from under.