ELBASAN, Albania — To most of the world, Haxhi Batusha is just a name on a list.
It's a long list, with 344 names numbingly tallied under the locales of seven massacres, a 13-page roster of the murders pinned on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, a legal document with no hint of the hearts and souls that the Serbian strongman is said to have extinguished.
Haxhi's is the 21st of 103 names on the international war crimes tribunal's record of "Persons Known by Name Killed at Velika Krusa--26 March 1999."
"Batusha, Haxhi," the list reads about midway down its fifth page. "Male," it says, offering only one other guess at distinguishing detail: "Approximate age: 28."
Real age: 29. Real life: machinist in training, weekend gardener, owner of a Mercedes-Benz and a two-story house with all the comforts. Husband of nine years to brave and indomitable Hermeta. Father of four girls under the age of 7, none yet aware that their father is dead. Son of Rasim and Gjyzide, who both painfully survive him. Brother of three, cousin of many and grandson of grief-stricken Hanemsha, the Batushas' 74-year-old matriarch, who lost 22 male relatives in a single act of ethnic slaughter.
The fact that documentation of Haxhi's death and those of most of the other men in his family might provide the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia with the "courtroom product" to convict Milosevic has been hailed by the U.N.-appointed prosecutors as a step on the long road to justice.
But his posthumous contribution to the outside world's quest to punish the architect of Balkan sorrow offers little comfort to Haxhi's survivors.
Bereft of their men, burned out of their houses and pushed out of their country in the Serbs' feverish drive to expel ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, the women and children of the Batusha clan have their sights set on a less merciful end for a man who they feel certain sent the orders for each pull of the trigger.
"We don't want to see him tried in a Western court--that would be too good for him," Hanemsha says of the indictment of Milosevic for the massacre of her family, the remnants of which now huddle in two rooms of a crumbling tenement in this rubbish-strewn Albanian town full of windblown grit and industrial ruin wedged between towering mountains.
"We want him to see his son and daughter doused with gasoline and burned alive, the way they killed our men," the wizened matriarch says with tearful venom. "After he has seen what that is like, I hope he is stabbed with dull knives and left to die slowly."
