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PRIZREN--Izbica, Meja, Bela Crkva: these were once small, anonymous villages in Kosovo. Now, like Srebrenica or Vukovar, these names will resonate around the world as sites of grisly civilian massacres. In Bosnia, in Rwanda, in Cambodia, it has taken years to document the extent of atrocities. But in Kosovo, the rapid return of refugees and the unprecedented access given to human rights workers makes it more likely that we will be able to identify and name the missing and killed more quickly.

When foreign journalists and international monitors were forced to leave Kosovo at the end of March, the only source of information about the fate of ethnic Albanians inside Kosovo was the testimony from refugees who fled across the borders to Albania or Macedonia. Wave after wave of survivors swept across the border with haunting stories of atrocities, of fathers and sons taken away, and of family members who continue to be among the missing. Yet, it is now clear that this testimony was only part of the grim picture.

This month, Human Rights Watch researchers were able to return to Kosovo so we could try to corroborate the allegations of war crimes. I spent much of April and May interviewing refugees who had swept into Kukes, Albania. They were traumatized and exhausted, but gave detailed and precise descriptions of what happened to those who stayed behind. Sometimes they even drew pictures and diagrams. These all make it possible now to identify the exact ravine or fence that was first described back in Kukes by those who lost loved ones there. The only surprises are how very accurate those accounts of atrocities were and how many more sites there were that we never learned about until we could return to Kosovo. It is now clear that in some cases, there were simply no witnesses left.

Meja is a village that lies northwest of Djakovica, a region that suffered particularly fierce Serbian repression of civilians. After 19 separate interviews with eyewitnesses who had passed through Meja on April 27, Human Rights Watch concluded that at least 100 men between the ages of 16 and 60--and perhaps many more--were taken out of a convoy of refugees by Serbian forces and systematically executed in Meja on that day. The refugees we interviewed had been systematically "cleansed" from neighboring villages by Serbian special police, paramilitary units, and soldiers of the Yugoslav Army.

In Meja now, how do our notes from the accounts we heard in the camps compare to what we can now see? There is the fence, over there the field, and beyond, the ravine.

And, indeed, the decayed remains of several men appear to confirm testimony we collected earlier. I saw bodies on the edge of a field next to the road that runs through Meja. Other corpses were located on the side of a ravine adjacent to the field. The bones of some of the bodies were broken, and they all appeared to be headless. We found pieces of a skull next to one of the bodies.

In the field were clusters of burned documents and personal possessions--items such as cigarette cases, keys, and family photos--that apparently belonged to the dead men. Spent bullet casings are littered about. Serb forces perhaps had in mind that one day investigators would try to piece together the identities of the dead when they sought to destroy this evidence.

Now, investigators are on the scene, doing just that. The departing killers have tried to erase some of the evidence of their crimes, but too much remains. Victims of such massacres cannot speak. But survivors have, and their voices have been heard.

Yesterday, there were reports indicating that documents left behind by withdrawing Serb forces could establish a direct link between the massacres and the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and senior Serbians, from generals to police commanders and all the way up to Yugoslavia President Slobodan Milosevic. These reports note that despite the Serbians' best efforts to remove all documents, they were not able to carry all.

Eyewitness testimony in combination with telling physical evidence will make life difficult for those who seek to escape justice.

The exercise of recording crimes used to be something we did for the historical record. Now, it is something we do as lawyers and investigators building a case against the perpetrators. That notion, that justice will come, makes sifting through the detritus of "ethnic cleansing" a little easier to bear.