On 26 March, 1999, the Serb forces attacked the village of Suva Reka and killed 44 members of the Berisha family. Only two women and one child survived the massacre and one of them, Shyhrete Berisha, later testified at the trial of six former Serbian officials. Among the dead were 14 children, three babies and 14 women, including one who was nine months pregnant.
It all started when police stormed out of the local police station and started firing at six men standing in a courtyard outside their family home. Despite the fact that the men raised their arms in surrender, the police still shot them in cold blood. Other members of the family tried to run away, but they were stopped in front of a cafe not far from their house. The police forced the family inside the cafe, where they opened fire and threw two hand grenades inside the building.
Shyhrete Berisha was badly wounded, but she played dead as it appeared the police were firing at anything that moved. After about 30 minutes, the police threw the bodies into the back of a truck. Shyhrete and another two survivors managed to jump off the back of the truck without being noticed, and local Albanians helped them escape through the woods. A month later they all took refuge in Albania.
On 30 April, 1999, an estimated 100 to 300 men and youths (the exact figures are still not known) are believed to have been executed at the village of Meja, northwest of Djakovica. Starting on 27 April, Serbian police and paramilitary units, together with soldiers of the Yugoslav army, forcibly expelled residents from the villages of Pecaj, Nivokaz, Dobrash, Sheremet, Jahoc, Ponashec, Racaj, Ramoc, Madanaj, Orize and Cuska. The Serbs surrounded the villages, rounded up the inhabitants and forced them to walk towards Djakovica. During the course of the day many of the men and boys were taken away from the rest of the group. There are reports that the soldiers were seen holding literally hundreds of men at gunpoint. Those people who passed by later in the day reported having seen an ‘enormous pile of bodies’ at the side of the road.
Those who made it across the border into Albania, mainly women, children and the elderly, were severely traumatized and spoke of mass slaughter at the village of Meja. One witness claimed she saw 70 or more men squatting with their hands behind their heads in a small ditch that ran parallel with the road. Refugees that passed through Meja on that afternoon said there was blood and bodies everywhere, many lying face down and none of them were moving.
In the closing days of the war, the grim and sordid details of mass slaughter appeared on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. It was given the label of the ‘Serbs Factory of Death’ as more and more evidence came to light of the atrocities that had taken place. In Kosovo’s capital of Prishtina, a beautiful 16th-century mosque was burnt down. Bulldozers had been used to flatten the rubble of many other mosques and buildings, leaving just the scars of war on the landscape. One elderly ethnic Albanian told a reporter, ‘They tried to wipe out our Moslem history. You can erase our buildings but you cannot destroy our people.’
It appears that is exactly what the Serbs were trying to do: eradicate the Albanians from Kosovo. Vucitrn was another site of destruction, when the Serbs massacred about 70 men after being herded into courtyards. The women and children were robbed of their money and jewellery by masked paramilitaries, while listening to the screams of their menfolk being slaughtered. The only reminders of their families at the end of the day were the bloodstains on the grass and a pair of dentures embedded in the mud.
Ultimately, many displaced persons ended up in villages to the north-east of Vucitrn, such as Bajgore, Vesekovce, Kurillove and Sllakovce, which became overcrowded with the homeless, frightened Albanians. Several witnesses reported that they had to live with as many as 100 people to a single house and that others were forced to sleep out in the open air. On their travels to Albania the refugees had been subjected to cursing and threats from the Serb soldiers.
As the group of refugees passed through Vucitrn, seeing the bodies lying at the side of the road, they decided to tie a white cloth to their tractor, to show that they wanted to surrender. The soldiers simply ignored the symbol of surrender and started shooting and shelling the occupants of the tractor. A woman used a mattress to cover her children as they drove as fast as they could away from the village. As the refugees approached a warehouse, they saw a line of soldiers on the left hand side of the road. They stopped the refugees and told them to get out of their tractors, put their hands behind their heads and then to sit down on the road. The soldiers started cursing, kicking and beating them as they walked among the petrified families. One woman was beaten just because her child was crying.
There is no accurate record of just how many Albanians were killed during the Kosovo War, as new evidence is being discovered all the time. In 2001, the existence of a mass grave at Batajnica was uncovered, after the fall of the Milosevic regime in October 2000. As many as 1,100 bodies have been exhumed from this site alone, but it is believed their has been widespread tampering with the gravesites and destruction of evidence, in an attempt to cover the true extent of the atrocity. It is certain that genocidal massacres continued throughout the war, but then came the long, hard task of trying to find out who was responsible and bring them to justice.
Abuses in Darfur
Since Sudan declared independence in 1956, it has been repeatedly torn apart by civil war. Since 1983 there has been ceaseless fighting between the largely Moslem, pro-government North and largely non-Moslem rebels in the South, making it the longest uninterrupted war in the history of the world. The death toll in Sudan is higher than the combined fatalities of Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia and Algeria and it is estimated that as many as two million Sudanese have died as a direct result of war.
The current crisis in Darfur is a continuation of a
15-year effort by Khartoum to quash potential political challenges and to expel rebels who are demanding greater regional independence and share of the power. Since the start of the rebel-insurgency in February 2003, the government of Sudan has persisted in using a military strategy that has violated the basic principles of international humanitarian and human rights law. It has failed to differentiate between military targets and civilian populations, the results of which have been dramatic. In just one year it is believed that as many as 750,000 people have been displaced in Darfur, with as many as 110,000 fleeing across the border into Chad. The severity of the crimes committed by Sudanese government forces and allied militias, the ‘Janjaweed’, amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. On top of the forced displacement, they have committed murder, torture, pillage and rape on hundreds of thousands of civilians. Hundreds of villages have been destroyed, usually razed to the ground by fire, and all the villagers’ personal belongings looted. Children have been abducted in large numbers and, even when they have fled their homes, the citizens are subjected to attacks by the militia as they pass through Janjaweed checkpoints dotted along the roads.