Surviving the Serb forces in Kosovowebplaced: August 11, 1999
One of the drivers for MSF in Kosovo tells his story of survival in Kosovo. His wife and three children were missing and he survived by dodging the Serbian forces.
Skender Berisha, 34 years
Interviewed by Eric Dachy in Pristina on July 15, 1999I am from Pristina where I owned a shop of textiles. I closed it on March 22, just before the war, because of the what had suddenly happened in the street. The Serbs had established check points on cross-roads, beating up people, taking their money and coming into the shops stealing and scaring the people. We all closed our shops and locked our doors. My wife was with her father with our three children. I could not reach them by phone and I thought they probably stayed there but I was not sure. I was worried for them.
It lasted for two days. Then came the night I will always remember, March 24, when the airstrike started. Two hours of NATO bombing, then the Serbs came throwing grenades and teargases in the yards where we, Albanians, were staying. The next day we kept hidden inside our house and they came again at night. I saw, in my street, five or six cars coming. Serbs got out of the cars and they broke the windows and looted the shops. They also put a bomb in one of the shops that exploded a few minutes later.
But from March 26 it became worse. The paramilitaries came to knock on the doors. They yelled at us that we had two minutes to leave to Macedonia. We did not open but they broke the doors. In my house, the ones who came had uniforms of regular police but they were wearing masks on their face. They put gun on my head, hit me several times and told me to go in the street immediately.
In the street, there were hundreds of people - a real crowd - under the surveillance of armed Serbs. I could walk discreetly into a small dead-end street where my sister Bahrija lives near my own house. She saw me and opened for me and I entered her house and waited there, terrorised. Fortunately on that day, they did not come to her house. All the people living in my street have been deported house by house. First to the train station and then to Macedonia.
In the same evening, with some neighbours, we made holes in the walls of the gardens to be able to circulate from one house to another and I reached my house in the early morning. Later in that day the Serbs came back in the neighbourhood again to loot and destroy. They were hundreds, both civilians and in uniform. They had trucks. They took everything they could from the houses; the TV, the freezers, everything. They also took all the goods from the shop and the food and any type of good. They stole all the fabrics from my shop. I was watching the whole scene from a aeration hole in the front wall of my house and I felt disgusted. I could not understand such a ugly behaviour. I felt anger as well, I had a gun in my house but had I shot on one of them, they would have killed us all.
In the next three days they did not deport anybody, they only looted. I kept hiding in the house, never going out in the streets, I had no news from my wife and I was extremely worried for her and for my children. I did not know what to do. And then they came back to deport the rest of the street. They knew exactly until which house they had already cleaned and looted. They broke the doors, shot in the air, asked for money then they separated men, women. They took my sister Bahrija, her two children, her husband. But I succeeded escaping with one of my cousins by returning into one of the houses they had emptied three days before. I climbed on the roof and they did not see me and from there I could watch the scene in the street. They first told the people to take their cars and, once the people were in their cars, they took the cars with the keys and told them to walk to the station.
At the end of the street, where people had to go, they were beating up men. At this moment I realised that this was like in the film, the Schindler list, and I had this impression again a few times afterwards. This was one of the worst moments of my life. I had no news from my wife and children, no news from my parents, and the Serbs were taking away my sister and her family. Me and my cousin staid on this roof for three hours and then we came back to the empty house of my sister. My only satisfaction that night was to hear the NATO planes bombing Pristina.
I stayed in the looted houses for a few days, circulating by the yards. I wanted to go out of Pristina to a village but they had illuminated the main cross-roads by projectors and they were shooting anyone trying to escape. I thought they would do to us what they did to Sarajevo. We were trapped in the city. But a few days later, in the first days of April, I managed to escape to a village called Makovc by walking early in the morning into a kind of corridor. It led to Makovc where my second sister, Hajrija, lives. I immediately went to her house and I staid there for 12 days. During this time I met one of my best friends who also escaped to this village and he told me he had received a phone call from my wife. She had been deported to Macedonia. She had been taken in the street when returning from the doctor and directly sent by train to Macedonia. They had not even let her come back to the house. But I was so happy. Mashallah. She was alive and she was in contact with one of our cousins in Germany. Later, she told me how overcrowded it was in this train and how she had been afraid for our youngest sons. During this period, I thought once about joining UCK and I met one commander but they had nothing serious to fight. They had old guns, bad organisation and I decided not to join.
Sometimes I had to walk through the corridor to Pristina at dawn to take some food in my house or in my sister`s house and bring it to Makovc where we had not food enough. One day I was coming back with a bag of flour. I stopped on the top of Koljovica mountain and I watched Pristina from there. The city looked completely empty. There were no cars, no buses, no people, no souls in the streets. I knew there were still people hidden in some of the houses but there was no sound. A big silence. Even the usual cloud of pollution was not there, the air was pure but this was like apocalypse.
In one of these trips to Pristina, I was happy to suddenly meet my first sister, Bahrija, who was back. She had been staying seven days in Jazince, near Blace, but she had not been authorised to enter Macedonia, so she finally had (returned) to Pristina by the Serbs and she was staying in an empty house. On the Macedonian border, she had met my mother who was in the no man`s land. They had been able to talk to each other for a few minutes through the fence. Probably my mother was in Macedonia, alive.
I went back in Makovc, to Hajrija, to give the news. But something was happening there. A while ago there had been airdrops in Podujevo area and apparently Serbs were afraid of weapons so they launched an offensive in this area and chased people in the mountains towards Pristina. We saw a lot of these people passing through Makovc. They were in a desperate condition. They had been in the mountains for long period. They had the colour of the earth. We tried to help them as much as we could with food and drinks but finally the Serbian offensive arrived in Makovc itself and in five minutes, we decided to flee by car. The only direction we could go was Pristina.
Later I knew that when Serbs arrived to Makovc they killed ten or fifteen people. The Serbia police stopped us near Pristina. I saw from my eyes the policemen taking a guy from a car bringing him in the police post and we heard two shots. The policeman came back and told the family waiting they could go now. This was under the eyes of his children. They heard the two shots. These policemen told us to enter in Pristina and to stay in empty houses. I went with my sister into the first empty house we found that night and on the next day we moved to the house of Bahrija.
We were together but we were terrified. We staid one month in her house. One month of fear. Other people were arriving from the villages and were staying in the empty houses. Serbs were coming to take some money and to steal the cars. Everybody was afraid.
The Serbs let women and elderly circulate in the early morning and they could go and buy in their supermarkets. Sometimes my sister was going, sometimes an old guy from our neighbourhood. We were giving the money and he was buying for us all. The city became full again but with displaced. During that month we had electricity and we were watching satellite TV all the time: BBC, CNN, Channel 5, and others and we had a lot of hope in international diplomacy, Tchernomyrdine and the others. I saw Clinton in Stuttgart saying to the NATO soldiers they had to fight for peace in the Balkans so that their sons would not to have to do it in 20 years from now and he warmed my heart. But Serbs were coming more and more often for razzias, taking young men to police stations who were never coming back. Still today we do not know about them.
More and more people were leaving Pristina. By the TV and the a radio we knew they were going to Macedonia and Albania. Pristina was emptying and the Serbs were again sending people to trains in Macedonia.
One day, we were so tired to fight for survival that we decided to put our lives in the hands of God, that we would go to Macedonia. Bahrija and me decided to go but Hajrija decided to stay. She was too much afraid to be deported with her sons and the Serbs were killing many young men. She stayed and we went to the train station. There were thousands of people, it looked again like in the movies about second world war. I felt like I understood what the Jews had been through 50 years ago. I thought of Simon Wiesenthal, how he had been right to hunt the Nazis, and how one day we should do the same and to punish the actors of this crime.
We waited for four terrible hours in this train. The heat was hard to stand and finally the train started and in two hours we were at the border. We got off the trains and the Serbs made us walk in columns. I was at the head of my column and I felt strange. I was not afraid to die anymore because all of this was too much. I was detached, I had no more interest in my own destiny. I was a toy in the hands of someone else and I did not want to be afraid anymore of what would be decided for me.
We walked to a field where we spent the night in the open, sleeping on the grass. The next day the Serbia policemen made us walk to the no man¹s land. For the first time they treated us well. We staid there for half an hour between Yugoslavia and Macedonia. We were one step to freedom but I was thinking to my sister Hajrija who had staid in Pristina and I thought if I cross this border I might not to see her and my homeland never again. I felt almost like a traitor. I was becoming a refugee and I did not like it. But I crossed the border and the Macedonian policemen told us to wait for the buses to bring us in a camp. I could call my cousin in Germany from the phone cabin to make him call the family where my wife was staying.
Half an hour later she arrived in a car. When I saw her I ran to her but ten meters from her, a policeman stopped me and told me to go back to the bus stop with the other refugees. I saw a guy from the UNHCR and I asked him to be allowed to join my wife. He told me there was nothing he could do. We had to follow the Macedonian procedure. I told him I would escape their procedure as I escaped from the Serbs because they treat us the same way and that is what I did. We had to wait for the bus fro the whole day but when the bus stopped on the road the police staid in their car in the front, I jumped and ran way from the bus into a village called Radusa. One guy from the village hosted me. I called my wife and she came to pick me up. Later we went to picked up Bahrija in the camp where she had been brought.
The first night it was hard for me to get used to having the light again in the evening because I was so used to hiding from the Serbs. Also I did not dare to watch my children for two hours because I had lost hope to see them again. After these two hours, I opened the door of their room to watch them sleeping and I felt I was the happiest father. This was May 26.
We spent a few weeks in Macedonia and one day NATO entered Kosovo. This was crazy. In between I had applied for a job as driver for MSF in Shkopje. They told me they were looking for someone to work in Peja, but they warned me it would be dangerous. We went to Peja on June 22. We were only ten, French and Kosovar together, and we were like a family. We worked a lot - driving, translating, transporting. We reopened the hospital and many dispensaries. I liked this work and it helped me to forget my bad feelings. I saw a lot of people who had suffered much more than me. I was happy but I was missing my family, and Graziella, the head of the mission, offered me to join MSF in Pristina so that I could live with my wife and children. I accepted and now I am a driver for the mobile clinics in Drenica.
Now we are in Kosovo after this war and it is almost unreal to realise everything that happened in this short period. In my memories, sometimes it is in black and white, like in a film. I have been scared many times. I have been courageous sometimes and I have been very lucky because nobody died in my family. But during this period, everyday was like fighting with the devil. The men who did this to the people had nothing human. I will never understand how they could be so cruel and for the rest of my life I will stay uncomfortable to have faced such evil.
senden