|
“Then Majlinda said, “Mummy, mummy, look at how they’ve killed Herolinda.” And when I looked around, I saw Herolinda over there and saw her, that she was lying on the ground with five or six bullet holes in her flesh. She had been such a beautiful girl.” Shyhrete Berisha, a Kosovo Albanian woman speaking about how Serb forces murdered her children in a café in Suva Reka/Suharekë, Kosovo. She testified on 10 July 2002 in the case against Slobodan Milošević.
|
In March 1999, Shyhrete Berisha was a 37 year-old wife and mother of four. She was living with her family in the town of Suva Reka/Suharekë, located in the southern part of Kosovo when Serb forces came to her house on the morning of 25 March 1999.
At that time, Mrs. Berisha’s husband Nexhat was 43 years old, her daughters Majlinda and Herolinda were 16 and 14, her son Altin was 11, and her youngest son Redon was just shy of two years old. Mrs. Berisha’s family lived in a house in Suva Reka/Suharekë together with her husband’s nephew, Faton Berisha, and his family. In 1998, both families rented the house to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). On 20 March 1999, the OSCE evacuated from the house, and the next day Mrs. Berisha and her family went back.
At about 5:00am on Thursday 25 March 1999, Mrs. Berisha and her family were sleeping in Faton's part of the house when there was a knock at the front door. Mrs. Berisha got out of bed to open it, and found three Serbian police officers standing at the door pointing their automatic weapons at her chest. One of them poked her chest with the end of his weapon and yelled in Serbian, “Where are your guests? Where are the Americans? Where is NATO?” They told her to call her husband, and when he came to the door, the police took him to her family’s side of the house. They told her not to leave. Mrs. Berisha saw a large tank parked about 20 metres away, pointing straight at the house.
Mrs. Berisha’s husband later told her that the police searched the drawers and cupboards in their part of the house. When they found some body armour and helmets, they started to beat her husband. While he was being assaulted, one of the police came to Faton’s side of the house and started searching through the drawers and cupboards. He told Mrs. Berisha that her husband’s life was in danger and asked her for money. She gave him 1000 Deutsche Marks (DM), and when she said that she had no more, he left.
Mrs. Berisha saw the police load a lot of valuable equipment from their house onto a truck. She said they stole televisions, computers and the heater, everything they could carry. She also saw police hit her husband with the back of an automatic weapon and kick him. She could see that he had been beaten and his face was all black.
The policeman sat Mrs. Berisha and her husband down, together with Faton’s mother, Fatime, and said in Serbian, “Give us money, otherwise we will kill you and burn your house with your children. See the tank, we’ll blow your house into the air.” The police thought they had a lot of money because the OSCE had been in their house. Mrs. Berisha could hear her children crying upstairs.
Fatime had some money on her chest and tried to pull the notes out, but one of the policemen said something like, “Wait. Wait. I’ll get the money,” and put his hands on her chest and grabbed all of it. Mrs. Berisha had 3000 DM on her chest and she gave it to the policeman because she was afraid he would want to undress her. Mrs. Berisha thinks there was 50,000 DM all together.
Mrs. Berisha saw the police throwing OSCE documents into the air, filling the courtyard with white paper. She thinks there were at least 15 of them there, and she heard them yelling things like, “Now NATO will come and save you.” They finally left between about 6:30 and 7:00am.
As they were afraid to stay in the house, her family and Faton’s went to the house of her husband’s uncle, Vesel Berisha, located about 30 metres behind theirs. Mrs. Berisha listed 24 members of the Berisha family between the ages of 10 months and 60 years who spent the night of 25 March 1999 there. “Only three people that slept in the house that night survived what was about to happen,” Mrs. Berisha said in her statement to the Office of the Prosecutor.
At about 12:20pm on Friday 26 March 1999, Mrs. Berisha saw some 30 police officers, all armed with automatic weapons, leave the police station across the road. She saw them run in an aggressive combat stance to a neighbour’s house. “Everybody,” said Mrs. Berisha, “man, woman and child became very afraid.” As Mrs. Berisha was about to faint, Faton’s wife Sebahate gave her a tranquilliser to calm her down. “It may have been this that saved my life,” she said in her statement.
Fatime told Mrs. Berisha that there were police at their house and she went over to open the door. Mrs. Berisha saw her go in the back door. A short time later she heard three gun shots. She and Sebahate started to scream because they thought that Fatime had been shot. Mrs. Berisha saw flames coming out of her house.
Fearing that they would be burned alive in the house, everybody ran for the back door. They were all barefoot as they had no time to put shoes on. Mrs. Berisha was looking for her children, and everybody was saying, “Hurry, hurry.” She heard two shots and Flora, the wife of Vesel Berisha’s son Bujar, cried out, “They just shot my Bujar.”
Mrs. Berisha saw policemen grabbing the men, and their wives trying to stand between them. She heard a man called Mišković, a hotel owner, yell to her husband, “Let NATO or the Americans come now and save you.” She then heard Mišković tell Nexhat to put his hands in the air. When he did, Mišković shot him in the back three times. Mrs. Berisha’s daughter Majlinda screamed “Daddy.” “[M]y children … loved my husband even more than they loved me,” said Mrs. Berisha.
At that moment, the shooting started and there was a lot of confusion. Mrs. Berisha said that they started to run in all directions: Majlinda and her two sons went one way and she went another. They stopped at a place that used to be an Albanian coffee shop, where they found three other Berisha families. When Majlinda and her sons arrived, Mrs. Berisha saw that her 11 year-old son Altin was bleeding. “The Serbians were shooting at my children while they were running away,” she said. Altin told her that they shot him in the hand and leg, but not to worry.
The police arrived soon after and screamed in Serbian that they should go inside the café. She heard one policeman who said, “There will be no Albanians alive. We will eliminate them.” They went inside and sat down. Then Mrs. Berisha said, “they walked in and started shooting us. It did not stop.” Among those who were shooting, Mrs. Berisha said that the one closest to her was Zoran and she believes his last name is something like Popović, who was from Suva Reka/Suharekë. Zoran was a bus driver and spoke Albanian very well.
Mrs. Berisha was near the back of the group, with her son Altin nearby. She was shot in the right shoulder and fell to the ground. There were about 40 to 50 people in the café, mostly women and children, and only four men. Some were still alive, and were not even wounded, among them her eldest daughter Majlinda, and her youngest son Redon. Majlinda said to her, “Mummy, mummy, look at how they’ve killed Herolinda.” Mrs. Berisha saw her 14 year-old daughter Herolinda lying face down on the ground with five to six bullet exit wounds, and flesh sticking out. “She had been such a beautiful girl,” said Mrs. Berisha.
|
|
Mrs. Berisha said that the Serb police must have heard them speaking because they threw something like a handgrenade into the room. Mrs. Berisha saw her son Redon with blood all over him, still holding his bottle of milk. She saw Majlinda and Sebahate, both with half their heads missing. Sebahate’s children, three year-old Ismet and ten month-old Eron, were still alive and were crying. Ismet was calling out asking for water and saying “Mum my leg is hurting.” Eron’s hand was half gone, and there was flesh hanging off of it.
Mrs. Berisha heard the Serb police saying something about placing their bodies into a truck. Her son Altin’s head was close to hers, as well as 37 year-old Vjollca Berisha’s. She told them that they were going to put them into a truck and to act as if they were dead. The Serb policemen then came into the room, and threw some sort of projectile that wounded Mrs. Berisha in the right thigh and killed Eron. Although she did not realize it at the time, Mrs. Berisha was also wounded in the stomach.
The Serb police took Mrs. Berisha’s son Altin and dragged his body along the ground. One of them said that he is still breathing, and Mrs. Berisha said that she thinks that they threw a sort of grenade. She heard Altin make one sound and that was it.
While they dragged Mrs. Berisha’s body by the leg and arm, she kept her eyes closed and her mouth slightly open so she could breath. She remembers one of the men say in Serbian, “Fuck life. What kind of life is this? I can’t handle this anymore.” The one who was dragging her said, “Hurry, hurry. We have got to clean this place.” They placed her body on a stretcher and took two gold chains from around her neck.
Mrs. Berisha landed on a number of bodies in the truck. Sebahate’s body was underneath her. They threw her daughter Majlinda’s body on top. When they finished they pulled the curtain of the truck shut and it started to move.
Mrs. Berisha could not breathe from the smell of the blood and the bodies. She saw her son Altin and called out to him, but then saw that his head was divided. His eyes and mouth were open.
Hearing Mrs. Berisha call out to Altin, Vjollca Berisha raised her head and asked, “Shyhrete, are you still alive.” Her nine year-old son Gramoz was also alive. Vjollca said, “Poor us. There is nothing left to lose for us. They killed everybody.”
After a while, the truck stopped, and Mrs. Berisha heard a woman’s voice say, “My son, did you finish the business?” A man replied, “Yes,” and she said, “Have a nice trip.” Mrs. Berisha and Vjollca recognised the voice of a Serbian woman called Vera, Zoran “Popović’s” mother, whose husband’s name was Laza, and they called her “Vera of Laza.” Mrs. Berisha also thinks that she recognised Zoran’s voice as well.
Vjollca and Mrs. Berisha discussed jumping off the truck, which Mrs. Berisha did in the village of Malsia e Re. “I was so injured that I did not think about it, I just jumped.” An old man saw her fall from the truck and told two young men to run over and put her in a car. They took her to a house nearby. They drove her to another village where she received medical treatment.
Mrs. Berisha had a bullet wound to the right shoulder, grenade shrapnel in her stomach that was surgically removed, grenade shrapnel through her right thigh, and nine other lighter wounds on her legs and one on her back. In 1999, when she made her statement to the Office of the Prosecutor, Mrs. Berisha said that she had a lot of pieces of grenade shrapnel all over her back that was still there, and believed she had more shrapnel in her stomach.
For the next month and a half, Mrs. Berisha was in the Kosovo area. She said that life was difficult, there was very little food, and she moved around a lot to avoid the constant shelling.
On a Tuesday in May, Mrs. Berisha, reunited with her parents, and together with some others set out to cross the border into Albania. That day, Mrs. Berisha said, “was as hard as the day that they killed my children.” They were on a tractor when Serbian police at the village of Bukosh stopped them. There was a lot of shelling and shooting going on around them, confusion and police were yelling. One of the police approached the tractor and asked what they were doing there. They screamed at them demanding money and gold, and asking where the Kosovo Liberation Army was. The police took her uncle, Isuf Kolgeci, who was driving the tractor, together with some of his friends and some young men and women, to the school. They heard a lot of shooting coming from the school and they thought the police had killed them.
A policeman grabbed Mrs. Berisha’s father, who was driving the tractor behind theirs. A young woman pulled out 100 DM and told the policeman to leave Mrs. Berisha’s father alone because she could not drive the tractor. They let him go. On Mrs. Berisha’s truck, one woman paid 100 DM so that they would release her sister. Mrs. Berisha saw a lot of women handing over hands full of gold.
At the Albanian border at Morina, the Serbian police ordered them to hand over their identification cards, and then they let them go through to Albania.
At the end of her statement to the Office of the Prosecutor, Mrs. Berisha said: “The [S]erbians erased history by taking entire families away. They did not even leave photographs of our children. Our men and our children were in their prime and they did not want to die. All our men were educated, the[y] were intellects and so all our children were excellent students. I would like to move back home to Kosovo but not if there are [S]erbians living there”
Shyhrete Berisha testified on 10 July 2002 in the case against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević. In this case, many victims’ testimonies were submitted in written form as an exhibit, and appeared before the Tribunal to answer questions from the accused or the court. Shyhrete Berisha related these events to an investigator of the ICTY’s Office of the Prosecutor in Tirana, Albania, where she had fled to in May 1999. Slobodan Milošević, who was charged with crimes committed in Suva Reka/Suharekë, Kosovo, among other places, died in custody on 11 March 2006, and proceedings against him were terminated.
>> Read Shyhrete Berisha’s full testimony and witness statement