Massacres of Albanian Catholics, 1999

On August 9, 2006, a Kosovar Albanian Catholic woman, Lizane Malaj, appeared as a witness before the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, in the trial of six Serbian nationalist and Yugoslav leaders, Milan Milutinovic, Nikola Sainovic, Nebojsa Pavkovic, Sreten Lukic, Dragoljub Ojdanic and Vladimir Lazarevic.   Aside from the late Slobodan Milosevic, the six were the highest officials of the Belgrade regime involved in the assault on Kosovo in 1999.   The case is known as Milutinovic et al.

            The testimony of Lizane Malaj recalled her presence in the Kosovo Albanian village of Korenica, west of the major city of Gjakova, on April 27, 1999.   That day, she suffered the deaths of her husband, son, brother, and nephew in an assault on the community by Serbian police, paramilitaries, and soldiers of the Yugoslav army.    The atrocities occurred one month after the commencement of the NATO bombing of Serbia.

I have been to Gjakova many times, as well as to Korenica, and know a great deal about what happened there.  As Mrs. Malaj stated in her testimony, “Korenica is neither big nor small, I would say. It has about 70 houses... We are all Albanian. We are Catholics and some Muslims.”   The wider vicinity of Korenica is overwhelmingly Catholic, and Gjakova itself has one of Kosovo’s largest and most respected Catholic communities.  The Christian Democratic Party of Kosovo is a leading political force in the city today.   But in 1999, because of its history of Albanian patriotism, Gjakova suffered the worst Serb violence of all the Kosovo cities.  .

The paramilitaries arrived in Korenica on April 27 of that year in buses, with red bandanas tied on their heads or as armbands, as described by a local resident, Tom Dedaj.   When the Serbs had completed their raid on Korenica, at least 129 people, and as many as 155, were dead, all unarmed, including women and children.   One survivor said every man in the village over 16 had been killed.  The ratio of victims was approximately the same as that of the living:  90 percent Catholic, 10 percent Muslim.

The inhabitants of Korenica returned there, in June 1999.  The returnees found mass graves filled with bones and hair, although many of the dismembered corpses lay where they had fallen.   In a burned house, limbs and other parts of men’s bodies lay on the top floor. 

When some survivors of the massacre first came streaming into the Catholic church at Gjakova that day, courageous Franciscan Pater Ambroz Ukaj went to a Serb army commander and demanded to know what had happened.   Pater Ambroz was interrogated as to how he knew anything had happened at all, and he replied that women in the village reported the mass arrest of all males.  “I was told to shut up.” Pater Ambroz recalled when I interviewed him. “Then I said that there were injured people in my church. Thank God, I had already sent them to a hospital, because the Serb officer was prepared to take them away.”  

The story of one Korenica villager, Daniel Berisha, 40, is extraordinary.  Berisha had once been a famous Kosovo soccer player, then worked as a driver for the mission in Kosovo of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).   Tom Dedaj recounted that on the evening of the massacre he had found Berisha hiding in the hills with bullet wounds in his leg and burns on his arms and forehead.  Berisha said that the Serbs had come at 7:30 in the morning and separated the men from the women and children.  They gathered the men on the third floor of the Berisha home and a local policeman who Berisha recognized ordered them to turn their backs and then began shooting them at close range.

Berisha said he fell and pretended to be dead.  The Serbs set blankets afire and covered the bodies with them.  After the Serbs left Berisha escaped, although wounded.    The next day, the group hiding in the hills attempted to break out of a Serb encirclement, but they were caught.  Another witness, Flora Merturi, said she saw Berisha beaten to death, but when his corpse was found he also had five more bullet wounds, two in his forehead and three in his chest.         Mrs. Merturi claimed the Serbs had paid Gypsies to bury the dead, with the Catholic and Muslim corpses separated.   Muslim corpses seemed to have deliberately been left in shallow graves, with a hand ticking out of the ground here, a skull half uncovered there.   

Many bodies were unrecognizable, and were buried without identification.   The Serb assault on Korenica was said at the time to be a reprisal for a skirmish in which three local Albanians ostensibly took part, and in which seven Serbs died.  In testimony at The Hague, however, Serb lawyers asserted that continuous fighting was underway between Milosevic’s forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and that the indicated clash had occurred in the nearby community of Meja, with five dead – four Serbs and one Albanian collaborator with them.  Two weeks before the Serb terror invasion of Korenica, on April 4, 1999, the Albanians living there had been ordered to leave their homes for Albania. 

The tomb of Baba Dan, founder of a Sufi or spiritual Muslim community in the village, today contains the bodies of several children killed in the April 27 mass slaying.   Another leading Sufi from Gjakova was killed at Korenica.   Meja was also the site of a Serb massacre of Albanians on the same infamous day, in which 430 adult males were murdered, after they had been forced out of their homes in the Catholic village of Guska and the Muslim settlement of Deva.  They joined a long column or refugees headed for the Albanian border, but in Meja the men were separated out of the column and executed on the spot.   International media reported immediately after the April 27 massacres, that bodies were scattered along the roads.

Aside from the unidentified corpses, many people were missing from the scene of the mass murder.  International investigators estimated that 100 men from Korenica and 300 from Meja could not be accounted for.  When she appeared at The Hague, Lizane Malaj said that the victims from her family had been among those who disappeared from the scene of the massacre.   Their corpses had been removed to Serbia proper and were located in a mass grave at Batajnica, near Belgrade, distant from the original horror.   Mrs. Malaj did not learn of their fate until spring 2004, in the case of her husband, and a year later, regarding her son.  The death of her nephew was not confirmed until the end of 2005.  

Meja also underwent the tragedy of a mis-directed NATO attack which struck a convoy of Kosovar Albanian refugees on April 14, 1999.   Before Lizane Malaj testified at the Hague, on August 8, 2006, Fuat Haxhibeqiri, a Kosovar Albanian Muslim from Gjakova, active in human rights work, was asked in court his opinion of the NATO bombing.  He said, “this is what I think about NATO.  If it hadn’t been for NATO, the Albanians would have continued to be wretched, living under that regime.  Because of NATO, a miracle happened.”   It is because of the miracle of their liberation that Kosovar Albanians, both Catholic and Muslim, remain among America’a best friends abroad.      

The pogrom against Albanians on a single day almost eight years ago, in which Catholics were slain along with Muslim fellow-Albanians, demonstrates both the essential unity of the Kosovo Albanians regardless of religion, and their common suffering at the hands of the Serbs.  It also anticipates the solidarity between Albanians, other Catholics and Muslims, that will reemerge if the United Nations refuses to accept full independence for Kosovo, or, even worse, allows restoration of Belgrade’s control over the liberated territory.

At a recent meeting in London, I was informed of an important effort that, God willing, may help reinforce Albanian interfaith unity in the area where such terrible events occurred.   Franciscans in Austria have donated funds for the reconstruction of the houses in Korenica.    In Guska, a primary school is being reconstructed on the basis of private donations.  The school is named for Pjeter Muqaj, an Albanian Catholic killed at 18 in 1943, while fighting the Nazis.  

During the period of Serb repression from 1987 to 1999, hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians were expelled from the educational and health systems as well as from ordinary employment.  Albanians of all faiths (and some of no faith) organized a parallel school and health system that educated children, mainly in homes, with teachers paid by parents or in food and other in-kind income.  Serb police and soldiers repeatedly harassed the students and staff at the Guska school.

After the NATO occupation of Kosovo, it became clear that the creation of a new and adequate school system was low, if not nonexistent, on the agenda of the international community.  Albanian parents who wanted to transform the parallel system into a legitimate educational system were rebuffed.   Teachers are among the lowest-paid employees in Kosovo, and their representative organization, the Unitary Trade Union of Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Workers (SBASHK), is the most militant labor group in the territory.

The Guska school serves mainly Catholic, but also Muslim children.   The building is dilapidated; it has no indoor sanitation; water is taken from a well, and the only heating is provided by small wood stoves.  Like the rest of Kosovo, the school undergoes frequent electrical power cuts.  Furniture and textbooks are old.   Three computers were donated to the school but without a proper facility for them they must be brought to the school one day per week for use by older pupils.  New texts and notebooks are provided by parents and teachers.  Bread is served to the students twice daily – once in the morning and once at the end of instruction.  The school has no medical service for the children, who this year numbered 136, aged from six to fifteen. 

Of the pupils who attended school at Guska in the 2005-2006 term, 25 lost their fathers in Serbian massacres, and 12 more are orphans.  In addition, of the school’s 12 teachers – 10 males and two females – one instructor lost all the males from her family.    

            Since I worked in Kosovo in 1999-2000, and in repeated visits since, I have frequently criticized the so-called “international community” governing the territory for their neglect of educational improvement.  I believe the school at Guska must be rebuilt; Korenica, Meja and their martyrs must never be forgotten.   But more important, the habit of educating Catholic and Muslim children together is an old one in the Balkans, and especially among Albanians.  The maintenance of this custom will, I think, do much to benefit coexistence between the two faiths.