[ALBSA-Info] Letter From Suva Reka-NEWSWEEK

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

Letter From Suva Reka
The burned-out houses have been rebuilt and the stores have reopened. But for 
the survivors of one of Kosovo’s most brutal atrocities, the suffering is far 
from over.

By Rod Nordland
NEWSWEEK

At first glance, it was heartening to see how much things seem to have 
returned to normal in Suva Reka, the town that experienced Kosovo’s most 
brutal and concentrated series of massacres more than two years ago. Of the 
8,000 persons believed massacred by Serbs during the war in Kosovo, 506 were 
killed here and in surrounding villages in an orgy of bloodletting coinciding 
with the beginning of NATO’s bombing campaign.    

ON RESHTAN ROAD, where the Berisha family suffered particularly severely, 
losing 49 members across three generations, the remaining Berishas have 
returned and rebuilt most of their burned-out homes. The last time I had been 
on Reshtan Road, in June of 1999, there were still Serbs prowling the 
neighborhood and NATO troops had not yet secured it. The evidence of the 
atrocity was still fresh, coinciding with witness accounts I’d already heard: 
the charred remains of the men, executed and then burned; the splattered 
blood and spent shell casings.

It started behind one of the Berisha family homes, the one they had rented to 
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), where the 
first seven to die were lined up against a wall and gunned down. The house 
was gutted and partially torched. Now that house, and most of those nearby, 
has been thoroughly restored. Once again it is rented to the OSCE, earning a 
tidy income for Xhelal Berisha, a primary school music teacher who by dint of 
survival is, at age 44, the de facto family head. The bus station across the 
street is filled with buses coming and going. Stores in the mall have 
reopened. You have to look hard to find any evidence of a recent war. Only 
the Calabria Restoran, the coffee shop-cum-pizzeria where the Berisha women 
and children were massacred, has been left in the same ruined state as after 
the grenade and machine gun attack that finished most of them off. Some 
flowers are piled on the debris; nearby a pyramid-shaped monument is being 
built to commemorate the victims.  

All is far from normal, though. The massacre left a deep gash in this family 
where grandchildren and nephews and nieces should have been. It has set one 
surviving family member against another in bitter disputes that remain 
unresolved. In a sense, the Berisha massacre continues to claim more victims. 
Against that backdrop, the news that their particular massacre has been added 
to the bill of particulars against Slobodan Milosevic is not something that 
gives anyone in Suva Reka much consolation. They have followed the recent 
series of revelations about the refrigerator truck Serbs used to take the 
exhumed bodies of the Berisha women and children in a postmortem odyssey 
across Serbia, searching for a place to hide them from the world’s view. But 
mainly the family is focused on how soon they might get the bones back so 
they can prepare the bodies according to Muslim rites and bury them properly. 

They have no doubt at all that the bodies in the refrigerator truck, later 
buried in the Belgrade suburb of Batajnica, were theirs. Among their victims 
were six children under the age of five (Redon, 2, Eron, 1, Ismet, 2, 
Doruntina, 2, Genc, 4, and Granit, 2), the same number as reportedly were 
among the corpses from the truck. Another of their victims is Lirija, 26, who 
was eight months pregnant, and searchers have found the skeleton of a mother 
and fetus of about that age among the dead. 

Among the survivors, most of whom escaped because they happened to be away at 
the time of the tragedy, the news is mostly not good. In the 13 months after 
the Berisha massacre on March 26, 1999, the three patriarchs of this closely 
inter-knit clan all died of heart attacks and other diseases. Those three 
brothers, Faiq, Vaseli, and Rasim, lost most of their sons and nearly all of 
their grandchildren. When Xhelal’s father Faiq took to bed, he asked his son 
to nail up pictures of his three murdered sons where he could see them. “His 
last words were, he died calling out the names of his boys,” says Xhelal. 
“There’s no doubt at all that my father and his brothers died of broken 
hearts.” And the two women who survived the actual massacre, their bodies 
full of shrapnel, still struggle to stay alive, emotionally and physically. 
“Why didn’t I die? Why am I the one to survive?” asks Vjollca Berisha, 38, 
who with her son Gramos, managed to roll off the truck taking the victims to 
a mass grave.

The Berishas are hardly in a forgive-and-forget mood toward their former Serb 
neighbors. The prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, in the thinking of the war 
crimes tribunal, may individualize the guilt to the person most responsible 
for what happened in Kosovo and make it possible for ordinary Albanians and 
Serbs to once again live together. But it will be a long time before that 
makes much of an impression in Suva Reka, which, once comprised of 10 percent 
Serbs, now has none.

“I’m not interested in Milosevic,” says Halid Berisha, whose brother Geshar 
was among the victims. “Someone did the actual killing and he should be 
tried. It’s not Milosevic’s fault, it’s all the Serbs’ fault. If someone 
ordered me to kill somebody I wouldn’t do that.” Between Vjollca Berisha and 
Shyrete Berisha (the other woman who jumped off the truck) and non-Berisha 
neighbors who watched the massacre in their homes, there is no shortage of 
people who witnessed the killings. But the arrests of those directly 
responsible would still not be enough for many of the Berishas. “There were 
1,200 Serbs who put uniforms on here, many of them our neighbors, and there 
were only 2,000 Serbs in the entire district,” says Halid. “And now the [NATO 
KFOR] authorities are telling us they all have to come back.” Vjollca’s 
perspective is less vengeful, and more personal. “Every time I read in the 
paper about the bodies in Belgrade, I know they’re not alive but I still have 
this hope they’ll find them.” The body of her husband, Sedat, was found not 
far from her house. But her children, Dafina, 15 at the time, and Drilon, who 
was then 13, are among the missing Berisha women and children. She never 
actually saw them die, and still feels guilty at jumping off the truck with 
only Gramos, her youngest, who is now 10. She knows Drilon was on the truck; 
she saw him shot but doesn’t know if he died.

Last week, The Hague’s investigators were back in Suva Reka, rechecking facts 
and taking additional testimony from witnesses. As one of the survivors who 
saw the killers up close and knew them personally, Vjollca’s testimony is 
likely to be a key part of the case prosecutors make against Milosevic in the 
Berisha massacre, and against the actual killers if they’re ever tried. For 
such an important witness, her life remains hard. Unable to rebuild the 
burned-out family home, Vjollca lives with her sister-in-law in a two-room 
apartment in Suva Reka that shelters nine people. There are still pieces of 
shrapnel in her body from the grenade blast, and she suffers from severe 
headaches. Gramos is with her, and doing well after a difficult time 
initially. 

While they were in hiding from the Serbs and recovering from their wounds, 
Vjollca and Gramos stayed with distant cousins hidden in a rural hamlet. She 
worried that something had happened to his tear ducts because he was unable 
to cry. Then, after NATO forced the Serbs out and life returned somewhat to 
normal, he began to cry and could scarcely stop. It went on for months. 
“Sometimes he cried so hard that his nose bled,” Vjollca says. Finally it 
stopped and he went back to school. “The first day [my son] said, ‘It’s such 
a long way, will you be here when I get back?’” she recalled last week. “He 
said, ‘Mommy when I get home I want you to open that door, I want you to be 
the first person I see.’” Now she worries because he steadfastly refuses to 
talk at all about what happened, or about his father and siblings before the 
massacre. “My daughter in July will be 18 years old. Every day I’m seeing her 
friends, they’re going to school, leading normal lives. I see the friends of 
my son Drilon, of my husband, and on the one hand I’m happy when I see them, 
I want to hug them, but on the other hand I want to cry.” 

For her friend Shyrete, the other survivor, it’s even worse. All four of her 
children and her husband were killed. She has 11 pieces of shrapnel still 
lodged in her body, and is in and out of hospitals in Italy, where she lives 
with a sister. She wanted to come back to the home she had lived in with her 
husband and children before the war, the one that was later—and is 
still—rented by the OSCE. “She had nothing left at all, all she wanted was to 
be in her own home with the memories of her children around her,” says 
Vjollca. But when Shyrete got there, she discovered that her brother-in-law 
Xhelal had rented it again. He claimed ownership on the grounds it was his 
father’s before it was his brother’s. By Albanian Muslim tradition, property 
passes down the male bloodline—not to wives, he said. Shyrete claimed that 
under Yugoslav law, it was her home. The dispute is now in Kosovo’s renascent 
court system, and it has left a bitter legacy of misunderstanding among the 
family’s survivors.

 “I’m very sorry about all this dispute,” says Xhelal. “We wanted Shyrete to 
come back and to live with us in our house.” During the war he had vowed that 
he and his wife would try to have another child and give it to Shyrete to 
rebuild her family. They weren’t able to, but instead, Xhelal says he told 
Shyrete he could give her one of his boys. He has three sons, aged 16 to 10. 
“Choose whichever one you want and he will be your son,” he told her. But all 
she wanted was her own house back, and she left Suva Reka in a fury, vowing 
to return only if she regained the house. “I said she could have one of my 
sons and I heard that she said, ‘I would rather live with a cat.’ I don’t 
care what she’s said. There’s always a place for her here. We keep telling 
her, ‘Come back here and stay with us, you should be with us.’” It just 
doesn’t make sense for her to live alone in such a big house, and anyway it 
was his father’s, not hers, he says. 

Shyrete’s family has a different version. “When she came back from Albania, 
they said to her, ‘Your children are all dead, there’s nothing for you here 
now.’ She said, ‘But I’m a Berisha now,’ and they said ‘Go from this place,’” 
recalled her mother, Sabrie Shala. Other family members said Xhelal’s offer 
wouldn’t mean much, since both his son and Shyrete would be living under his 
roof. And, added one, “that would mean his son would inherit the house.” 
Meanwhile, he gets the rent from the OSCE. (Xhelal says the agency hasn’t 
paid him in a year, while the dispute is in the courts.) 

 Xhelal seems as sad as Vjollca when he talks about all of this. The deaths 
of their brothers and sisters, cousins and nephews and nieces, grandparents 
and grandchildren, is still, nearly two-and-a-half years later, on everyone’s 
minds. “There isn’t a minute that goes by that we don’t think about it,” he 
said. “Sometimes we say, ‘Why didn’t we die so we don’t have to stay alive 
and suffer?’” But the bitter dispute with his sister-in-law often seems to 
overshadow everything else, even the trial of Milosevic and the discovery of 
the truck that carried the Berishas’ bodies. “This too,” says Xhelal, “is the 
fault of the Serbs.” That, at least, is one thing the Berisha family can all 
agree on.