[Prishtina-E] Boy in Yellow Shirt (fwd)

[Etrit Bardhi]

please reply directly. etrit.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 23:22:20 -0500
From: David L. McFarland <dlmcfarland at mindspring.com>
To: support at alb-net.com
Subject: Boy in Yellow Shirt

To anyone in Kosovo,

Thanks for your assistance.  About this time last year, I began to look for a young Kosovar boy that I had seen on television here in the US during the war in Kosovo.  The boy was in a refugee convoy on a highway near Djakovice/Gjakove.
The convoy was accidently bombed by NATO fighters and over 70 people were killed.  The Serbs brought in news media the next day to view the carnage.  The most well know picture probably from the war was the boy pictured on the following web site.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/nato_gallery/victims_default.stm

I ran a program in Alabama to bring historic figures to an Air Force Staff College.  Each year, we also brought about 50 teenagers to get their first rides in light aircraft.  Brig Gen Chuck Yeager participated each year and gave about 50 of the rides personally each year.  One year, I brought two Dutch kids from the Netherlands (6th graders) with the help of Martinair Holland.  I was really touched by the "boy in the yellow jumper" and began search to find him.  I tried working with the K-for US public affairs in Kosovo.  It was just before they left at Christmas and really got no where.  

I sent a message to OMik, and an Icelandic public affairs officer for the UN put me in touch with a Greek-American working for OSCE in Gjakove.  Amazingly, within days he called me and said he had a picture from a local paper of the boy.  He faxed it to me, and I confirmed that it appeared to be the boy.  The name that the newspaper gave Mr. Demetrious Tzotzis turned out to be incorrect.  At first, it appeared that the boys family had all been killed and he had been sent to Belgium to an aunt.  

December 1999 and January 2000 were really bad, and the snow was up to 4 feet deep and the roads were iced.  Tzotzis got a correct name in January.  In February, he made a trip to the village where he thought the boy was.  He had to use a four-wheel drive vehicle.  The tiny village of Pacaj is a few kilometers southeast of Junik near Decani.  It is near the Albanian border between Pec/Peja and Djakovice/Gjakove.  It lies a few kilometers west of the road between these two larger towns.  The boy was there.  One of 8 siblings had been killed and his father had lost a leg.  They were living in an animal shelter, since the Serbians had destroyed the houses.  The boy was still in the clothes in the picture.  He had nothing else.  They were surviving on bread.

Tzotzis took the boy and an uncle into Djakovice/Gjakove and bought him some clothes and fed them.  He also got the Argentinian Military Hospital to give him a physical.  He was very thin but physically healthy.  The impact mentally obviously left him traumatized.  Unfortunately, Tzotzis said that he also had a tough winter and was due to leave.  I think he went to East Timor.  He was my contact.

The boy's name is Mehemet Alija, and his father is Sherif Alija.  The Alija entended family seems to be the main group in Pacaj.  The Serbian paramilitary began their operations around Pacaj and Junik in early April 1999 by kidnapping an Alija elder and taking him to Djakovice.  They tortured him, killed him, and then brought the body back and dumped it in the village.  That is when the Alija family group took to the hills and forests and then to the road south and west to Albania.

I still hope to make contact personally with the boy.  It is purely a humanitarian project on my part.  I am amazed that I got this far with only a picture.  

My goal is first to see if I can reach them by post.  Does it work in Kosovo now?  Any advice that anyone in Kosovo can provide would be greatly appreciated.
By next spring...I might try a trip to Kosovo via Greece and Macedonia...

Thanks for your assistance

David L. McFarland
Lt Col, USAF, Retired
email is   dlmcfarland at mindspring.com