Soldiers Rolled Grenades Yelling 'This Is For Blair','This Is For Clinton'
The London Times
March 30, 1999 Sam Kiley
HER face reddened with weeping, her feet raw from the 20-mile forced march across mountains, Shipresa finally broke down when she reached the grim sanctuary of her new home in northern Albania.
Her ordeal sounded like some terrible medieval tale of rape, pillage and brutal tribalism. In reality it happened over the weekend, and at one point she had to dodge Serb soldiers rolling grenades into the refugee crowds yelling: "This is for Clinton" and "This is for Blair".
Shipresa and her family fled with only the clothes on their backs, forced, like tens of thousands of fellow ethnic Albanians from their ancient homeland in Kosovo.
Their nightmare began when her family were denounced as terrorist members of the Kosovo Liberation Army by a neighbour, a Serb who enthusiastically joined in the ghastly ethnic cleansing of their home town and exposed the hiding place where she and 40 family members were concealed.
"The army and police came to the house many times and could not find us. Then our own neighbour showed them where we were hiding. We thought we all would be killed," said Shipresa, a 24-year-old medical student from Peja.
The 15 men in her group, mostly well educated ethnic Albanians, were at first separated from their families. Then, for the Serbs, the fun started.
"They told us they were going to kill all the men. We cried and begged them not to, we fell to our knees, we offered them money. They all just laughed and shoved their guns in our faces," she said through the tears streaming down her face.
The soldiers did not shoot. They just ordered the family to get out of the country and get lost to Albania, she said.
Like many of the other 70,000 Albanians driven from their homes in the biggest humanitarian catastrophe since the end of the Second World War, Shipresa and her family were then forced to walk the 20 miles to the border with Albania, leaving behind centuries of Muslim heritage, their professional lives and in her family's case, their comfortable home.
Their route meant running a gauntlet of Serb checkpoints. At each one, she said, they were threatened, what meagre goods they carried were taken from them. That was the easy part. The real fear was of summary execution, or worse. They told of how they saw young men have their limbs hacked off by laughing and jeering policemen, who then shot them in front of their loved ones at the roadblocks, a brutal reminder of the Hutu extremists in Rwanda.
"People were mad with blood. They seemed clinically insane, psychotic," Shipresa said. The men in her family joined the trek to Albania and were inexplicably spared the initial threats of murder.
But en route, as they tramped alongside tens of thousands of others, they fell victim of a deadly game played by the Serbs with live grenades. Young men, some of whom they knew and had grown up with, yelled: "This is for Clinton" and "This is for Blair", and then rolled grenades into the terrified refugees as they fled on Sunday.
"It was supposed to be the Christian day for religion. But these people were like devils, cold with hatred, sometimes laughing, sometimes yelling insults and throwing stones," she said.
"Three of our men were killed, in three different explosions, as we ran to Albania. As we left our house, they burned it. As it burned, they blew it up, they said that we would never be able to return because there would be nothing to return to," said the devastated young woman, who now owned only what she stood up in, a set of clothes and an anorak.
The scale of the Serb atrocities in Kosovo, which are not possible to verify independently, was given credence by the fact that every refugee in Kukes had a similar story. They told of mass rape, or men being tied up and then immolated in their homes, or random killings, and not a single act of mercy or help from their neighbours.
Shipresa said that in the state-sponsored attempt at the genocide of Kosovo's Albanians, some among the Serb minority - backed by police and paramilitary thugs bussed in from the Serb Republic, where they learnt their skills - had been turned from ordinary civilians into beasts.
"I am now lucky to be alive, I suppose. But what sort of a life can we now expect," she said. Then she turned and ran for a bus which would take her to a temporary home in an unknown village in a country she had never visited. |
