Symbolic remembrance of the crimes committed in Kosovo

26. 3. 2010.

The activists of My Initiative and the Youth Initiative for Human Rights (the Initiative) symbolically commemorated the crimes committed in March and April 1999 over Kosovo Albanians, on 25 March in a street action in Belgrade, at the fountain between the Faculty of Philosophy and the Cervantes Institute.

The activists put up a red carpet in Knez Mihailova. At one end of it, there was a sign in which it was written “Belgrade”, and at the other end “European Union”, while at the middle of the carpet a location was marked which symbolizes Batajnica where, during 2001 and 2002, 709 skeletons of Albanians killed in Kosovo were exhumed from mass graves.

The message of the action is that, on our way to the EU, we need to face the crimes which happened in Kosovo and punish those responsible for the existence of mass graves near the capital of Serbia.

“Some of the passers-by we talked to watched us in wonder when we mentioned mass graves in Batajnica. Many people heard about the mass grvaes, but knew nothing about the crimes which happened in Kosovo”, said activist Nenad Obradovic.

After this action, the activists put up signs on the concrete arch on the Batajnica road at the intersection towards the “13 May” settlement, in which the names of the Suva Reka and Meja municipalities were written, as well as the dates when war crimes were committed in these municipalities. The bodies of Albanian civilians murdered in Meja and Suva Reka in 1999 were transported by trucks to the area of the Center for training Special Anti-terrorist Units “13 May” and buried in mass graves, which was organized by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia.

During the first days of the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav Army and the Serbian Police committed numerous crimes over Albanian civilians in Kosovo. On 26 March 1999, police forces killed 48 persons in a local pizza place in Suva Reka, 46 of which were members of the Berisha family. Two days later, on 28 March, the members of the “Scorpions” unit in Podujevo killed 14 persons from the Bogujevci and Duric families.

The crime was survived, with serious injuries, by five children 6 to 14 years of age. In early morning hours of 27 April, the members of the police and the army performed a massive attack on villages in the Djakovica municipality, with the intention of banishing the inhabitants of these villages. From a refugee convoy in the village of Meja, they separated and killed approximately 384 Albanian men.

Aside from the graves in Batajnica, two more mass graves with the bodies of Kosovo civilians buried in 1999 were found — in Petrovo Selo near lake Perucac. The graves in which more than 800 bodies were found in Serbia were formed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia, in order to cover up the traces of crimes committed in Kosovo.

D.L.