The boy whose mother was massacred in front of him

Julius Strauss reports from Gornje Obrinje in Kosovo on the fate of a little Kosovo Albanian boy whose family was murdered in front of him by Serb paramilitaries.

1 November 1998

As the first rays of dawn began to filter over the rolling hills of central Kosovo on September 26, they brought with them the promise of a beautiful day. Unusually for the region the dry, sunny weather had held out late into the year. The cooler mornings gave just a taste of the harsh Balkan winter to come but were nevertheless a refreshing change from the pounding dusty heat of the summer.

For the women and children of the Deliu family, packed into a small shelter made of branches and string and covered with plastic sheeting, the good weather was a blessing of sorts. The incessant sounds of shooting and mortar rounds had made the children skittish and the women were happy to get them out into the open air while they cleaned the camp. Five-year-old Besnik Deliu went to play on the edge of the camp with his two little sisters and a cousin.

Without the men around, the women were nervous and they slept only fitfully as the background sounds of war crept into their sleep. There were rumours that Serb forces were attacking the villages but, hidden away in the woods, they were more concerned for the fate of their husbands and sons still trying to protect the family houses than for themselves.

Little did they know, a mixed Serb unit of paramilitaries and police had quietly crept into the outlying hamlets of Obrinje from the north while the scant village defence were guarding the roads from the south.

The first person the Serbs found was 63-year-old Ali Deliu. Too old to fight he had stayed behind to look after his cows. They threatened and beat him and told him to take them to where the family was hiding. Under pain of death, he led them the one-and-a-half miles to the women and children.

For the Kosovo Albanians there world was about to change forever.

The fighting in Kosovo had begun in March. Since the 1980s nationalist Serbian rule had nurtured Europe's last apartheid state in the southern province which was more than 90 percent ethnic Albanian. Albanians had been driven out of their jobs. Those brave enough to protest were dealt with brutally. Riot police beat student demonstrators, political leaders were jailed and human rights officials subjected to arbitrary arrest, torture and even death.

In response to the oppression a shadowy organisation - later to be known as the Kosovo Liberation Army - began to crystallise among the Albanians. It gained especially popular currency in the central Drenica area, a region with strong traditions of independence.

In the spring of 1998 the underlying tensions exploded into open conflict. On March 5 Serbian special police responded to ambushes on police cars, killing more than 60 Albanians in one day. The Albanian guerrillas counter-attacked and seized huge swathes of territory.

Throughout the summer the two sides skirmished. But whenever the Albanians engaged the Serbian police and army forces head-on they were forced to retreat in the face of superior fire-power. Their submachine guns were all but useless against tanks, helicopters and heavy artillery.

Besnik was too young to understand the politics. For him the travail of living under the Serbian regime was that his father was gone for long periods to the west to earn a living. When the war came it meant shooting and shelling from a Serbian base two miles across the fields and sometimes a period in the woods, living under plastic sheeting with his mother, little sisters and cousins. Any sense of adventure was eroded by the crushing boredom and restless fear as the family waited until it was safe to return home again.

The house in Obrinje where Besnik's family lived was cozy and vibrant. According to the tradition of Drenica, which survives on small-time cattle farming and money from relatives working abroad, the home was shared by the extended family.

When Besnik's father Enver was home, he lived in one room with his wife, Luljeta, Besnik and his two little sisters, Liridona, a mischievous three-year-old, and Arlinda, who was only 13 months. In the other rooms were Enver's two brothers Adem and Ymer, each married and with children, and in a separate room the grandparents.

Besnik's maternal grandmother Hava lived in nearby Trdevac and used to visit the family often. "Besnik was a very good boy," she remembers. "He was always very clever, very clean and considerate. He loved the life of the country, the cows and the fields. He would often say with some importance: now we will go and work in the fields."

In many ways Besnik behaved like a much older boy. When guests arrived and were ushered into the Oda, a separate building traditionally used for visitors and special occasions, he would sit politely next to them and ask after their families and health or listen to their stories.

His best friend was his 10-year-old first cousin Jeton, the eldest son of Ymer, who lived in the next room. The boys played football together, hide-and-seek and other games but their particular love was for their bicycles. Together they would ride around the farms, peddling furiously to keep the wheels turning in the muddy lanes.

If Besnik was cared for a little more than the other children, nobody blamed his mother Luljeta. Her first-born, a girl, had died as a baby and when a boy was born soon after, she was delighted. "May he live long with the name of Besnik," Ymer, his elder uncle, had pronounced, firing two bullets into the air in a traditional ceremony to name the baby boy.

"Besi was always a bit special," Hava said. "He had two eggs with his soup for breakfast and while we washed him we would heat his towel by the fire to make sure he didn't get a chill." When his sister Liridona was born two years after him, the two children became very close. Liri, as he called her, adored her older brother and when given a present or an apple from a neighbour always asked for something extra to take home for him. "They loved each other very much," said Hava. "It was a happy childhood for them. The family had a little money from abroad. The children had more toys than most and all the signs were that they would grow up to be fine adults."

Then the war came. The men sent their families into the woods, reasoning that if the Serbs overran the area they would spare the women, children and old if there were no men of fighting age with them.

Throughout the summer the family moved around. Somehow their small homestead survived successive offensives even though some of the houses were pockmarked by mortar shells. Each time the fighting in the area died down the women and children returned to their village.

"They were very difficult times," Hava said. "The family was under great stress. But Besnik understood that in the absence of the family's menfolk it was his duty to look after his two little sisters."

By the autumn, the family must have thought they would see the year out safely. Hundreds of villages the length and breadth of Kosovo had been burnt by the Serb forces. The western world had threatened but done little to halt Belgrade's war machine.

Three hundred thousand refugees, more than a tenth of the province's population, had fled their shattered homes and were living in the open or with friends and relatives in the towns.

But worse was to come. On September 26 a band of Serb paramilitaries swept out of their base in Likovac, barely three miles to the north and descended on Obrinje like a hurricane.

As Ali reluctantly led them through the woods that fateful morning they caught the entire Deliu family at unawares. Ali was the first to die. A Serb hit him hard on the head with a blunt instrument. Then they set about the rest of the family.

It was two days before the bodies were discovered. At dawn on Monday, Besnik's uncle, Ymer, ventured down to the shelter to check on the family and take some apples he had picked for his mother Hamide. He found an orgy of death.

Hamide, Ymer's 60-year-old mother and Besnik's grandmother had been beaten and stabbed to death. Ymer's 30-year-old wife Lumnije was dead too, slashed at the back of the neck. His four-year-old daughter Menduhije had been cut repeatedly, her ponytail chopped off and stuffed into her mouth.

His 10-year-old boy Jeton was cut from mouth to ear. "When I found my boy, it was 11 minutes to six in the morning," Ymer said. "I took his watch and I wear it. It was covered in his blood. I will always wear it."

The family of Adem, Ymer's younger brother, had fared no better. Adem himself was killed in the village. His 25-year-old wife Mihane died in the wood. Her intestines were out and her skirt pulled down. The body of her son Valmir, only 18 months old, lay blood-spattered nearby.

Luljeta, the 28-year-old mother of Besnik was dead too. She was eight months pregnant, "in her moon" as the Albanians say. She had been hit on the head and her unborn baby stabbed where it lay in her stomach. Altogether Ymer found the corpses of another nine relatives lying nearby: aunts, uncles and cousins.

There was only one apparent survivor: Ymer's six-week-old daughter Diturije. She lay smeared in blood in the arms of his dead wife. Only when she opened her eyes and looked at him, did he realise she was alive. In a state of deep shock, Ymer picked her up and walked for two hours to the nearby village of Trstenik, oblivious to the fighting around him.

Besnik, his two little sisters and Ymer's only other child, three-year-old Albert, had disappeared. As it later turned out, Besnik was probably the only witness to the massacre.

Piecing together the story of Besnik's life and those fateful days was not easy. Of the people who shared the camp in the woods he was the oldest left alive. Of his sixteen-strong household, only Ymer, the uncle who found the bodies and had taken charge of the household and, was left to talk with.

The first time I met Besnik was a week after the massacre in the house of his dead mother's family in the tiny village of Trdevac. He was nervous, shy and scared of strangers. Wearing a small scruffy sweat-shirt with Harley Davidson emblazoned on it, he cut a pathetic figure.

His father, Enver, was still in Slovenia where he works illegally as a builder. He is still there today as it is unsafe for him to cross the border back into Yugoslavia.

Ymer, quite sensibly, had forbidden any journalists from questioning the surviving children. Besnik was in any case in no fit state to talk. Despite an evident pride, his lip quivered sometimes as if he was about to cry and he avoided eye contact. But I visited Ymer and the family several times over a period of weeks between other assignments and slowly a relationship of trust developed.

They were difficult times. One day Ymer took my translator and me to visit the small, sad plot of land where he had buried the bodies of his relatives. It was the first day of an official cease-fire. The Serbs, barely a mile away, opened up with machine guns and mortars. Terrified, we spent half an hour running for our lives amid the sounds of exploding shells.

Some of the roads were mined. Only a mile from Ymer's house the wrecked body of a Toyota Land Cruiser still shows where a Red Cross car hit an anti-tank mine. One of the doctors aboard died. Other times we were turned back or harassed by the Serbian police at a checkpoint that officially no longer existed. Once a warning shot was fired close to our car.

Before long I too became protective of Besnik he grew to trust me. He was especially fond of my translator, a young Albanian woman who had a way with children. Although I never questioned him directly slowly a story began to emerge.

The day of the massacre Besnik was at the camp when the Serbs attacked. He must have witnessed at least part of what happened there as he has described the killing of Ali, the uncle. Somehow he escaped into the woods with the three others as their tiny cousins were slaughtered. Nothing more is known of that day. Relatives hope that Besnik never saw the butchered body of his dead mother. But bloodstains on his pullover when the children were next seen mean that he had probably been hugging somebody's dead body. We don't know whose.

What is certain is that by the next morning the four children had been found by Serbian police and taken to a house in the village. "We can only assume that the policemen who found them were better men than the others," Hava, the grandmother, said. But the ordeal was not over. In the same house was Shehide Hisenaj, a 53-year-old lady from the village.

She described what happened: "First they brought bread and milk and told us to eat. But we couldn't. Then the interrogation began." They beat and killed a woman and her husband. The man was hit repeatedly with a shoe until his face was a bloody mess. By the time they finished with off he was too battered to stand.

For the children, who were forced to witness these events, it was a sore trial. They tried clinging to Shehide's dress but she too was panicked. "They're going to kill me too," she told them as they pleaded with her not to leave them alone.

The baby, Arlinda, cried: "Mummy, mummy, mummy." When the police left Shehide ran to her house only to find the butchered body of her husband Rustem in the garden. He was 73. "He had been eating an apple when they killed him. He was stabbed and bloody everywhere." The children clung to her hysterically.

It was another day before they were finally rescued by Ymer and taken to the mother's family in Trdevac. When they had their bloody clothes removed, the family discovered that 13-month-year-old Arlinda had received a fragment of shrapnel in her leg. For two days the children slept.

Since the massacre a month has now passed. On Ymer, for so long a rock of support to the survivors, the strain has finally begun to tell. For weeks he refused to shed even a tear. But in the end the burden was too much to bear. I spoke to him several times. Once he said: "When I see other families return to their homes, I am happy for them. But for me there is a great sadness too. There is no one to go back to. They are all dead." It was an emotional admission from a deeply private man.

As for Besnik and his sisters, the first two weeks after the massacre were very difficult. They received no aid or medical help from outside. Each night when the sounds of shooting and shelling came from nearby villages Besnik would stare blankly out the window.

Hava, the grandmother, who along with two aunts now brings up the children, said: "We did our best to protect them. We talked loudly and sang to drown out the noise of the explosions. But we had no electricity. If we had we could have played records."

The smaller children quickly overcame the shadow of those terrible days. Each time I visited they seemed more animated and happy. But for Besnik, the struggle is only just beginning. Only this week he told his grandmother that he was worried the police would return and they would have to go back into the woods.

There were no toys. Everything including Besnik's beloved bicycle was burnt when the Serbian forces torched the old house. "He was a great cyclist," his grandmother said. "He didn't need stabilizers or anything." So we bought him a bicycle. Also some Lego and dolls for the little ones and some food for the family. It seems to have helped.

Ymer and other surviving relatives have now officially begun receiving condolences, a tradition in which relatives and well-wishers visit the bereaved family and talk over the lives of the lost ones. Albanians call the ritual which last for many "saving the head," a reference to its therapeutic effect.

I still had a favour to ask Ymer and it was to be a difficult one. "Ymer, do you have any old family photographs? Any of Besnik?" I put the question. He nodded and began to search through a bundle of family snaps, all that had been saved from the burnt house.

As we sat in the freezing cold in one of the only rooms in the village that had not been destroyed, Ymer searched the familiar faces. Outside the rain fell, turning the muddy lanes into a quagmire. Softly he began to weep. The hard men of the hills sitting with us in the room and smoking cheap cigarettes sat in silent respect. "Nobody knows what happened that day you know," he said. "Only Besnik... and the Serbs... and God."