I took a little break, so good morning all. I’d like to discuss a topic that concerns recent history, as I notice that young people born after 1999 know very little about why the entire civilized world decided to enter war with Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. The story I’m going to tell you today is horrifying, and it won’t be the first time I’m telling it.
Suva Reka
At the university, we mark the Genocide Remembrance Week. Many topics will be discussed, and Jasmin Mujanovic will be visiting us to talk about Srebrenica. Two Serbian filmmakers, Ognjen Glavonic and Tatjana Krsteski, are coming as well. We’re going to watch two films – ‘Dubina Dva’ and ‘Teret’. Both deal with the crime in Suva Reka, in which Serbian police massacred members of Berisha’s extended family, 48 of them. And they did it two days after the start of the NATO bombing of FRY. Their sin was that they rented houses to the OSCE mission.
They came armed in the morning, says Sherita Berisha, who started to run away with her four children aged 2 to 16. They caught her and other members of her family at a pizzeria in the center of Suva Reka, forced them to go inside and threw grenades, finishing off with shootings to the head. Although she tried to protect the youngest child with her body, she didn’t manage to save him. That day, 37-year-old Sherita was left without her husband and four children, and she survived by sheer luck with a couple of other relatives with whom she later jumped out of the truck full of corpses.
Many will say there were crimes everywhere, and it’s true. But now we’re talking about members of the 37th unit of Serbia’s Ministry of Interior who were ordered to go to Suva Reka.
What happened later was even worse. The police hid the bodies, and then after June 1999 transported them to Serbia in refrigerators so that they couldn’t be found by the KFOR forces and the Hague Tribunal prosecutors.
Until Vucic came to power, Serbia tried to cooperate and punish its own people for crimes. One of the refrigerators was accidentally found in the Danube near Kladovo. It belonged to a slaughterhouse in Prizren.
The proceedings were launched and the policemen who killed those people were sentenced to 20 years each in Belgrade. By now, perhaps, they should have been released from prison. Those who are alive. Some of the killers were neighbors and friends of the Berisha family.
Because of these crimes, trials in the Hague were held against Serbian political and police leaders. At one of them, Hisni Berisha was a witness, and said:
“We have souls that are wounded, as 18 children were killed in that tragedy, while the youngest was my 9-month-old grandson Eron. My daughter’s eldest son was three years old, my daughter was 25… I want to point out one thing – that as a 5-grade pupil I learned the poem ‘Krvava bajka’ written by Desanka Maksimovic. I want to ask a question – have the Serbian people forgotten that case, I haven’t and I want to say, just read it again, because the Suva Reka massacre was just like in Kragujevac. I don’t want that to happen to anyone.”
That’s all for today. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM observer and columnist
(The opinions and views of our columnists don’t necessarily reflect the opinions or views of the CdM news team)
