This post is also available in this language: Shqip Bos/Hrv/Srp
The Kosovo war was almost at an end in early June 1999, as NATO’s campaign of air strikes on Yugoslavia forced President Slobodan Milosevic into withdrawing his troops.
But as Yugoslav soldiers, police units and Serbian paramilitaries prepared to pull out, the situation in the western town of Decan/Decani deteriorated. Local resident Shaban Bruqaj and his family witnessed ethnic Albanians being killed and houses being looted by paramilitaries.
On June 9, after Milosevic accepted the terms of an international peace plan, armed Serbs broke into the homes of the remaining ethnic Albanians in Decan/Decani, robbing them, assaulting both women and men and threatening the women with rape at gunpoint.
“Paramilitaries entered our house,” Bruqaj told BIRN. “They started to beat us. I was afraid they would kill my children. I begged them not to kill them.
“My eldest daughter, then eight years old, had five [Yugoslav] dinars in her hand and she said to them: ‘Take it and don’t kill my father.’ But one of them kicked her and she fell on the ground.”
Bruqaj said that during the days of the fighting, the abbot from the nearby Visoki Decani Serbian Orthodox monastery, Sava Janjic, went to the homes of the remaining Albanians to check they were safe.
Janjic told BIRN that the monastery had been taking care of people seeking refuge since the summer of 1998, both Serbs and Albanians, when the conflict between Serbian police and Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA fighters in the Decan/Decani area erupted. But during the NATO bombing campaign, the violence intensified significantly.
“The situation of Albanian civilians in the city worsened because the police and the army took complete control of the city,” Janjic explained.
The monastery, together with the International Orthodox Christian Charities, an American humanitarian organisation, worked to distribute aid to the locals. “We regularly took care of them,” Janjic said.
Albanians flee
A Serbian policeman in the town of Decani in June 1998 after fighting between ethnic Albanians and Serbian forces. Photo: EPA/STR/MPC.
The Bruqaj family had already encountered violence much earlier in the 1998-99 conflict. In July 1998, when the seven Bruqaj children were playing in their yard in their old home in the village of Isniq/Isnic, two of them were hit by a grenade and badly wounded.
That evening, Shaban Bruqaj and his brother took their families and went to the nearby town of Decan/Decani, to stay at the house of their elder brother. By the time the NATO air campaign started in March 1999, he said that no more than 300 people remained in the town.
One evening in early April, he went to take care of his brother’s cow, which was grazing in the field close to the house, when he heard someone groaning in the bushes.
“I pointed my torch towards the place and I heard a voice saying, ‘Are you Albanian?’ I moved closer and found a young man with a cut hand, covered in blood. He was wearing a KLA uniform,” Bruqaj said.
“The wounds had turned black and started to fester. He constantly kept losing consciousness.”
Bruqaj took him inside the house and found some medicine to treat his wounds. “I kept him a secret from the rest of the family. I helped him recover from his wounds for three months,” he explained. “I cut his nails myself. I helped him wash his hair and face,” added his wife Miradije.
Monks take action
The Serbian Orthodox Visoki Decani monastery in January 2012. Photo: EPA/VALDRIN XHEMAJ.
As the violence continued in Decan/Decani in June 1999, the monks at the Visoki Decani monastery decided to act. “In the midst of the paramilitaries we saw abbot Sava arriving alone in a van. Thanks to God and Sava we survived,” Bruqaj said.
“Sava asked, ‘Who is alive?’ He told us to get in the van and sent us to the Monastery. He asked me to help find the others. We took many people inside the monastery. I also took the KLA guy with me.”
While the abbot was searching for any others, Bruqaj told him about an old woman who lived at the end of the road. “As Sava held her in his arms to put her in the van, a hail of bullets came down around us. But we were not wounded,” he said.
“In total, there were close to 200 of them and we organised food and accommodation,” Janjic recalled. “They stayed in the monastery until the end of the bombing and the Kumanovo Agreement [that ended the war].”
He said that the monks heard that some of them were accused of “going to the monastery, to the Serbs” instead of fighting against Serbian forces. “It was very dangerous for them, but we witnessed that they were just ordinary people, our neighbours who needed help,”
He insisted that the Serbian police and Yugoslav Army troops knew what the monks were doing to help the Albanians and did not oppose it.
After all the remaining families were inside the monastery, Bruqaj said that Janjic told him that he should go to the municipality building and gather up documents and cadastral records: “We took all of them before the municipality building was set on fire.”
Although their accounts of what happened in 1999 generally corroborate each other, at one point in the story, Bruqaj and Janjic’s recollections are very different.
Bruqaj said that the day after he brought the documents from the municipality, while the monks were playing with the children, at least 40 paramilitaries entered the monastery. “Sava, Teodosije and other monks raised their hands, saying, ‘You can kill us but not them here.’”
Janjic denied that this happened, however. He said that although Serbian police and Yugoslav Army troops often stopped by the monastery, they never entered with guns or conducted any searches. “No one ever threatened us, nor did any Albanian who found refuge in our monastery experience anything unpleasant from those people,” he insisted.
The monks looked after the Albanians until the first NATO troops, who had entered Kosovo after Milosevic’s forces withdrew, arrived at the monastery, which is now a UNESCO world heritage site.
Miradije Bruqaj said that she hopes that abbot Janjic will never be in trouble in his life, but if he is, she would help him in the same way.
“I would take care of him like my children,” she declared. “He saved us.”
But although the war was over in June 1999, the monastery’s role as a refuge was not. Janjic explained that the monks then had to shelter local Serbs who feared revenge attacks in the absence of the Serbian police.
“About 20 people found refuge in the monastery for several months,” he said. “Those who remained in the city, unfortunately, we learned from a report and from forensic analysis, were mostly killed in the summer of 1999.”