‘People were screaming. They were being beaten. They screamed until they died’ , is how survivor Rame Shabani remembers the massacre in Reçak, Kosovo. He hid in a hole in the forest for hours. Capture by the Serbian police would have been a death sentence; Serbian security forces murdered 45 Albanians that day and the next, 15 and 16 January 1999.
Independent observers from the OSCE described the village after the massacre: people shot in the back, shot between the eyes, or beheaded. The Serbian investigation categorised the villagers as ‘terrorists’ – every single victim, be they a pensioner or a 12-year-old, man, woman, or child.
At the same time, peace talks were being held in France. The delegation from Kosovo signed the peace treaty, the Serbian delegation refused – again. After many more massacres, after ten years of Milošević’s wars of aggression against Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia, and after ten years of ignoring sanctions and international pressure, NATO ended Milošević’s war of aggression against Kosovo in 1999 with a military offensive.
Thousands of victims of the war in Kosovo were trucked away and buried in mass graves within Serbia. Over 1600 people remain unaccounted for.
Remembrance culture also means understanding why it is impossible for Kosovar Albanians to live in a country whose government wanted to destroy them, whose police killed and raped them, and whose capital is a mass grave containing the corpses of their families.
Serbian nationalists continue to deny and trivialise the Reçak massacre and other massacres to this day. After decades of oppression, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. As investigations into the events had been controlled and hampered by Serbia up to that point, much of the evidence had already disappeared. None of the murderers involved in the Reçak massacre has yet faced justice.
