Dusk, 5 in the morning. A group of men knock on the door, ‘Get out of your house, because we’re going to burn it!’ This is how a teenager remembers 27 April 1999.
The men were from the Serbian police force, the teenager and her family were Albanians from Kosovo. No more needs to be said for everyone to realise the horror associated with this day. But unfortunately, so few people know about Serbia’s war crimes against Albanians that it bears repeating over and over again. For that reason, here is of the massacre in Meja.
In the early morning, the Serbian army and police drove into several areas around the village of Meja, looted and burnt Albanian houses, and expelled their inhabitants. They forced the people to the central site of the crime: Meja. There, they robbed them again. The police, the ‘friend and helper’, forced all the displaced people to hand over their last possessions, threatened them, and beat them.
Brothers were separated from sisters, fathers from children, sons from mothers. Men and boys were forced to shout: ‘Long live Serbia! Long live Milošević!’. They were beaten and tortured. They knelt on the ground, driven to their knees by pain or by force, and with their hands tied behind their backs, they were. Murdered.
All of this was reported by witnesses to the human rights organisation Human Rights Watch. ‘The street was full of blood’, recalled one survivor.
At least 377 people were murdered in one day. Months later, when NATO troops came to Meja, they saw piles of bodies thrown on top of each other. They saw corpses with severed heads, other bodies completely dismembered. Scattered objects and broken bones that once belonged to people. People who had fallen victim to the centuries-old dream of ‘Greater Serbia’.
But that was not all: some of the bodies had been packed into lorries and driven to a mass grave near Belgrade.
Only a few of the murderers were brought to justice. The main perpetrator, General Vladimir Lazarević, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The sentence was later reduced to 14 years and after serving two thirds of it, he was released in 2015. Ten years in prison for thousands of stolen years of life.
He received a hero’s welcome in Serbia and now teaches as a professor at the military academy, training new generations of the Serbian army. Please remember this when someone claims that ‘Kosovo is Serbia’ or complains about Kosovo’s necessary independence or the equally necessary NATO mission.
It is too late for the people of Meja and the surrounding villages. But the survivors, deeply traumatised and wounded, live among us in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. They prove that remembrance culture is not a thing of the past.
