We switched off the TV when we heard knocking at the door. When my friend opened the door, we saw two tall policemen! They had long black beards, black clothes, big scary red eyes, and weapons in hand. Knives were strapped at their waists and their left arms carried badges with Serbian writing. Their appearance was so frightful to all of us! The policemen spoke only a few words. In Serbian language they said, “You have five minutes to leave your apartment. If you don't leave you will not be alive any more."
Panic!! What can someone do and take in five minutes? Where could we go? We couldn't’t go home anymore. My friend chose to go to Montenegro. She had some friends there. I didn't know what to do! Go with my friend in Montenegro? Go to another part of town to hide? My family was in my home town so I would lose all contact with them! I chose to go to Macedonia. I still don't know why. Maybe God called me to take that road!
I quickly grabbed one small bag and ran to the street. There was a little money and my postage stamp collection. I was by myself. I didn't own a car. I had to find somebody who did! I asked couple of people, but they didn't’t have room for an extra passenger. Amazingly, I found one of my cousins who had lived near me in my home town. He explained, "We are three adults and three kids! But, you can come with us." I got in the car as it started running.
So many people were in the street. On one corner a policeman was beating a young man. I saw blood from his nose run down the length of his body. Police stopped anyone with new cars and forced them out of the cars into the street. The police were stealing cars! Both sides of the road had walking women. The handicapped tried to push their own wheel chairs. Tired children cried! Old people plead for help. I never dreamt I would see the new holocaust of middle Europe with my own eyes!
A massive line of cars headed toward the border of Macedonia. Police stopped us in the streets. They demanded identification documents – intending to keep them, not just to establish identities. Then they demanded money for us to continue our trip. Of course everybody gave some money, me too - this saved our lives and the lives of the children. Every village we passed had burned houses and abandoned animals in the street. I was sure I was looking at a Hitchcock movie, not really believing that this was the most critical day of my life! How did my life get to be so out of my own control? I couldn't think about the future; I just wanted to live!
I grew up in very small quiet town in Kosova. Everybody knew everybody. Like me, the majority were ethnic Albanian. There were a couple of Serbian families, but we had lived together peacefully! Even though I am a small woman from a small town, I had always dared to dream big! I attended the University of Belgrade completing coursework in special education, but it was always my dream to get an American master’s degree. Two years after finishing my degree, I traveled to Prishtina, 27 km away from my town, to learn English.
Milosevic became the leader of Serbia at the time I was in Belgrade as student. He first started trying to eliminate all non-Serbian people in Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia and finally Herzegovina. His “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo began slowly in 1991.
First, Albanian children of Kosova no longer had the right to study in their own language. Then he took our only television station. Serbs were hired to replace the Albanians who were forced from their jobs. Most of my peers from school left for Germany, Switzerland, and Austria looking for better lives.
The worst ethnic cleansing began in 1998. Milosevic’s forces began killing men from the villages in my native central Kosova. In September of 1998, Milosevic and Richard Holbrook, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations made a pact that seemed to minimize our plight. February 1999 had one of the worst massacres. Thirty-two villagers in Recak were killed! Most were very old. Their heads were cut off. Some of the victims were shot in the back at very close range.
America and the United Nations tried to negotiate peace. They used sanctions for a couple of months but with no results. It seemed Milosevic only understood the language of weapons! NATO began attacking Serbian bases on March 24.
On March 31, 1999 I was in the capital of Prishtina working for a British organization called OXFAM. I felt a world away from my family! That morning I had a wonderful dream of flying to America! It was so pleasant - so real, but upon opening my eyes the nightmare of my reality returned. I was living in a war! Alone in Prishtina, my situation there was getting worse each day! I worried about my family living in a part of Kosovo where there was so much killing!
I was living with a friend, her two children, and three other people in an apartment. Looking from the window, I saw a nice sunny day – a good to take a walk and play outside with my friend’s kids. However, we were unsure of what the next minute might bring outside the safety of the apartment walls. The need of milk for the children eventually outweighed our need for safety, though. My friend and I went outside to join the long mandatory food line. While waiting we couldn’t talk, fearing our speech might allow others around us to discover our Albanian ethnicity. If uncovered, we knew we would not receive the milk and bread that was the expected reward for only Serbian line-standers. All markets were now in the hands of the Serbs!
Our eyes heard more talking than our ears! The silence was talking! So many of my people had already left town! Our hour of waiting in line earned us only one liter of milk and one loaf of bread, but we felt lucky to get that. We returned home safely. We fed the children, but the adults had the smallest of breakfasts - just enough so our stomachs weren’t completely empty! We tried to distract our grumbling bellies by turning on the television to watch the news.
That was when the policemen arrived at our door. Control of my life was no longer mine. My big dreams of this morning had vanished into the smallest hopes of just living!
It was 4:00 p.m. as the seemingly-still line of cars approached the Macedonian border. Still in a state of disbelief, I looked at the village we were passing. So many houses were burned down. I could hear the call of cows pleading for somebody to come and take their milk but nobody was there to help. In a grassy meadow a lone horse and her baby were eating together, not understanding what was going on. In the mountains I could see a little snow looking deceivingly fresh and clean.
Suddenly a tremendous boom sounded! Everyone turned their heads to see what had happened. The horse that was eating a couple minutes before was now just couple of pieces of burning meat. The horse had stepped on a land mine.
Its colt ran away as fast as it could, and we knew there were mines everywhere around us! We became very fearful of walking no matter how slow the line of cars was! We decided to stay in the car and not move! No bathroom stops – no stretch breaks for the children!
Four o’clock in the afternoon, in March, in the mountains - it was getting cold! I looked to the blue sky and tried to ask God, “Where is my family? How is my old dad? How is my mum? Does she have her medicine? How is my sweetheart, Rinas? How are my two angels Rina and Deniz?” I had so many questions without answer.
My stomach was empty, but there was no food to make it full! I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but there was no chance – no peace. Outside, police were beating somebody again. I could hear the beating go on and on. The police were mad because of the NATO planes that were flying overhead. They were beating a man while asking with screaming voices, “You asked for NATO, now you have it…. Call NATO for help…. Where is your Clinton now? Why is he not coming to help you?”
After 13 tortured hours of waiting near the border, we crossed into Macedonia. I am so grateful to the Albanian community of people who had prepared bread and some Sprite for new refugees. It tasted better than any bread I had ever eaten!
My cousin drove deeper into Macedonia to visit an Albanian family there. I felt that I should be near the border so I might be able to get information from my family. My cousins wanted to stay in the village where we had stopped, so I rode a bus back to Stakovec, the first camp near the border. A humanitarian agency gave me a bed and told me to sleep with another family. I had never seen them before in my life! It was hard to sleep in that tent, but I was safe!
This was the end of my longest day, but not the end of my adventure. Life in the camp was hard, but after one week I started to work again for OXFAM again like I did before my flight. I found my family in Macedonia after 6 weeks of searching. Miraculously, all of them were alive, but we lost everything of material value in Kosova. With the help of an international migration organization my family decided to start a new life in the United States. All 14 of us came to Nashville, not even knowing where Nashville was. I am glad our pilot knew, though.
Here we work to forget our past and our terrible memories of war. We found here what we were looking for – love from many sources, the right to work and to study, and nobody will ever again beat us or kill us just because we are Albanian! March 31, 1999 was a day of nightmare, but in the years since then the reality-nightmare from the end of that day has been transformed into a realization of the dream I had experienced at the beginning of that day. Was it just instinct or God who called me to Macedonia during my five minutes of decision time? I may never know, but that choice made my dreams of attending school in America come true!
P.s Ky tregim eshte ngjarje e vertet,dita kur une e lash Kosoven !
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