All they asked for was freedom. What they received in return was a reprimand for having been born - their punishment, Hell on Earth. This is a story of a people who once had lives and families with futures to look forward to, but now all they live for is death.
The persecution inflicted by Serbia’s wicked regime is worse than such a fate as the words of many of Kosovo’s refugees can be heard crying out, ‘I wish I was dead!’
As the toll of executions accumulate, there seems to be no end to this genocide in Kosovo. As many as 150,000 ethnic Albanians have been slayed and as many as 500,000 unaccounted for. It’s not just the homes being ransacked and looted before the massacres take place, but also the Muslim women of their respect and honour by the ‘savage beasts’ of Eastern Europe.
One report told of a Serb general who had rounded up Kosovan Albanian women and put them in a hotel in Pec where they were raped by his soldiers on a rota basis. Rape camps have also been set up by Serbian soldiers for organised sex attacks around the region. One such camp is in southern Kosovo, the area of Djakovica near the Albanian border. Vivid details of the horrors are being reported each day by women and teenage girls. One woman was 7 months pregnant and told of the appalling incident: ‘I thought they wanted to kill me but no, they did not want to kill me. For me it was better to kill me than let me live - I wanted to kill myself.’
Not a single soul has escaped from this crisis unscaved. As many as a thousand Kosovan teenagers - some as young as 14 - have been taken from their families by Serb troops, during the widespread ethnic cleansing, to use as human blood banks to treat wounded Serbian soldiers.
The ‘orphan tribe’ and lost children are also on the increase. Herded into huge foster camps in Albania and Macedonia, tens of thousands of children have been separated from their families, either by confusion or by death. In Macedonia one camp has a list of their names - headed ‘Losted Children’ - but the government there keeps families apart by out-lawing transfers between camps.
It was these very same authorities who brutally herded away 35,000 Kosovan refugees from around the Blace border camp two and a half weeks ago. The speed with which the Macedonian police worked was clearly evident. In the terrible confusion families were split up. At the same time Serb troops drove terrified refugees who had been seeking sanctuary back into their stricken homeland and placed mines around the border to prevent any further crossing. Although the UN is still investigating the whereabouts of 10,000 of the refugees who have not been seen since they were bused out of Blace, we have recently received unconfirmed reports that the US transferred some of them to a base near Cuba. This without even informing NATO or the British. The rest of the missing were pushed out by the Macedonian authorities for the Serb forces to deal with treacherously as they have been doing so.
However, it’s not just Serb forces implementing policies of ethnic cleansing. I have also recently received reports from reliable Albanian sources confirming that the KLA captured Russian soldiers operating amongst Serb troops, assisting them in wiping out ethnic Albainians. Not only are Russians involved in genocide, but are also guilty of ‘beast like’ rape assaults on innocent Muslim women.
This is the price for liberation in a world governed by the unjust, where even cries from the graves can be heard asking for freedom. The upsetting tale of ethnic cleansing is so inhumane, that one could only imagine it to be fictitious. But for the distraught victims, words cannot even describe the horrors of truth, as they have experienced the pain of hurting. Every new page brings more suffering and every new chapter brings more scars in this reality of Kosovo - once a state, now a void where even the dead have no peace.