 | Testimony of horror |
| Ismet is eleven years old. He was escaping from his village with his family. They were all on the trailer of a tractor when, a few kilometres from the border between Kosovo and Albania, they met a Serb patrol. Ismet's mother was dragged down from the trailer and her throat slit before the eyes of her husband and children. Then one of the soldiers approached the trailer, laden down with people and the few things they had managed to carry away, and threw a hand grenade into it. The explosion killed Ismet's father and a cousin, and he himself was wounded in the face; he will carry the signs of this horror throughout his life. He was 18 months old, the tenth of eleven children. When the family arrived at the refugee camp "Kukes Two" it was 11.30 at night; they had walked for five days, 150 kilometres in the rain and cold. He didn't make it, he died of privation. The doctors were only able to corroborate the death and fill out the death certificate. In the confusion of the innumerable arrivals of that night, they can't even remember his name. He was one of the many nameless children who have died as a result of the ethnic cleansing. "...we heard the aeroplanes and then the explosion of the bombs along the column made up of tractors and cars escaping towards the Albanian border - recalls Faze Gela, 52 year old - my daughter Valentina, who was 18 years old, was badly hit and called out to me ‘mama, mama,' she cried. Then the Serbs arrived. They took the dead and the wounded and put them all together. I told them that my daughter was still alive, but they sent me away." The doctors are still asking themselves how his heart managed to survive the fatigue of the journey. In fact, when Shaquiz, 20 years old but only looking about 15, arrived at the refugee camp, they immediately deduced, from the almost violet colour of his skin, the serious heart malfunction which had been treated up till then as a skin disease. He was immediately sent to Italy and urgently operated. The war, in its brutality, has saved his life. Zabo lives in Italy, in Rome,
The family tells us that he is a hundred years old; he doesn't hear, he is lying on his side on the floor of a stable which the owners of the land have made available, and where numerous families from Kosovo are camping out. He is distracted, pale, weary from all that he has seen and suffered, and from the exhaustion of the journey. Seven days on foot, in the rain and cold, after the horrors experienced with the other survivors from his village. In the same stable is a pair of four-year-old twins with their mother and an older brother. They are from the same village as the centenarian. They managed to escape, along with another family which succeeded in saving one of their children (see photo), afflicted by a serious handicap, by carrying him on their backs for the entire journey. He arrived at the "Kukes Two" refugee camp with a fractured right shoulder. The doctors cannot understand how 15 year-old Javat managed to bear the pain. He recounts how, before letting him go with his family, a Serb had dealt him a sharp blow on the shoulder with the butt of his rifle, saying that now he wouldn't be able to fire against them with the UCK. "They took all the men of the village, and they made them lie on the ground face down. One of the Serb soldiers then approached one of our men and, laughing, said "now I'm going to kill him", and then fired into the air above the head of the prisoner, leaving everyone terrorised. He continued like this, choosing men at random, and then every so often, still saying "now I'm going to kill him", he really did shoot. | |||
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