Anniversary of NATO attacks: Confessions of survivors (Photo)

Sokol Morina spent a long and sleepless night on 24 March 1999, the day NATO launched its air strike campaign against Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslav forces.

It was the last time he and his large family were together in the village of Old Chikatova in Drenica, Kosovo, and only hours before learning from the radio that NATO had launched its campaign.

He recalled, in mind how during all that evening, he and his brothers kept on guard in the dark and talked about how to leave the village to avoid the expected arrival of Belgrade troops who began their operations while NATO aircraft dropped their bombs.

In the morning, women and children left for Drenas. The men stayed in the village. We knew our days were numbered,” said Morina, who is now 63 years old and lives in Germany.

The family lived in constant anxiety, hidden in a basement until 17 April, when Yugoslav forces entered the village and took Sokoli, his two brothers and two grandchildren.

It was early in the morning when we were taken to Shavarinat (a hill over the village). There were about 30 men,” he said.

He was in the first row of ethnic Albanian civilians captured, along with his older brothers and saw his older brother Tahiri fall to the ground when the first bullets were fired. Sokoli was turned into a living pit, untouched by the shooting.

He stood in the midst of dead bodies until sunset. When darkness fell, he set out to search for a hiding place and found his other nephew, Petrit, and another cousin, Selman, in nearby hills.

After him, at the scene of his execution, he has a pile of lifeless bodies. His brother Tahiri, 65, and Bahtiri 62, as well as his two grandsons, Florim and Affonym, were among them.

Hidden in the Cave

NATO launched its air campaign against the Yugoslav Army in an effort to force President Slobodan Milosevic to accept the terms of an agreement that had been discussed during most of the previous month in Chateau de Ramboullete in France.

The Kosovo delegation, led by Kosovo Liberation Army political director Hashim Thaci, had accepted the conditions offering the opportunity to end the year of fighting and civil displacement, giving Kosovo Albanians substantial autonomy even though maintaining Yugoslav sovereignty over the disputed territory.

Diplomatic efforts failed, and after warnings to Belgrade to end using its military force in Kosovo were ignored, NATO struck and Yugoslav forces backed off.

In April, Morina and his relatives had been the first from their village to be taken to the execution site in Old Chichitova to be killed.

In late April, about 90 others were taken there in two trucks. Twenty - five children were among them. Thankfully, Veliu, 13, was the youngest.

Morina's brothers' remains were found in 2016 in a mass grave in Rudnica, Serbia. But some of the remains of other bodies remain to be found.

Meanwhile, Morina and his two relatives had been sheltered in a man - made cave a little more than a pile of stones not far from their homes, which had been burned.

We heard when the trucks came in. We heard shots and bodies rolling into the pit,” recalls Morina.

Another village resident, Emin Morina, was left injured in the pit.

We pulled him out of there and put him in a little stone cave. A week later, his health deteriorated, and he decided to go down to the village. The same day he was killed,” Sokol Morina said.

As NATO air strikes continued, about one million Kosovo Albanians were forced to leave their homes and seek refuge abroad or in the cold and rainy mountains of Kosovo.

As the humanitarian crisis deepened, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan expressed “his deep affection for the scale of ethnic cleansing within Kosovo. In an attempt to force the Yugoslav Army to stop its operations, NATO continued its “escalation strategy gradual”.

Meanwhile, the cave in which they were hidden, the three Morinas began fighting hunger.

We found some flour and mixed it with water and salt to make dough. We were fortunate in sunny days because we dried the mixture of flour and water to make it easier to eat. Sometimes during the nights, we cooked a porridge,” remembers Morina.

War wasn't too far.

It was the nights when we heard the explosions from the open between the stones. We were waiting for our death, he said, ”

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No more than 30km from the Old Cyclato in the small town of Fushe Kosovo, Andjelka Cup residence was rocked during the night when NATO bombings hit a military complex near Slatina Airport in Pristina.

“Of course, for us Serbs was another kind of feeling compared to Albanians. It was a moment of despair and uncertainty. A moment of defeat,” said Cup, now 57 years old.

Just two days before NATO began its air campaign, Cup had arrived in Fushe Kosovo from the Bosnian town of Bihac after winning a job at the Yugoslav state railway company.

She said she believed NATO would never intervene militarily.

I spent terrible years in the war in Bosnia. After Bosnia, I didn't think there would be another war,” she said at her post-war house in the village of Caglavica near Gracanica, a municipality of Serbs in central Kosovo.

While her male colleagues were responding to a call for mobilization and joining the army, women and children were leaving the country. But Cup stayed in her office, almost alone.

“at the beginning of the air campaign we were hiding in a basement with our neighbours, then after a few days I decided not to move from my office, no matter what would happen,” she said.

The “Only trains for Blace were functioning,” she added, referring to the route Kosovo Albanians were transporting towards the border point with Macedonia.

I was often told to leave Kosovo, but I didn't want to,” eat it.

On 3 June 1999, Milosevic accepted an international peace plan to end the conflict, and Serbian troops began stepping down to clear the way for a NATO-led multinational force.

But unlike many Serbs who decided to leave, Cup brought her three children to Kosovo three days before Serb forces withdrew.

“I remember that a Serbian police officer at the Merdare border point told me: Where are you going? We're all leaving Kosovo,” she said.

She explained that she was determined not to move again. I was tired of my status moved for years in Bosnia. I didn't want to move anymore. I decided to stay, no matter what happened, she said”

Seeing a Living One

During the NATO bombings in April 1999, Sokol Morina's pregnant wife went to a refugee camp in Macedonia with their four children and from there to Germany, believing that her husband had been killed.

But his uncomfortable shelter in the improvised cave did not end when NATO troops entered and Serb forces fled Kosovo on June 12th 1999.

Morina and his two relatives were hiding until July 13th that year, a month after the war ended.

We heard some voices outside. We thought they were Serb forces. I decided to get out of the cave. We were exhausted and I remember saying to the other two: Let them kill me. ) But I saw children playing in the field,” he said.

It was then that I realized that the war was over.

A week earlier, on July 6, his wife had given birth to a little girl in Germany. Meanwhile, in the village, his relatives had also kept his traditional mourning rituals, thinking that he was among the dead.

Instead, he had survived, but when he left the cave where he had been sheltered for many weeks, it was too late for him to join the celebrations of freedom in the streets. / BIRN

Plakata at the site of the massacre on Albanian civilian population in Old Chikatove/ Drenas.