Former survivor of the massacre in Dubrava prison: We were told in prison NATO bombing Serbia tonight

The former survivor of the massacre in the Dubrava prison, the Kosovo Liberation Army invalid Sadik Zeqiri, whenever the 24 March comes, reminds former associates killed at the Dubrava prison and reminds them of the terrible events experienced by Albanian prisoners in Kosovo prisons and Serbia by Serb invaders.

On the 24th anniversary of NATO bombings on Serbian military targets in Kosovo, he has today confessed how they received the information that “NATO will bomb Serbia”.

March 24, 1999, except that it was a long day of our daily suffering, it was also a happy day. Information came to us in the Dubrava prison, by Albanian inmates ordinarians, that NATO will bomb Serbia. We had a great hope that day, that the Albanian people were finally being released, that we prisoners would be released from Serbian prisons. We had great confidence that if NATO bombings began, Serbs would have taken us out of prison”, Sadik Zeqiri relates the 24 March 1999 event, when he was imprisoned in Dubrava.

He shows that in Dubrava there were prisoners from the Peja prison, Prizren, Gjilan, Pristina, Mitrovica, but also from Serbian prisons. “We were sent to Dubrava after talks were started in the Paris Rambouillet in the middle of the Albanian delegation led by the KLA and Hashim Thaci and by Serbia's delegation/Yugoslavia left. From Peja Prison, about 50 Albanian prisoners, on March 15, 1999, sent us to Dubrava. They put us in different wards. Everyone in solitary confinement. My friends and I were placed in the C1 ward on the second floor, in room 36. That's where I was with Adrian Cumnova, Malane Square, Halit Ademiyan, Mustafe Jotane. The C1 ward was to arrest us with limited rights, which means that we were brought to the room, even under the table. The food was mainly brought by Albanian prisoners convicted of various (political) works. When they were given the opportunity, because they usually came accompanied by two and three guards, informed us of what the situation was like outside and what was happening”, states Zeqiri about the events of the shift from one prison to another and the torture that were inflicted on them daily by Serb guards. He shows that they did not know what was going on outside, nor what would happen to them. However, some brief and quick information -- all three or four words about the situation in Kosovo -- was received from time to time.

We usually got the information when the guards started beating the prisoners in the rooms and then these cooks gave us information. For example, the information came that on March 24, 1999 NATO will bomb Serbia has given us prisoner Naser Shporta on the morning of that day. He said with a little voice: Tonight the NATO bombings begin. We who heard it, we're gone. One of us asked Naser who gave him the information. Nasser told us that he has heard Serbian guards and prisoners and that they have begun to remove military vehicles from the fields around the prison. That's all Nasser” informs us of the March 24, 1999, and adds <x2 after we ate that food that was prepared for us prisoners, we started talking about the news we received. After the guards left our facility to send the leftover food to the kitchen near the prison entrance, we began talking through windows with other prisoners about this information. Some had heard the same version, and some knew nothing. It was about 20.00 hours later, perhaps because we had no hours when the bombings in the Pec section began to be heard. Almost all prisoners stayed up all night waiting for the next” bombs.

Zeqiri says he was heartened when he heard the explosion of a NATO bomb. “Our people, the KLA, received the greatest support at the right time. We had hoped that Serbia would surrender within three days after the bombing began, but, unfortunately, they lasted 78 days and we prisoners suffered as many days as we were beaten so many times and killed and slaughtered 130 friends and over 300 were injured during these days and months in Dubrava, until May 24th, when we were taken out and sent to Lipjan, then to Serbia's prisons. Those NATO bombs warned the start of Kosovo's liberation and the end of the captivity of Kosovo and the Albanian people”, says Zeqiri, who, whenever he remembers that day, tears fill his eyes with tears as he reminds of friends killed inside the prison wards and his field.