FATLUM’S TALE

Forty kilometers away from Blerim, in north Mitrovica, Fatlum Sadiku, an only child, lived with his family. Their apartment was only 50 meters away from Yugoslav state institutions: the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the police station, the court and the prison.

In the semi-urban environment, as Fatlum describes it, they lived alongside and socialized with people of different ethnicities.

In Spring 1998, the war intensified with massacres and battles in central Kosovo. Fatlum and his family feared the worst. Residing so close to the authoritarian center of Mitrovica made the situation all the more frightening. Serbian forces would set off from Fatlum’s neighborhood to attack different parts of Drenica. 

With the situation becoming more severe, all schools were closed in Mitrovica. Fatlum was an excellent student at the time. He had just received his grades after finishing the first semester of grade five. For the first time, he had got a four out of five in math and was feeling quite down.

“This was a preoccupation of a city kid, that was perhaps shameful for me. But it was not done on purpose,” he says. 

When the game ends

March 13, 1999 was supposed to be a market day at the edge of the Ibër river but Serbian forces shelled the market in south Mitrovica, killing six Albanians and wounding 128 others. Before the NATO bombing campaign started, Albanians who lived in the same building as Fatlum had begun to show wartime solidarity, making arrangements to ensure that everyone was sheltered. 

Fatlum’s family of three lived on the fifth floor of the building. When the news broke that NATO would attack Serbian targets, it became too dangerous for them to stay at their apartment. Their balcony faced the police station that was later bombed by NATO air forces.

On March 24, in one of the last evenings at their apartment, Fatlum’s mother, who also spoke Turkish, was watching the news on NTV, a TV channel based in Turkey, which is a NATO member state. She heard the phrase ‘NATO vurdu,’ which means ‘NATO strikes.’  

The next day, their Albanian neighbor knocked on the door, asking them to hide in his apartment, since he was living on the first floor and it was safer there — and so they welcomed him in. 

At 2 a.m. on April 20, 1999, four or five masked Serbian paramilitaries knocked on their neighbor’s door and began questioning his decision to shelter an Albanian family. The scene ended with him being brutally, and fatally, beaten.

“He was so badly beaten that we couldn’t even find his eyes, nose, ears or mouth,” Fatlum says.

Just before 5 a.m. that morning, they were ordered by Serbian forces to leave the building and cross the Ibër bridge to the southern side of the city.

Fatlum’s family was heading to the town of Vushtrri. His blind father insisted on going there, saying, “If we die in Vushtrri, at least Albanians will bury us.” He was convinced that would not be the case in Mitrovica.

In Vushtrri, along with other displaced people, they were sheltered by Fatlum’s mother’s relatives. They were expelled from Vushtrri on May 4, two days after the Studime massacre, which they learned about from Euronews, even though they were only 2 or 3 kilometers away from the scene of the crime. Euronews also reported on the police station’s bombing by NATO.

“This speaks a lot about how newsworthy the conflict in Kosovo was. You would hear about your city or your apartment on Euronews,” he says.

On the day of their expulsion, policeman Zoran Vukotić, who was later sentenced to six years imprisonment in Mitrovica for the abuse and torture of Albanian civilian prisoners in 1999, entered the garden of the house where Fatlum’s family was sheltered. All the people staying there were in one room, except Fatlum’s father, who had gone out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette.

When Fatlum went out to the balcony to get his dad, he saw the perplexed Serbian policeman looking at his father. Fatlum’s father is blind, so he couldn’t see the policeman and he looked like he just didn’t care. To this day, Fatlum is amazed the policeman didn’t execute his father. 

Breaking the window with the butt of his gun, Vukotić ordered the people to evacuate the house immediately. When he recognized some families that he had evicted previously, he became furious: “Is this Albania?!” he said, swearing at and insulting them. 

Surprisingly calm, Fatlum’s mother reached for her boots that were next to Vukotić’s legs, making the policeman very angry. Fatlum explains that his mother was an employee of the Yugoslav system and as such she could never imagine that there would be a war. She subconsciously believed in Yugoslavia’s longevity.

“When he saw her getting so close, he started to swear and fire his gun in the air. ‘I’m going to shoot three more times. If you don’t leave, I’m going to kill you,’ he said. I started to cry and gestured to my mother to leave.”

They left and walked for about 20 meters before they saw smoke coming from the house.

After this, Fatlum and his family found shelter at a relative’s house in Vushtrri. On May 22, Serbian forces committed one of the largest massacres of the Kosovo war, while Fatlum and dozens of others were staying silent in a house only 100 meters away.

Fatlum says that during that time he started to become envious of animals.

“I’d say, ‘Look, no one kills a dog.’ Perhaps they even killed dogs, but no one kills birds. ‘If only I were a bird,’” he says. “Like that Troja song: ‘When the sky opens, you’ll see the angels,’ but I couldn’t see any angels, I was envious of birds.”

‘Time to see the angels’

Fatlum says that the days when NATO forces entered Kosovo and Serbian forces retreated felt like centuries full of nightmares. 

“The garden of the house had a tree in the middle. My father and I were talking to each other under its shade: “I wonder if they’ve reached Klinë or Ferizaj,” Fatlum says. “And that’s when I heard the first cries: ‘NATO! NATO!’”

Fatlum looked through a hole in the garden fence and saw a few Albanian teenagers burning the flag of the former Yugoslavia. Like many others, he ran toward a British tank.

“It was time to see the angels,” he says.

The Sadiku family returned to their apartment in north Mitrovica.

In the days after the war’s end, it quickly became clear that although the armed conflict had stopped, there was absolutely no security for minority groups who lived south of the Ibër bridge — hundreds of civilian Serbs, Roma and others who didn’t leave the country were killed or became victims of abuse.

There was also no peace for Albanians in north Mitrovica, as they lived in constant danger of continuous attacks coming from the Serbian parallel structures’ criminal gangs. That culminated in February 2000, when a group of Serbian volunteers known as the Bridge Watchers killed 10 Albanians, while 12,000 others were expelled. 

Due to the tense environment, in June 2000, Fatlum’s parents decided to return to Vushtrri and start a new life. Throughout his life, Fatlum has chosen not to make a big deal of his war experiences, finding comfort in the fact that his loved ones survived. That was not the case for thousands of Albanians. 

After finishing school in Vushtrri and university in Prishtina, Fatlum went on to finish a master’s program in Istanbul. He lived there for four years, until 2016. The Turkish capital helped him reflect on his life during and after the war.

Fatlum was brought back to his own experiences of war as he followed the development of court cases against war criminals like the late Oliver Ivanović, who was accused of killing Albanians, and the policeman Zoran Vukotić, who was found guilty of torture against Albanians who were detained in Smrekonica prison. 

Fatlum was disappointed with the justice system because Ivanović’s case went to retrial, while accusations against Vukotić for his complicity in the Studime massacre as well as the campaign of systematic rape were not tried in court.

“That added fuel to the fire that is my experience of war, because those two figures were present in my experience,” Fatlum says. “Vukotić almost killed my mother, and while I never saw Ivanović, he was the head of the Bridge Watchers.”

Indignant at the situation after the war, Fatlum says that he is very disappointed with Kosovo’s political leaders who, he says, have violated Kosovars’ experiences of the war.

Editor: Dafina Halili
Multimedia Content Editor: Cristina Marí
Design: Kokrra / Skins Agency
Development: Harisia

This publication is supported by the ‘Civil Society programme for Albania and Kosovo’, financed by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and managed by Kosovar Civil Society Foundation (KCSF) in partnership with Partners Albania for Change and Development (PA). The content and recommendations do not represent the official position of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Kosovar Civil Society Foundation (KCSF).