Pablo Hiriart
Poklek, Kosovo.- Nationalist barbarism arrived in this Balkan village at six in the morning on April 17, 1999, when Serbian tanks and infantry surrounded it to massacre every last inhabitant, while Fadil Muqolli crouched in the bushes on the hillside and watched as his father, wife, and four children were killed.
Fadil shows me what used to be his home, which he keeps as a small shrine where 53 people, including 23 children aged between six months and 14 years, were locked up and murdered in the ethnic cleansing ordered by Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
The breeze and silence next to the house where the massacre took place just 26 years ago give us an idea of how far the identity-based rhetoric of European populism, led by Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen, and Viktor Orbán, can go.
Here in the Balkans, it was the first blow to the rule that borders cannot be changed by force, and a step was taken to legitimize violence in the name of identity. The United States, then the leader of Western values, stopped the genocide. Now, without a leader and with Europe in decline, the fate of an era of human rights, democracy, and international law hangs in the balance.
After 26 years and with your country now independent, is the wound closed, Falil?
No, no, the wound is not closed because there is no international justice and no repentance from the Serbian government. In Kosovo, there are 20,000 women who Serbian soldiers raped, and justice has not been served. The wound is not closed,“ he says as he calmly extinguishes another of the countless cigarettes he smoked during the trip.
”I had slept at a relative’s house in another village and woke up to the sound of Serbian soldiers firing into the air. I ran to my house and saw soldiers coming down from the hills. Tanks were also coming. It was raining very hard that morning, and I lay down in the bushes (about 400 meters from here). I saw my father go out into the yard, and they shot him dead. With him was (the poet) Ymer Elshani. They also killed Ymer.”
With machine gun fire, “they forced 53 Albanian civilians (of Albanian origin) into this room (where we are now). My wife and four children were there. First, they threw a grenade at them, then they fired bursts of machine gun fire. Then they burned the bodies three times. I saw everything,” he told me.
Such was the ethnic cleansing carried out by the nationalist Milosevic. “And why didn’t you intervene?” I managed to ask, still moved by the story, by the meaning of the pauses and the tears held back in his large, elderly eyes.
He never cried or let his voice break. “If I had had the chance, I would have killed all the Serbs in uniform, but I didn’t have the opportunity. It was very unequal… After 11 days, I was able to get down, along with six friends who had survived. It was nighttime. I entered through the basement door, and when I stepped inside, I thought water had gotten in. It felt like mud. We lit it up with a car battery, and it wasn’t water, but blood that had seeped down from the floor above, where they had killed them…
-And what did you do?
-We took the charred bones and put them in bags. Then we took them to the forest and hid them there until the war was over. And when the war ended, we buried them in a mass grave,” he replied, and showed me photos of his wife and children, framed on the wall of a room on the second floor.
There are the faces of his children: Shehide, 14, on the day she was killed; Nasser, 13; Ylber, 10; and Egzon, four. I see their school notebooks, notes, and drawings. Their backpacks. Their small clothes are hanging on an indoor clothesline. Fadil stands in this room filled with vivid nostalgia, like someone waiting for his children to return from school. He looks at me intently, seriously, amid the silence. I hug him, and he hugs me back tightly.
He smiled only once during our meeting, on the way to the car, when I asked him about the role of the United States in the Kosovo war:
“If the United States didn’t exist, neither would we,” he said.
He then stated coldly, “A nation without nationalism does not exist. Nationalism in a positive sense. However, Serbian nationalism resembles wild beasts. That nationalism feeds on the life and blood of other nations.”
Valon, the anthropologist who is accompanying me, translating and guiding me, intervenes: “After the collapse of Yugoslavia, nationalism in the Balkans changed many things. It brought with it wars, ethnic cleansing, massacres, and genocide. Serbia, with its nationalism, unleashed these wars and has not apologized for the crimes committed.”
We cross the village, which is now a small town of 1,100 inhabitants, with simple but semi-new houses of beautiful architecture. Like almost everything in this country that was devastated, they were built with funds from the European Union, the government, and the private sector. All that remains of the village of 26 years ago is the house that Fadil transformed into a memorial or museum.
With Valon, we head towards the capital, Pristina, located 30 kilometers from here, where the genocide of the Albanian Kosovars took place, bringing to a close a tragic century, the 20th.
But first, we will stop at the Field of Blackbirds—now called Kosovo Field—where in 1389 the great battle of the peoples of this mountain range against the troops of Sultan Murat of the Ottoman Empire took place. The battle ended in victory for the local forces and marked the beginning of the tragedy that still continues in the Balkans.
Revenge for what happened in the Field of Blackbirds in 1389 came 600 years later, in Pristina, where we will meet next Tuesday.
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