Four Kosovan Albanian children who survived a Serbian massacre and were given the right to live in the northern city of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, went to court in Belgrade this week to tell their story to a war crimes trial .
They are the first Albanian victims of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo four years ago to testify to a Serbian judge and the Serbian public about the horrors they survived.
The four Bogujevci children — Saranda (18) and her cousins Fatos (16), Jehona (15) and Lirie (13) — told a closed session of the Belgrade District Court of the massacre of 14 women and children in a back garden in the town of Podujevo on March 28 1999.
Sasa Cvjetan, a 28-year-old Serbian paramilitary from the notorious Interior Ministry unit the Scorpions, is charged with war crimes in taking part in the murder of 19 civilians, all Albanians and mostly women and children, four days after Nato began its bombing campaign against the Serbs.
Five Bogujevci children — the four in Belgrade on Wednesday and 10-year-old Genc — were grievously maimed when Serb paramilitaries herded them into the backyard of a neighbour’s house, put them against the wall and opened fire with automatic weapons.
The five children were the sole survivors. Another seven children and seven women died. Cvjetan is also charged with taking part in the murders of five more Albanians on the same day.
Saranda Bogujevci lost her mother, grandmother and two younger brothers. The other four, all brothers and sisters, lost their mother, the same grandmother and their eldest sister.
Their fathers, the brothers Selatin and Safet, fled the town hours before the Serbian death squads arrived.
The wounded children were taken to hospital in the Kosovan capital, Pristina, where they were found at the end of the war by British army doctors, who arranged their evacuation to Manchester for emergency medical treatment.
The children and their fathers have been in the UK ever since, and last December they were given indefinite leave to remain in Britain.
Lirie, aged nine at the time of the crime, was shot through the neck and requires complex reconstructive surgery of a type unavailable in the Balkans. She was fed through her stomach for eight months.
Saranda, now a college student, survived 16 bullet wounds to the back, leg and arm, has had five operations in Britain and is undergoing weekly physiotherapy on her scarred left arm.
”It’s much better now,” she said. ”I can use it much more than before.”
Judge Biljana Silanovic conducted a thorough, if sensitive, questioning of the fathers in open court and then heard the evidence of two of the four children in closed session.
The other two children gave evidence on Thursday, also in closed session. The judge forbade any reporting of the evidence given in the closed sessions until the children have left Belgrade.
British aid workers and Serbian human rights campaigners accompanying the children said the two girls who testified on Wednesday were ”very brave” and performed with stamina, dignity, and determination.
The trial is the result of research, investigation and lobbying by the Serbian human rights campaigner Natasa Kandic, who began pursuing the case a month after the crime was committed.
The Manchester branch of Workers’ Aid to Kosovo helped to get the Bogujevcis to court. — Â