The mother, a small boy and a girl were gunned down in their garden. The next victim was Nazmi Jashari, who ran a kiosk in Prekaz selling cigarettes and sundries and lived opposite the main family compound.
He tried to carry his elderly mother, Naile, out of the back door, and was shot in front of her. The signal was clear. Anyone seen leaving their home would be a target for Serbian snipers.
The extended Jashari family gathered in what they thought would be the safest room, which had a new brick wall. But they were trapped: they faced gunfire if they came out or bombing if they remained inside. Soon, the shells were coming through the roof, then the walls. Basorta’s last memory of her family is that her uncle, Adem, was singing Albanian folk songs above the noise to keep up their spirits. She remembers the moment he stopped singing. Then, for 36 hours, there was only the sound of the bombs.
When they thought everybody inside was dead, the police entered the house, throwing grenades into several rooms ahead of them. One officer stood guard while another sprayed the bodies with bullets.
Perhaps they had had their fill of killing when they found Basorta cowering. Perhaps they thought she was too young to accuse them. Or perhaps they could not look a terrified schoolgirl in the eye and shoot her. But she is the reason the truth can be told.
‘I tried to pretend I was dead,’ she said to her uncle Hilmi. ‘But one of the soldiers put his hand on my chest and he felt I was alive.’
Still dressed in her red shirt and black trousers, by now covered with blood, she had to step over the bodies of her family to leave the room, surrounded by Serbs. She was taken to the military base nearby and interrogated for three hours.
Basorta believed her only chance was to lie. She denied that she was a Jashari, claiming her father was abroad and she was merely a guest in the compound. ‘They asked about my father and about Uncle Adem,’ she said. ‘I told them nothing, nothing.’
The Serbs dumped her on a road in Srbica and she ran to the home of a school friend. Yesterday, shocked and finding it increasingly difficult to speak, she was being moved from house to house for protection.
Unbeknown to Basorta, the bodies of her father, mother, uncle, aunt and all her cousins were lined up by the police at a bus depot in Mitrovica last week.
When nobody from the family turned up to identify them and friends tried to insist on post-mortem examinations, the Serbs dumped them in the graveyard they had dug opposite the remains of their house, leaving the coffins poking through the earth. The surviving villagers came back in the night to finish the job with respect.
All that was left of Basorta’s family was a pile of numbered black bin bags at the bus station, each filled with the bloody clothing they had been wearing when they died.
Kosovo guerrillas fight Serb shells with bullets
25 April 1999
Marie Colvin, the first reporter to enter Kosovo from Albania, is with a KLA unit fighting to open supply lines. She braved sniper fire and shelling to send this report.
At night, the foothills of Kosovo are silent except for the sporadic sound of gunfire. The silence makes them even more terrifying to walk through. Serbian snipers are in the woods but we do not know where they are. The anticipation of a shot at any moment is unnerving. Nobody speaks.
There are no civilians left in these woods or villages. It is dark and cold and when the shooting starts the crossfire can be petrifying. Bullets slam into trees.
I walked in single file on Friday night with a KLA special forces unit advancing towards the distant lights of the city of Djakovica. The Serbs were 500 metres away.
We walked through a village of six houses. All the red roofs had been holed by shells and half of one house was a pile of rubble. First the Serbs had driven out the ethnic Albanian farmers, then the KLA had driven out the Serbs. There is little for the families to return to.
Our goal was a gully in the forest overlooking Serbian positions in the village of Batusa. It was cold and wet and I slipped off a log when I was trying to cross a stream. A soldier held me up with the butt of his Kalashnikov.
Camp for the night was in camouflaged tarpaulins strung over branches. A pile of sleeping bags stashed earlier was sodden with the cold rain that had fallen all day and into the night. It is difficult to sleep in a flak jacket on a slope; it is like being an upended turtle with a detached shell. I keep slipping down the slope.
A patrol set out into the darkness and the night was broken intermittently by gunfire: single shots, automatic weapons fire and the crack of snipers’ rifles resounding off the hills. At 1am there was a long exchange of fire. Shells boomed intermittently though none landed close. One man in a returning patrol said he had killed a Serb, but nothing is sure here.
The watch came in for breakfast and a soldier passed round packets of cigarettes, bread and tins of sardines. This unit travels light. We overheard the Serbs on the radio asking to go back to their bunkers.
Every night has been like this for the past two months for this unit on the front line of the KLA offensive. The last weeks have been the worst. The Serbs have not attacked on foot; they have just shelled. Their tanks and artillery are beyond the hills. Two shells landed during breakfast.
It is heartbreaking for these men to hear Nato planes fly overhead on their way to Belgrade and Novi Sad. Everyone asks me when Nato will start bombing Serbian tanks and artillery and when the Apache helicopters will arrive.
The men in this special forces unit are different from the raw recruits one sees in most of the KLA camps. They have been fighting together for a year and seem like the units seen in old war movies.
There is ‘Doc’, who looks after communications as well as the wounded and to whom most of the men turn in time of crisis. Their commander was killed by a sniper 10 days ago. Another soldier, Morina, remembers his village and how the old men wept when he left. Another refuses to get out of bed, saying he cares more about the cold than the Serbs.
Few have heard from their families for months. They accept that there will be no news until the Serbs leave.
The KLA holds a small but strategic foothold in Kosovo at this point. The group I am with has so far penetrated about 8 kilometres from Kosare, a Serbian border post captured by the KLA just over two weeks ago.
Kosare is in a small cleft between the mountains and the KLA holds the mountains, including a towering, snow-bound peak where KLA soldiers sleep in 3 foot of snow. They will dominate the valley as soon as they take Batusa, the next target.
The KLA is trying to meet up with other units inside Kosovo who have been besieged and are running low on food and ammunition. They can hear that the Serbs are low on food and ammunition and constantly requesting to go back to their bunkers. The spirits among the units are rising.
There is still a big question of whether any of these units will be able to join up with the inside forces because of the superior armaments of the Serbs. They have tanks and artillery and the KLA is fighting with Kalashnikovs and a few modern Nato-issue guns; but their spirit and courage are extraordinary.
On the first day when the KLA fought its way into Kosare, the Serbs replied with a welter of shells; now shells fall three or four times a day. Shards of broken flowerpots cover two unexploded shells in a concrete courtyard outside the former Yugoslav barracks – now KLA headquarters in Kosovo – and there are six shellholes in its red-brick facade.
When the sun came out for a moment on Friday, I took a bowl of bread and soup outside for my lunch. Within minutes there was a whistle of a shell, which burst 100 metres away. As I moved inside, another whistled down.
In between shells, the men waited