Burying the Truth: Witness Deaths Leave Kosovo Massacres Unprosecuted

"He lived and died with his wish to testify," Gjyle Deliu, his daughter-in-law, told BIRN at her house in Rezalle.

"He constantly kept repeating: 'I will tell everything that happened,'" she said.

Deliu is among dozens of survivors of massacres committed by Serbian forces across Kosovo who died without giving evidence, while the perpetrators of these massacres have never been prosecuted.

Gjyle Deliu, now aged 50, recalled how Serbian forces arrived with tanks at dawn on April 5, 1999 and gathered the local residents at the centre of the village.

"They separated men on one side and women with children on the other. We were ordered to leave the village while the men, most of them elderly, remained there," she said.

The villagers who left did not get far before they heard shooting. "We didn't see them but we understood they were being executed," Gjyle Deliu said.

After he fled, Misin Deliu hid in a nearby forest for two days. From where he was hiding out, he saw a truck that collected the bodies of the murdered villagers. "He suspected some of them were still alive," Gjyle Deliu said.

She added that the most difficult moment he remembered was a cry for help from a 13-year-old boy who was dying alongside him in the pile of dead bodies.

After the war, he suffered with anxiety and trauma. "But he kept living with the hope of justice," she said.

For many of the massacre victims' families, Misin Deliu's death represented the end of an opportunity to shed light on what happened on that tragic day in Rezalle.

"Nobody could tell the story like he did," his daughter-in-law said.

Uninvestigated mass killings

Massacre survivor Misin Deliu, who died last year. Photo courtesy of the...