Kosovo Massacre Anniversary Brings Memories of a Missing Mother

His mother Sahide, who was 61 at the time, tried to get to her husband's cousins' house, but she was shot as she walked up the road. Wounded, she remained in the street for almost an hour.

"Some people who were hiding in the basement of a house saw her sitting on the roadside after being shot. It isn't known where she was shot, they only saw she was bleeding," Hasan Metushi said.

One woman made an attempt to get Sahide inside her house, but when she went out into the street, she saw Serbian forces approaching.

Later that day, Sahide's husband Haki, then 62, along with his younger brothers Sabri and Arif and 41 other villagers, were found slaughtered, their bodies scattered on a hillside and heaped together in a gully above Recak/Racak.

After night fell, Hasan Metushi, who was a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA at the time, went up to the top of the hill with a group of other relatives.

"I saw the bodies of my father, my uncles and others," he recalled. "They were close to each other and they had been executed at close range. Some of their eyes had been gouged out or their heads smashed. For a moment I felt like it was a dream. I remember I couldn't stand up…"

Down in the village, people who had been hiding in their basement had seen Serbian police shooting his mother Sahide: "When [Serbian forces] saw she was alive, they shot at her," he said. "Then they put her body in a black bag and put it in a car."

'I hope the children will survive'

Hasan Metushi at his house in Recak/Racak. Photo: Serbeze Haxhiaj/BIRN.

Twenty-two years later, at the Metushi family house in Recak/Racak, the memories of that day remain fresh. Hasan Metushi, who is now a health...