Last Despatches: Kosovo Journalist Disappears After Visiting Guerrilla Base

Ismail Berbatovci closed the door of his apartment in the small central Kosovo town of Lipjan/Ljipljane for the last time on the morning of July 23, 1998.

His wife Peme remembers that he went out to do an interview with Rame Buja, a senior leader from the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, at the guerrilla force's local base in the nearby mountains.

Armed conflict had already been simmering for several months between the guerrillas of the KLA and Yugoslav troops and Serbian police controlled by President Slobodan Milosevic's regime.

Berbatovci was a correspondent for Pristina-based daily newspaper Rilindja (Revival) and editor-in-chief of monthly magazine Fjala Jone (Our Word); he also served as head of the local office of the Kosova Information Centre, a media outlet that was affiliated with the Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK political party. At the time, the LDK and the KLA were involved in their own bitter dispute about how to conduct the struggle against repressive Serbian rule.

As evening approached, Peme Berbatovci kept looking out of the window, watching and waiting for her husband's return.

"There were no mobile phones at that time and I thought he might have gone to his brothers' house in Dobraje e Madhe. But the next morning, two of his brothers came to our apartment and I realised that something might have happened," she said.

His brothers' neighbours told them that the journalist had been detained at the KLA's base in Blinaje, which he had also visited several days earlier to set up the interview.

He then went missing, and his family still have no idea what happened to him. His body has never been found and no one has been prosecuted over his disappearance.

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