‘I Wanted to Die’: Kosovo Mothers Haunted by Children’s Massacre

Sebahate Berisha remembers the warm night of April 1, 1999 when she put all her five children to sleep wrapped up in blankets in the basement of an abandoned house in the village of Nagavc/Nogavac in Kosovo's Rahovec/Orahovac municipality.

Like around 6,000 other ethnic Albanians from nearby villages, they had left their home to find a safer place in Nagavc/Nogavac amid attacks on nearby settlements.

A week earlier, on March 25, hours after NATO had started bombing Yugoslavia in an attempt to stop President Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. In response to the Western military campaign, Serbian forces had stepped up their attacks.

Sebahate Berisha's sister Zyrafete Berisha, then 29, had also taken refuge in the basement of the abandoned house with her three children, along with a couple of other mothers and their children.

Since they fled their house in the nearby village of Hoce e Vogel/Velika Hoca and came to Nagavc/Nogavac, Zyrafete's eldest son Shqipron had been sleeping upstairs in the abandoned house with his grandmother, but that night he wanted to be with his mother and sisters.

"Shqipron came down and said to me: 'Tonight I want to sleep here, and he went to join his two sisters," Zyrafete said. "My youngest daughter asked for some bread and I brought her a slice of bread with sugar."

Sebahate, who was 33, woke up around one o'clock to feed her baby and change her nappies. It was hard to get her back to sleep because she hadn't been able take her cradle with her, but they both finally fell asleep.

Zyrafete was still awake and heard their neighbour Hyrishahe saying: "I had a bad dream like they [Serbs] are shelling." "I got up and looked out of the window and I told her to try to...