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“I don’t know anything about clashes of this kind. I know that there was a slaughter and that I fled with my family. And I was just trying to preserve my family…” Sadik Januzi, a Kosovo Albanian man and a survivor of a massacre in Kosovo, answering questions about the conflict in Kosovo. He testified on 24 April 2002 in the case against Slobodan Milošević.
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Sadik Januzi lived all his life in the village of Broje/Burojë in the municipality of Srbica/Skenderaj in the northwestern part of Kosovo, with his wife and seven children. When Serb forces set up a police checkpoint and entered the village at the beginning of March 1998, Mr. Januzi was a 65 year-old farmer.
Five to six weeks later, during which time he had continued his usual work in the fields, he heard that a Serb policeman had been killed by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a Kosovo Albanian armed group. From then on, “the situation became very tense,” Mr. Januzi said, and Serb forces started shelling his village, and one located nearby.
Mr. Januzi said that, “because there was sporadic gunfire in the early hours of the morning and in the evening … we had to leave our houses early, at dawn, and return in the evening to eat and to have a little rest.” Eventually, the whole family decided to leave for fear of their own safety. Mr. Januzi sent his family to his sister’s house in Kladernica/Klladernicë, also in the Srbica/Skenderaj municipality, and he himself went back to take care of his house in Broje/Burojë. He remembered those days as the time when “there was no security at all.”
During the summer of 1998, Serb forces removed the checkpoint from Broje/Burojë and Mr. Januzi decided to bring his family back. However, they managed to stay for only seven days, as Serb forces started an offensive on his village and 52 others in the broader Drenica/Drenicë region. Broje/Burojë was repeatedly shelled forcing him and his family to constantly move from place to place all over the Drenica/Drenicë region for fourteen months. As Mr. Januzi said “I was only trying to look after my own family.”
In March 1999, Serb forces again shelled the town of Broje/Burojë and other surrounding villages. On 24 March 1999, Mr. Januzi and his family sought safety in Izbica/Izbicë, also located in the Srbica/Skenderaj municipality, where about 5,000 residents from six different villages had also gathered. The women and children slept in houses and the men in tractor-trailers. Mr. Januzi spent four nights there.
Three days later, on 27 March 1999, Mr. Januzi saw Serb soldiers setting houses in Izbica/Izbicë on fire. The following day, at around 1:00pm, Serb forces surrounded the refugees and gathered 5,000 of them in a meadow about 150 meters from the village itself. Mr. Januzi then saw three Serb soldiers moving towards the crowd and shouting, “If you don’t want us to burn all houses give money!” Many people gave them the money.
Then Mr. Januzi heard one of the soldiers saying in Serbian “Get all [the] men out of the crowd,” and the soldiers started separating the men away from everyone else. “We were forced to sit down two by two along the road.” Other soldiers went to the rest of the crowd and took out about 12 or 13 young men. One of the older Kosovo Albanian men begged the soldiers in Serbian to release the young men. They did so only after the soldiers got the money they demanded.
The men were then divided into two groups of about 70 each. One group was ordered to go up the hill and the second group to go to the stream. The group Mr. Januzi was part of “started to climb the hill for about three hundred meters” in two rows escorted by ten soldiers. He said “the soldiers were pushing all of us with the back of their machine guns in order for us to go faster.” The men in his group ranged between 40 and 96 years of age.
Mr. Januzi described that “at one point, one soldier told us to stop, we turned toward them and they ordered us [to] turn our backs to them.” He heard them shout “Fire” and in a few seconds the men started falling down, all shot from behind. Although Mr. Januzi was not hit he “proceeded to fall down.” Three bodies fell on his back. He could hear the soldiers checking whether anyone was still alive, and after that they left saying, “Let’s go, our work is over.”
Mr. Januzi said that he was so scared that he only waited one minute, and crawled to a nearby bush, and then 150 meters to the woods. He sat there and smoked two cigarettes. He was met there by other survivors from his group that was forced up the hill. He stayed in the woods until midnight, then went to a nearby village for three days, and afterwards to his sister’s house in Kladernica/Klladernicë. On his way he met men from the other group who had survived.
He stayed in Kladernica/Klladernicë about a week until 12 April 1999, when Serb forces started shelling the village before sunrise. All the young men fled to the forest while Mr. Januzi went to check on his family in the school building, where they and many others from the surrounding villages had found shelter. There were already between 10,000 and 12,000 refugees in the village. Later that morning, heavily armed Serb military, paramilitary and police surrounded the school. They separated some 400-500 young men from the crowd, and told the women, the children and the elderly to go to Albania.
The group started walking escorted by Serb forces. They had to “travel for about 80 kilometres without ... food or anything at all” in a convoy four kilometers long, with soldiers lined up on each side of the road all the way to Jošanica/Jashanicë in Klina/Klinë municipality in western Kosovo. He said “everyone was on foot, apart from two to three tractors which were taking the old people and the handicapped.”
On the way, Mr. Januzi saw villages burning, with no inhabitants, only with “Serb military around with their vehicles and tanks.” When the convoy arrived in Đakovica/Gjakovë, close to the Albanian border, after having spent a night in a field, Mr. Januzi saw that, “[t]he town was burning, there was a large presence of police and soldiers there, and they would not allow us to stop in the town.”
They continued walking south the next day after spending the night in a school. Mr. Januzi said that the people were very hungry. Near a bridge just outside the town of Đakovica/Gjakovë, Mr. Januzi’s wife and his sister-in-law “went to a Catholic house” to get some food, having gone three days without any. While he was waiting for them, one of the Serb soldiers told him to, “Go away from here, because NATO could bomb.” Mr. Januzi waited for his family and then caught up with the rest of the convoy. When he left he said “I saw the NATO plane, I heard the sound and saw smoke.” The bridge had been bombed.
The convoy continued walking south eventually arriving in Prizren. “They told us to wait there, that buses would take us to the border” Mr. Januzi said. The buses came every half an hour and Mr. Januzi and his family managed to get on the last one which drove straight to the border. He heard that “the people on the other buses were only driven to Žur/Zhur” around ten kilometers away from the Albanian border, from where they had to walk. Yet the bus Mr. Januzi was on “drove straight to the border because we had given the conductor money.”
At the border, Serb soldiers “took our documents and threw them into a basket.” Finally, on 15 April 1999 they crossed into Albania as refugees.
Mr. Januzi in his statement to the Prosecution affirmed that “I left Kosovo because I was forced out of my village by the Serbs, they had ordered us to Albania[.] I did not leave because of the NATO bombings”.
Sadik Januzi testified on 24 April 2002 in the case against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević. In this case, many victims’ testimonies were submitted in written form as an exhibit, and appeared before the Tribunal to answer questions from the accused or the court. Sadik Januzi related these events to an investigator of the ICTY’s Office of the Prosecutor in Tirana, Albania. Slobodan Milošević, who was charged with crimes committed in Srbica/Skenderaj, Kosovo, among other places, died in custody on 11 March 2006, and proceedings against him were terminated.
>> Read Sadik Januzi’s full testimony and witness statement.