Blerina Bacaj, 13, Kosova

I am Blerina Bacaj from Kosova. I am 13 and I have been in New York for one and a half years. I like it here, but I did not come here by choice. I was forced to leave my country and I want to go back so much.

All of us who have come here have lost our childhood to the fighting in our country. There is not one of us who has seen things children should not see. Our childhoods were tortured. We lost our rights, our religions and our homes. We were not safe. Many children lost their parents in front of their eyes. The things they saw will be etched in their minds forever; they will never lose the terror.

I was born in Peja, although I haven't lived there since I was small. Peja, Loxha and Drenica were the cities most damaged by the war. And small villages like Slovi and Recak lost most lives to the Serbs.

A friend of mine comes from Slovi. It is very difficult for him to tell you his story, so I will share it with you. The whole village of Slovi was expelled and forced to flee to the mountains. They rode in a line of tractors since they all lived on farms.

The Serbs hunted them down in the mountains looking for young men. They boarded the tractors and shot people who were crying. They pointed guns at the villagers and said, "We can do anything to you and no one will know."

They held the rest of the villagers in the mountains, torturing them and killing 45 of them.

One family did not get outside of their backyard. They killed the father, two sons and two nephews in the yard. It was brutal. They cut their fingers from their bodies and took out their eyes. They put a cross on their bodies because they were Muslim and threw them in a hole in the ground.

A woman who was paralyzed had to stay in a wheelchair. Because she could not walk, they burned her to death.

We all know many people who were killed.

My family has a different story. It was on March 31st, 1999 at 1 o'clock in the afternoon when the policemen came to my house. They said to us, "In five minutes you must leave your house because Kosova is not your country."

Everyone was afraid in my house because they were terrorists; they killed babies, women, children, and old people. We had heard the stories from Peja and the villages; young boys - 15-and 16-years-old were taken and forced to fight.

One policeman said, "Walk and go to the train station." We cried; we were afraid and sad to leave our house. We took nothing with us. We lived on the 4th floor. When we were ready to go down, one policeman said to my sister and my aunt, "You two stay here and your family can go."

And I said to my Dad, "Why is this happening to us, my sister and my aunt didn't kill anyone, didn't kill any Serbs," I can't believe this is happening to us. We were lucky. Many women and girls weren't let go - they were raped and abused and then killed. I was afraid for my sister and aunt.

We started walking slowly. We saw closed stores, broken windows. In the street I saw an old man dragged by the police. I saw old people suffering because they couldn't walk and the police were kicking them. I wanted to help but my father would not let me go. I wanted to help but during this war we could not because we risked being killed.

At the train station, we waited in the cold for five hours. We saw children crying without mothers; they had no food. When the train came, we piled inside; there were many people. We traveled to Macedonia. In Macedonia, there were children without parents. From there eyes you could tell they had seen horrible things; they were badly traumatized and they will never be right again.









God have mercy!

http://www.amnestyusa.org/stoptorture/index.do