Sokol Morina had a long and sleepless night on March 24, 1999, the day that NATO began its campaign of air strikes against Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslav forces.
It was the last time that he and his big family were together in the village of Cikatove e Vjeter/Staro Cikatovo in the central Kosovo region of Drenica, and just a few hours before they learned from the radio that NATO had launched its campaign.
He recalled how throughout that night, he and his brothers kept watch in the dark and talked about how to escape the village to evade the expected arrival of Belgrade’s troops, who stepped up their own operations as NATO’s planes dropped their bombs.
“Early in the morning, the women and children departed to Drenas/Glogovac. The men stayed in the village. We knew that our days were numbered,” said Morina, who is now 63 and lives in Germany.
The family lived in constant anxiety, hidden in a cellar, until April 17, when Yugoslav forces entered the village and took away Sokol, his two brothers and two nephews.
“It was early morning when they took us to Shavarinat [a hill above the village]. There were around 30 men,” he said.
He was in the first line of captured ethnic Albanian civilians, together with his elder brothers, and witnessed his oldest brother, Tahir, fall to the ground when the first bullets were fired. Sokol rolled into a hole alive, untouched by the gunshots.
He stayed among the dead bodies until sunset. When darkness fell, he left to look for a place to hide and found his other nephew, Petrit, and another cousin, Selman, in the nearby hills.
Behind him, at the execution site, he left a pile of dead bodies. His brothers Tahir, 65, and Bahtir, 62, as well as two nephews, Florim and Afrim, were among them.
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