Promotion of “The Train – On the Border Between Terror and Freedom” in Pristina, Kosovo, 26 May. Photo: BIRN.
Stories of being deported in April 1999 during the Kosovo war are compiled in ‘The Train – On the Border Between Terror and Freedom’, a book of personal testimonies launched on Tuesday in Pristina.
“We were forcibly deported. In the train there was no space to breathe. Serb police with masks circulating on the train. [There were] screams, pushing, documents and money were taken and families continued to be separated,” says one of the accounts in the book, the testimony of survivor Fatime Lumi.
“There were many stories of families who had left and never returned. No one knew whether we would survive the journey. It was the day when many thought we would not come back home,” Lumi adds.
The book, published by Integra, an NGO focused on peace, reconciliation, and human rights, brings together 20 testimonies from people who, during the mass expulsions of spring 1999, were violently uprooted from their homes, forced onto trains, and deported to the Bllace/Bllaca border crossing with North Macedonia.
The book explores the painful reality of deportation, with the train serving as a central symbol.
“Through firsthand testimonies from people of different ages and backgrounds, it sheds light on a chapter of the Kosovo war exodus,” Kushtrim Koliqi, the director of Integra, told BIRN.
“The book is only one chapter of the ethnic cleansing carried out through deportation by train, because at that time Kosovo was being emptied of its people through three routes leading to three neighbouring countries: Macedonia, Montenegro, and Albania,” Koliqi added.
When NATO launched its air campaign in March 1999 to halt the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Kosovo as armed repression by Serbian forces intensified, more than 300,000 Kosovo Albanians had already fled their homes after more than a year of fighting and the failure of international efforts to resolve the conflict through diplomatic means.
However, the largest wave of deportations occurred during the air strikes, when nearly one million people were forced to flee.
Former refugees who crossed into what was then Macedonia recount in the book harrowing experiences of killings, beatings rape, robbery, and the burning of houses by Serbian police and paramilitaries.
“In the fragments of their memories, we come to understand the difficult journeys, displacement, refugee life in different countries, and long-silenced trauma brought into public view,” Koliqi said.
In the book, people recall the dire conditions in an overcrowded refugee camp in the muddy fields of Bllace/Bllaca, where they desperately searched for news of missing relatives.
In another account, Arbana Hajredinaj recalls her family’s deportation from Pristina. “It was unbelievable. The entire city of Pristina was at the train station. We managed to get onto the train, and as soon as we left the station, I saw the bodies of dead people, rotten and burned, a sight that has never left my memory,” Hajredinaj says.
“Many of the experiences documented in this book remained publicly untold for decades,” said Eliza Hoxha, the lead researcher. “This book is an attempt to document, not to forget, and to heal.”
Koliqi pointed out that the violent expulsions have still not been properly documented. “Everything about the exodus exists only in fragmented or half-hearted initiatives,” he said.
