Lives of Children Kept Mother Going

There were two bullet wounds in her broken shoulder, a dead child in her arms, and still Fatime Kelmendi did not give in to the pain. The lives of three more children were in her hands.

For three days in May, the Kosovo Albanian woman hid among the trees at the edge of a field with the children, scaring them quiet so the Serbs wouldn’t find them, and trying to staunch her bleeding.

So many times, she thought how good it would feel to stop fighting and just let go. But her baby was already gone, and to save the others, she had to stay alive.

“The day when I was walking, I just couldn’t keep going,” Kelmendi said Friday, her wounded arm still in a sling. “I didn’t care if I fell into Serb hands or Albanian hands. I just wanted to die.

“But because of these kids, I kept walking. If it was just me, I wouldn’t have moved another step forward. I would have lain down there and died.”

Rebel’s Gun Jammed as Serbs Attacked

A forested ridge runs behind this village in western Kosovo, and on May 6, heavily armed Serbian forces attacked from the trees along the high ground behind the two-story Kelmendi farmhouse.

Her husband, Ramadan, 37, was a guerrilla in the Kosovo Liberation Army, but when he tried to fire his Kalashnikov at the forces driving people from their homes, it jammed, Kelmendi, 32, said through a translator.

“He threw it down and joined the column of refugees,” she said. “But he was taken away by the police, who stopped us and separated the men from the women.”

His wife was left behind in a tractor wagon filled with 11 people. Three of them were her children: son Fatos, 7, daughter Florida, 5, and her younger boy, Rinor, just 18 months. She tried to hide him behind her legs.

The Kelmendis’ tractor was the last one out of the village, and the Serbs fired from the ridge as it passed. The spray of bullets hit everyone in the wagon except Florida.

“We couldn’t get out sooner because of the bullets. They were flying everywhere,” Kelmendi said. “The whole place was full of tanks and trucks and soldiers. We were attacked from four sides.”

Felt Wounded Son Take His Last Breath

One shot grazed Fatos just above his elbow, and seven weeks later, the wound hasn’t healed. Four people in the wagon died instantly.

Three women and two children were killed in another wagon when a shell exploded in a direct hit, Kelmendi said.

In the chaos of the screaming and the loud cracks of gunfire, Kelmendi managed to pick up Rinor with one arm and hold him just long enough to feel him take his last breath.

She laid his body down on the wooden floor and untied the scarf knotted around her head so that she could bind her smashed and bleeding arm against her chest.

“I just ignored it until the wound healed a little bit and it stopped bleeding,” she said. “But whenever I was walking and stumbled, it would start bleeding again.”

For two days, Kelmendi stayed with all the wounded and the dead in their tractor wagon outside a house just down the dirt road, where it bends and crosses some railroad tracks.

She placed her dead son in the front room of the house, and an old woman with her covered the child’s face with a white napkin. Her brother-in-law lay near the boy’s body. He was wounded and bleeding from the back.

Serbian police looking for money found the survivors’ hiding place, Kelmendi said. Each had a strip of red cloth tied around one arm.

One policeman put a Kalashnikov at Kelmendi’s throat while the others watched and waited for the terrified refugees to hand over their cash. When Kelmendi said she didn’t have any, the officer asked why, then, they had left their houses.

“We told him, ‘We left the house because you were shooting and burning,’ ” she said. “They said, ‘No, we weren’t.’ ”

The police found her brother-in-law in agony, barely able to move, and ordered him to get up and get outside so they could talk to him, Kelmendi said. As he struggled to stand and took a step out the front door, he was shot twice in the back, she said.

The police dragged his body across the yard and dumped it in the bushes by a fence made of sticks.

Kelmendi’s two children, her brother-in-law’s child, Arian Kelmendi, 6, and an elderly woman all saw the murder, and at 4 a.m. the next day they escaped through the darkness to the banks of the Drini River.

They came across the bodies of several men, about three miles west of home. But they kept walking, silently, looking for anyone still alive.

“We walked eight hours beside the river trying to find someone, and there was no one--not a soul--except an old blind man,” Kelmendi said. “He was wrapped in a blanket. The Serbs had thrown him there.”

Kelmendi couldn’t do anything for him, so the travelers moved on until they reached the home of a Gypsy, who gave them bread and told them to hide in the trees.

He secretly fed the two women and three children for three days until another Gypsy man led Kelmendi to the farm of an ethnic Albanian named Nikolle Gjeta, 47.

“I was working in my field when I met her, and there were [Serbian] soldiers just 200 yards away,” Gjeta recalled Friday. “She said to me, ‘If I come to your place, I’m afraid you’ll be in danger, so let me just walk until I find somebody of my own kin.’

“I told her: ‘Whatever happens to my kids will happen to your kids, so don’t worry about that. Just come inside.’ ”

It was three weeks before Kelmendi took a knife and cut the bloodied cloth of her shirt away from her swollen arm. It was another week before a doctor looked at the wound.

A slug is still lodged in her shoulder, and the broken bones didn’t mend properly on their own, so a doctor is going to break them again and set them.

There is no one to mend Kelmendi’s spirit, though. She is back in her village but living in the burned-out shell of her family home. Her last-born son is dead. She still doesn’t know whether her husband is alive. All she can do is keep going.

“Everything is flat for me,” she said. “I’m happy for my kids because they are still alive. But I just don’t care anymore--about anything.”