Four Youths Testify on ’99 Kosovo Massacre

Pale and drawn, Saranda Bogojevci spoke just above a whisper Thursday as she described how Serbian paramilitaries shouted and jeered before gunning down her family four years ago.

“I just lay on the ground, my eyes shut, pretending to be dead,” the ethnic Albanian teenager told a court in a landmark case expected to shed new light on one of the worst massacres of Kosovo’s 1998-99 war.

Bogojevci testified along with her three cousins, all of whom survived the March 28, 1999, slaughter of 19 ethnic Albanians in the northern Kosovo town of Podujevo. They were flown in this week from Manchester, England, where they have lived since the war.

Although the proceedings were closed to media and the public to protect the young witnesses, Bogojevci -- who is 18 -- testified in open session Thursday in the trial of Sasa Cvjetan, a Serb police officer charged with participating in the massacre. Cvjetan has denied any wrongdoing.

The case is sensitive for Serbia, still struggling to come to terms with atrocities committed by Serb troops in Kosovo, where they cracked down on independence-minded ethnic Albanians, and elsewhere in the Balkans under the government of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Milosevic is on trial facing charges of war crimes and genocide at the U.N. tribunal in The Hague.

Bogojevci, her frail figure clothed in a simple black T-shirt and jeans, spoke calmly and quietly, cradling in her right hand her badly scarred and now paralyzed left arm, which was mutilated by bullets in the Serb rampage. She was also shot in the leg and back.

Bogojevci described how Serb troops stormed into Podujevo, an ethnic Albanian town where her extended family -- including her mother, aunts, grandparents, many cousins and other relatives -- had sought shelter in a neighbor’s house.

The soldiers forced the family into the street, strip-searched them and marched them through the town center and past the police station before taking them through several paths to a garden.

“They told us to hold our hands up in the air and leave our belongings outside the house,” Bogojevci said.

“They were shouting, laughing and cursing us,” she added, describing how soldiers shot her uncle, another male relative and an aunt before spraying the rest of the group with automatic gunfire.