By Keze Kozeta Zylo. Translated by Petrit Latifi.
“There is no human being, let alone a mother in the world, who is not shocked when they hear about the Serbian massacres in Kosovo! Today we received the bitter news of the departure from this world of Mother Zoje Prendi, the Lady of God whose Serbian stepmother devoured her 5 sons Viktor, Sokol, Mark, Robert and Gjergji, as in legends. What horror when you read it! What a tragedy that has happened right in the heart of Europe in Mejë.
The Mejë massacre was the mass murder of 372 Kosovo Albanian civilians by Serbian police and Serbian army forces, carried out on April 27, 1999 in the village of Mejë, near the city of Gjakova, during the Kosovo war. They were mainly between the ages of 14 and 60.
My imagination moves over the massacred bodies of the men of Meja by the Serbian crocodile and I stop for the moment, I stop writing, I am filled with the blood of my brothers in the shocked photos, gouged out on the streets and everywhere. It is not far, just 22 years ago and the civilized world is still silent to bring to international court the Serbian criminals who committed genocide against Kosovo just because it was ethnic Albanian.
But to help the memory are always the brilliant pens of the Nation and since we are in Gjakova of the goddess Zoje, Din Mehmeti comes close to me with the poem “Black Steam” as “On the boulevards of the demonstrative way/ fire and water fought again/ angel masks, knife masks/ trampled and occupied every point/ Around us the wind wailed/ around us the beasts howled/ over our remaining blood.
In that massacre, men were taken from refugee convoys at a checkpoint in Meja and their families were ordered to continue their journey to Albania.
According to Human Rights Watch researchers, the Meja massacre was the mass killing of 372 Kosovo Albanian civilians by Serbian police and army forces on April 27, 1999, in the village of Meja, near the city of Gjakova, during the Kosovo War.
The men and boys were separated from the convoy, then executed by the roadside. The massacre is considered the largest of the 1998-1999 Kosovo War.
Only a portion of the bodies have been recovered; the rest were loaded onto trucks and transported to Serbia, where they were buried in mass graves or burned to cover their tracks.
Meja is a small Albanian village in Kosovo, located a few kilometers northwest of the city of Gjakova.
Human Rights Watch researchers heard about the massacre in the early morning of April 28, when refugees from Kosovo entered Albania through the Morina border crossing. Refugees who arrived during the day reported seeing men lined up along the road in Mejë. Refugees who arrived in the evening, and the next day, claimed to have seen a large number of corpses by the side of the road in the village, as did refugees who had passed through Mejë around noon.
An eighteen-year-old girl who had passed through Mejë at the time stated that she saw fifteen corpses on the right side of the road. The road was covered in blood. On the right side were fifteen men. I counted them. They were lying face down, blood all around them, and they were not moving.
A shiver runs through your body as you read these macabre testimonies… Mother Zoja took upon herself the drama of her family, the loss of the 5 Kosovo Lions in the Mejë massacre by the Serbs. Writing, the tombstone verses of the distinguished poet Din Mehmeti continue to wander as:
Around us the wind howled/ around us the beasts howled/ over our remaining blood…
Rest in peace, Mother Mary, Lady of God, for the fallen sons of Kosovo, together with your sons Viktor, Sokol, Mark, Robert and Gjergji, will rise like the Phoenix from the ashes of Freedom throughout the centuries.
Farewell, Mother of Kosovo!
June 2, 2021″
Reference
Balkan Academia 