KOSOVO 1999

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M I N U T E S T O WA R : Picnic in Hell Everyone of these statements is allegedly real. I have not made it up and it is coming like staccato gunfire from their mouths. We were the first witnesses as they crossed the border so they hoped to tell us and therefore tell the world what is happening. “Um, I think we’re certainly talking about many dozens, ah maybe in the low 100s, abducted, kidnapped, I don’t know what the right word is in these circumstances.” “How many people were killed?” “There were about 13 cousins….At that moment 4 people were physically maltreated, then executed with a bullet, then cut with the knife. Because there is first of all they cut them with the... Then they execute them with a single bullet, now with a knife. The following day we managed to calculate, the size of the bodies were reduced to this format, the next day we were able to see the corpse, they were this size.”
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Picnic in Hell Like a picnic from hell sobbing refugees were sprawled over the emerald grass and bent daffodils with broken packets of baby food, shawls and dirty anoraks lying in the sun, women in tartan weeping, crying with tears swimming down their faces; children holding up victory signs and again tears streaming down their faces. An empty victory at that. It is like a holiday in hell except it is not hell, it is hell on earth. women should stay there.’ Then yet another: ‘My wife and my son, my son is one year old, and they have been sent, have been pushed back from the border. If they’re alive or dead….I don’t know exactly.’ (Note: A couple of days later I just saw people coming in again in the buses and their faces are shocked and because of the events that have swept me up I did not really have time to take on their pain. It is like what Alma Sahbaz from Sarajevo said to me: “A lot of people don’t have the actual ammunition; emotional ammunition to deal with other people’s suffering because their own cups are so full.”) “Yesterday they came, they got into the tractor and started to beat me.” Soldiers and militia have now stopped us from entering into the bay where all the broken Ladas, 1985 Fiats and a cavalcade of caravans are, but we walked round the rear to a broken cement pylon and climbed up onto a slopping grass embankment and filmed from that point. Like a picnic from hell sobbing refugees were sprawled over the emerald grass and bent daffodils with broken packets of baby food, shawls and dirty anoraks lying in the sun, women in tartan weeping, crying with tears swimming down their faces; children holding up victory signs and again tears streaming down their faces. An empty victory at that. It is like a holiday in hell except it is not hell, it is hell on earth. After lingering to collect more documentation of abuses to interview further people at the border crossing we left. All the stories just seem to merge into one horror story. Just as we were leaving another spoke: ‘Yesterday they came, they got into the tractor and started to beat me.’ It is just continuous, there does not need to be any selective process. ‘They took my son he’s fifteen years old. He had no identification card.’ The events are continuous and yet even if each
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Picnic in The Diary of Dominic Ryan
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M I N U T E S T O WA R : Picnic in
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KOSOVO 1999

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