Suhodoll i Poshtem/Donje Suvi Do i Suvi Do
Rakosh/Rakos
The mainly ethnic Albanian-populated village of Suhareka/Suva Reka lies in a valley surrounded by hills where, during the war, the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army had hideouts. As Serbian forces intensified their campaign against the KLA, the village became an often target for killing and looting by the Serbs.
According to Human Rights Watch, most of the abuses in Suhareka/Suva Reka took place in March and April 1999, when many residents were expelled and there were a series of killings. Thousands of people were either deported to Albania or forced to flee and hide in the forests. The looting and burning of civilian property was widespread.
According to the Suhareka/Suva Reka office of the Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms, 430 people were killed in the municipality during the spring of 1999.
The remains of the 113 people were found in two mass graves in the summer of 1999 – one in the centre of the village, where 54 bodies were discovered, and the second, containing 59 bodies, at Siroko cemetery on the road to the city of Prizren. A number of bodies from Suhareka/Suva Reka were also found some 340 kilometres away at a police training centre in Batajnica in Serbia.
The 54 bodies of Kosovo Albanian civilians found in Suhareka/Suva Reka itself were discovered near the premises of a former publicly-owned beverage company. The mass grave is in a populated area but remains unmarked.
The gravesite is a couple of minutes away from a memorial erected in 2020 in memory of 48 members of the Berisha family who were killed on March 26, 1999. The victims included 14 children, two babies, a pregnant woman and a 100-year-old woman.
The killing of the Berisha family is considered one of the worst massacres of Kosovo war.
Serbian forces rounded up members of the family, killing several elderly men with machine-gun fire before forcing the rest of the family into a pizza restaurant and throwing hand grenades at them. Those who showed any signs of life were shot in the head, and the bodies were then taken away.
Autopsies showed the victims were not killed in a battle, but executed.
The Serbian war crimes court convicted members of the 37th Brigade of the Yugoslav Army of the killing of the Berisha family, in the first war crimes trial held in Serbia for crimes in Kosovo.
The killings in Suhareka/Suva Reka and surrounding villages also formed part of the trial of four Yugoslav and Serbian political and military leaders – Nikola Sainovic, Dragoljub Ojdanovic, Nebojsa Pavkovic, Vladimir Lazarevic and Sreten Lukic – who were found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
