The Acting President of the Republic of Kosovo, Albulena Haxhiu, participated today at the marking of the 27th anniversary of the Dubrava Prison massacre.
In her address to the participants, Acting President Haxhiu said that a prison is a place where the state closes the door from the outside.
“The one who is in the inside has neither weapons, nor freedom, nor the opportunity to defend himself. The life of the prisoner is in the hands of the institution that guards him. For this reason, the Dubrava massacre cannot be treated as an ordinary war crime. The Dubrava massacre took place inside a state institution, under the administration of the Serbian state, on unarmed, confined and defenceless people,” said Acting President Haxhiu.
Acting President Haxhiu said that the gravity of the crime becomes even more serious due to the fact that the Albanian prisoners were not there by chance.
“In the spring of 1999, people were brought to Dubrava from prisons and detention centers, from Kosovo but also from Serbia. Political convicts, convicted of various crimes, those arrested due to circumstances of the war, were gathered there. All of them found themselves inside that prison that had become an instrument of state crime”, emphasized Acting President Haxhiu.
According to her, in Dubrava, the Serbian state built the crime upon a double trap.
“First, it kept the Albanian prisoners inside a facility where it had introduced the logic of war. Then, when the danger of bombing became imminent, those who held the keys left to hide, while the Albanians imprisoned there remained locked up. On top of that deliberate abandonment, a deceptive act was also built: to attribute the murders to NATO attacks. On May 19, the prison facilities were hit, including the pavilions, while on May 21 there were strikes again during the day on the prison facilities and the surroundings,” said Acting President Haxhiu.
She further said that some of the Albanian prisoners, who were outside the wards for routine prison work, took the tools they had with them and started breaking the doors and locks to get their comrades out of their cells.
“In the midst of that horror, the prisoners found a way to send a message to the world. With white plastic pieces, in the prison yard, they wrote the word “HELP”. It was a simple, short, but understandable call to the world. Through this call, the prisoners showed that they are alive. And this was successful, because the airstrikes stopped. But even that word, “HELP”, became a reason for the killers’ rage. Because it broke their script. It showed that there were living people inside the prison, prisoners and witnesses”, said Acting President Haxhiu.
Acting President Haxhiu said that after this, on May 22, the prisoners were ordered to line up, under the pretext that they were going to be transferred.
“Instead of being transferred, they were shot. Lined up, unarmed, defenseless, they were shot inside the prison yard. Survivors’ testimonies speak of other attacks during that day and the following day, of people seeking refuge in damaged buildings, of wounded people who received no help, of prisoners who tried to save each other. The mechanism of the crime also involved Serbian prisoners, convicted of serious crimes, who were armed and put at the service of the Serbian state apparatus. On May 23, the violence continued. Attacks on prisoners who remained inside the complex further increased the death toll,” said Acting President Haxhiu.
She stated that 116 Albanian prisoners were killed and hundreds more were injured in Dubrava prison, in a space where the Serbian state had full responsibility over them.
“On the eve of these days, on May 16, 1999, Professor Ukshin Hoti was also released from Dubrava Prison. Since that day, he has remained missing. A rare political mind of Kosovo, a man who had thought of freedom as a historical order, disappeared right there”, claimed Acting President Haxhiu.
Acting President Haxhiu said that in Dubrava, the Serbian state acted as a murderous machinery.
“It had prisoners in registers, in wards, in rows, under orders and locked up. This is why Dubrava has special legal and moral weight. There the crime did not happen because the state was absent. There the crime happened because the state was present in every link: in command, in the guard, in the weapon, in the deception and in the attempt to hide the truth”, claimed Acting President Haxhiu.
According to Acting President Haxhiu, today it is not enough to mention Dubrava as a date.
“We must understand it as evidence of Serbia’s monstrous crimes against defenceless Albanian citizens. We must also understand it as evidence of our duty to ensure that the names of the murdered, the testimonies of the survivors and the full truth of Dubrava become part of the state conscience of the Republic of Kosovo”, said Acting President Haxhiu at the end of her address.
