This is the fourth story in a series of ten stories about the 1990 Reconciliation of Blood Feuds Movement. The tellers are Raif Musa and Valdete Bajrami Musa, husband and wife, information technology professionals from Ferizaj, who were activists of the Movement.
In the photograph: Valdete Bajrami, Halil Halili, Minire Ademi, Raif Musa, Imam Idriz Kosova and Syzana Jupa. The gathering in Fusha e Pajtimit, 1990.
There were various cases, very hard and challenging ones for us. There was one case for example, two murders and one injury in the village of Pleshina, the son-in-law had killed his wife’s father, mother and his wife. His wife survived, but she was wounded with an axe blow while she was sleeping, the four years old child didn’t know when he woke up, the child was in bed. And they faced it, they forgave it, for example. A very difficult case, and what he mostly wanted was to not forgive. We are good friends with him today, he respects us a lot, we hang out with him, we have coffee, we joke, I tease him by saying, “How come you did not want to [forgive], you postponed it.” And he always says, “I made it very difficult for you, I made you come and go very often.” Because we went to that family many times.
There were unintentional murders, no, I mean, they didn’t murder the one they wanted to, but someone else by total mistake. There were case when they murdered [someone] and hid the crime and it was discovered only 18 years after. There is a woman in the village of Bibaj, her husband killed her, he tied her to stones with a wire and threw her in the well, and he put pressure on her brothers. […] He put pressure on them by telling them that, “You sold your sister” […] “You took her and sold her somewhere else.” You know, putting pressure on them in order for them not to look for her. They said, “She didn’t come to us.” 18 years later he sold his house in the village of Bibaj, and the one who bought the house cleaned his yard and the well and found some bones in the well, he called the police who through a DNA test found that those were the bones of the person who had gone missing 18 years earlier…And they forgave, it was not easy for them, because she was killed twice.
The same happened in another accident, he crushed and killed [someone], and they made us go there many times. I still have contacts with the boy who back then was seven years old when his father’s blood was forgiven. There were cases, and the most difficult case was one in the village that was called Kçiç back then, now it is called Dardani, he was eleven years old when his father’s blood was forgiven, his neighbor murdered his father and this boy was the oldest, but his paternal aunts and his mother forgave the blood. I mean, in a way we took a risk, because he had three other sons, I mean, he had four boys and they grew up. […] And they still live near the family of the murderer. […] But the….murderer was a savage. It is not that I am very good at drawing, but back then I held a journal in which, when we went back to our track and talked about what this and that said to us, I drew the ones who gave us troubles, I drew their caricature. […]