I had enough trouble raising them all. But you can see what they built me. Both the NATO bombing and the fighting between Serbs and the KLA went on for days after the peace agreement was approved by the Serbian Parliament and even after it was signed. In fact, the fighting and bombing seemed to intensify as peace neared, inflicting some of the saddest casualties of the war. The men had been hastily buried by the Drinit te Bardhe River.
Nobody can cry.
They hid by the river, thinking that they would not be be pursued by the Serbs because of the peace agreement. But, he said, the Serbs followed and the cousins were killed fighting them. It was their last offensive. Even as returning villagers are finding bodies of ethnic Albanians, it is something of a mystery why there appeared to be no bodies of Serbian soldiers here in Planeje, given how badly damaged the town was. Here and there the smell of rotting flesh rose from the rubble, but there was no way to tell if it was human or animal.