Albanian Flag Day was first celebrated in Kosovo and Metohija in November 1999. The celebration was accompanied by brutal murders, beatings, and arrests of Serbs.

On that penultimate day of November, the streets of the capital of our province and all the larger cities in Kosovo and Metohija dawned decorated with the flags of Albania.

Albanians began to gather and crowds began to riot in the cities in celebration. Serbs in Orahovac organized themselves to protect their families and property, since KFOR assistance had been of no use until then, starting in mid-June 1999. University professor Dragoslav Bašić, a former Fulbright scholar who had also studied and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, still lived in the Dardania neighborhood of Priština. His wife and mother-in-law were in the apartment with him. In the evening, when the shouting had turned into the beginning of vandalism and was replaced by shooting throughout the city, Professor Bašić decided to take refuge with his family in Kosovo Polje, where there were still Serbs and where his mother-in-law had property.

They managed to leave the building and drive by car towards Kosovo Polje, where they were intercepted on the main road by a mob driven mad with hatred.

First Professor Bašić was pulled out of the car and brutally beaten, followed by his wife and mother-in-law. The brutal violence against the professor was not only carried out by beatings, but the perpetrators also pushed stunned firecrackers into his mouth to explode inside. In the end, they shot him, overturned the car, set it on fire, and fled. He died on the way to the hospital, while his wife and mother-in-law suffered a skull fracture, brain contusion, a broken jaw, and numerous injuries to their bodies in the form of bruises and fractures, as seen in the picture. At the time of admission to the hospital, both women were in a coma. His mother-in-law died in a Niš hospital from the consequences of the beatings she suffered, and his wife never recovered from them.

Despite the fact that Police Station No. 4, where UN police and KFOR were stationed, was located only 500 m from the brutal attack, the perpetrators of this attack were never arrested and prosecuted!

UNMIK and KFOR representatives - and the next day they expressed "concern and condemnation" about the attack without lifting a finger to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice. They were not, but the Serbs from Orahovac, who organized themselves out of fear, were. They also took away their weapons and left their families with small children, empty-handed, at the mercy of the living remnants of the terrorist KLA.

When I went to the scene the next day, the smell of soot, the burning car, and traces of blood were still there.