Bloody harvest - Staro Gracko - Kosovo and Metohija 1999.
The bloody harvest in Stari Gracko in Kosovo and Metohija marks its 26th anniversary tomorrow without an answer to the question of who killed 14 Serbian harvesters. Let it be recorded that KFOR rejected the Serbs' request that the army ensure the harvest. The massacre unfortunately proved that the fear was justified.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of the massacre in which members of the KLA brutally killed 14 inhabitants of the village of Staro Gracko near Lipljan on that hot July day in the atar of the village of Bujance near Lipljan while they were gathering grain on their property.
This, as well as all the crimes committed in Kosovo after the arrival of international military troops, go to the soul of KFOR, because the harvesters and their families indicated the possibility of attacks and crimes based on the fact that until that 23.07.1999. the huge Serbian population was kidnapped, killed and expelled from Kosovo and Metohija, and numerous Orthodox holy places were partially or totally destroyed. Despite the black statistics for the Serbian community in Kosovo and Metohija, KFOR turned a deaf ear to this plea of the reapers.
After the massacre, the head of UNMIK at the time, Bernard Kushner, offered a sum of one million marks to anyone who would reveal the orderers and/or perpetrators of this crime.
The investigation went sloppily from the very beginning, so the UNMIK police arrested Mazljum Bitići in 2007, who was released from custody after 2 months due to "lack of evidence".
No one was ever held accountable for this crime, and in May 2017, the Special Prosecutor's Office suspended further investigation into the crime against the reapers, despite evidence of the activities of the KLA special unit in this central enclave after the signing of the Kumanovo Agreement.
Even today, not much has changed for Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija. They still walk the fine line of survival and extinction.
