Twenty-eight years ago, Serbian forces carried out an attack against the Jashari family in Prekaz, a village in the municipality of Skenderaj. At the time, media reporting from the ground was extremely difficult due to both technical and logistical obstacles. Nevertheless, international media documented the events that culminated in the heroic fall of the Jashari family.
The American newspaper The Washington Post reported on the events in March 1998 in an article titled “Serbia Attacks Ethnic Albanians.” The report stated that Serbian forces launched a new offensive against ethnic Albanians by attacking villages near Pristina in an operation that alarmed the administration of Bill Clinton and other Western governments.
According to the article, Serbian occupation police claimed that at least 20 Albanians and two Serbian police officers were killed in the clashes.
“The clashes began at dawn. Hundreds of paramilitary police, reportedly supported by armed helicopters and dozens of armored vehicles, attacked Albanian villages about 20 miles west of Pristina. Serbian police set up roadblocks to prevent journalists from approaching the area, but Albanian sources said that several houses in two villages, Lausha and Prekaz, were burned and that up to 3,000 women and children fled to nearby towns. The attack reportedly spread to a dozen other villages.”
The newspaper also wrote that the attack marked a further escalation of the conflict in Kosovo, which had about 2 million ethnic Albanians and fewer than 200,000 Serbs at the time. The assault came only five days after similar police operations in the Drenica region that reportedly killed four Serbian police officers and 25 Albanians.
The Washington Post further recalled that during the height of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, the administration of George H. W. Bush had warned Yugoslavia that U.S. forces might intervene militarily in Kosovo to stop Serbian actions against ethnic Albanians.
