In March 1998, Serbian forces launched an attack on Prekaz.
Here, Serbian forces, with all their artillery, targeted the Jashari family.
And with the horror unfolding here, the world was soon notified.
This was done through the camera of former BBC correspondent in Kosovo, Vaughan Smith.
26 years after this event, Vaughan Smith has recounted his experiences.
“We were informed that something was happening in Prekaz, but what exactly we did not know. There were many Serbian police forming cordons on the road, and we had to pass through them. When we arrived in Prekaz, I had to climb a hill, and there I saw the village below me. The houses were already on fire and being targeted. It was difficult to film because I had to hide behind trees. I remember filming a tank destroying the houses and soldiers setting them on fire and looting them,” he said.
Vaughan Smith revealed a detail that he only understood after the end of the war in Kosovo.
The tanks used by the Serbian army in the attack on the Jashari family were taken from the Bosnian and Herzegovinian war.
“Later I realized that these tanks had been taken by the Serbs from the Dutch army in Srebrenica a few years earlier and were now being used against the Jasharis in Prekaz,” he said.
All these scenes, Smith showed to the world.
But he almost paid for it with his life.
“When I finished shooting, the mission was to leave because there was still time to appear on television. But the Serbian forces saw me as I was leaving and pushed me with a Kalashnikov towards us. One of the bullets hit me, but I didn’t feel anything. When I left, I looked at my phone and saw that the bullet had hit it and was still inside the phone. I still keep this phone,” says the former BBC correspondent.
During his career, Smith covered wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Chechnya.
But he adds that a case similar to that of the Jashari family has not been seen anywhere else in the world.
“I have never seen a case like the Jashari family. There are many elements there, for example, could some of the family members have escaped? But no, they chose to stay and were all killed. To understand Prekaz, you have to understand how many visitors have gone there until today. What the Serbian army did cannot be called a success because they killed everyone except one or two survivors. This is not a victory in war. On the other hand, when you look at it from the Albanians’ side, it had a completely different effect. Prekaz aroused resistance. People from the diaspora began to return to fight, the KLA expanded and emerged. All this is closely related to Prekaz and the Jasharis,” he says.
For the war in Kosovo, Smith also made a documentary “The Valley,” which remains one of the most famous documentaries in the United Kingdom.
