On March 17, 2004, Spasoje Pavlovic and his family left their home and joined their Serb neighbours in the courtyard of the village church in Bellopoja/Belo Polje in western Kosovo, where they were seeking safety as an angry crowd of thousands approached the village.

Earlier that Wednesday morning, Pavlovic remembers how his relatives were talking about protests by Kosovo Albanians. From his house, he could soon hear the voices of the crowd. Violence seemed imminent.

“It was a very difficult day. We went into the church and remained inside for hours. There were attacks with weapons and Molotov cocktails,” he told BIRN at his house in Bellopoja/Belo Polje, where he still lives.

“I remember there were shootings; some old people were beaten up. It was a nightmare. We ran for several hundred metres through the hostile crowd before [NATO’s Kosovo peacekeeping force] KFOR troops and UN police managed to evacuate us.”

Pavlovic didn’t know at the time about the scale of the unrest that had erupted across Kosovo on March 17 and continued into the following day. Nineteen people were killed in the inter-ethnic violence: 11 Albanians and eight Serbs. A total of 954 were injured, 4,100 displaced from their homes and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage was caused.

Although protests by ethnic Albanians started peacefully in the city of Mitrovica that day in response to reports of the deaths of three boys, they soon spread to other parts of Kosovo and became increasingly violent, as demonstrators attacked Serb and ethnic Ashkali civilians and their property as well as Serbian Orthodox buildings.

The beatings and arson of March 2004 followed two other waves of violent unrest across Kosovo that also affected Bellopoja/Belo Polje. In spring 1999, most of the ethnic Albanians’ homes in the village were burned by Serbian forces as they waged a campaign of repression against civilians while trying to defeat the guerrilla rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA.

A couple of months later, in June 1999, after Yugoslav troops and Serbian security forces withdrew from Kosovo in the wake of a 78-day NATO bombing campaign, Pavlovic’s house and hundreds of other Serbs’ homes were also burned. In July 1999, three Serb civilians were killed in the village.

In 2003, Spasojevic was among the first Serbs return to live in Bellopoja/Belo Polje as the village was rebuilt. But the following year, on March 17, Serbs’ homes in village were targeted again even though Bellopoja/Belo Polje was almost adjacent to a KFOR base housing NATO troops from Italy.

Pavlovic is among three Serbs still living in Bellopoja/Belo Polje who experienced the March 2004 unrest, and he is very hesitant about speaking about the day when he was forced to leave his home for a second time in five years. He also declined to be photographed.

“This house was built twice, but we have always lived here in a good neighbourhood, and we have not harmed anyone,” he said.

Inter-ethnic incidents escalate

The March 2004 violence was preceded by three incidents. The first happened on March 15 in the village of Caglavica/Cagllavica, where a young Serb was wounded in an attack. In response, Serbs from the village blocked the Pristina-Skopje road and threw stones at ethnic Albanians’ vehicles. This provoked anger in the country’s Albanian community and strong condemnation from its political leaders.

At around the same time, KLA war veterans’ associations organised protests in several cities against the UN’s Kosovo mission over the arrests of former KLA commanders who had been charged with war crimes.

The third incident happened on March 16, when three ethnic Albanian boys drowned in the Ibar river in the Serb-majority municipality of Zubin Potok. The tragic accident was reported as an ethnically-motivated crime.

By the evening of March 17, violence had broken out across Kosovo and Serb houses in Bellopoja/Belo Polje were on fire, recalled Zenel Shabaj, one of the village’s ethnic Albanian residents. “Unfortunately, nobody could do anything, not even KFOR,” he told BIRN.

When the Kosovo war ended in June 1999, the UN Security Council had established the NATO peacekeeping force KFOR to take over security and the United Nations Interim Administration Mission, UNMIK, to serve as a temporary civilian administration.

Watchdog organisation Human Rights Watch said in a report in 2004 that the failure of KFOR and UNMIK’s international police force to effectively respond to the March unrest left much of the security in the hands of the Kosovo Police Service, many of whose officers were only recently trained and poorly equipped to deal with the violence.

According to the report, some Albanian police officers acted professionally, risking their own lives to rescue besieged Serbs in many towns and villages.

Vukmen Petrovic, now 80 years old, had returned to live in Bellopoja/Belo Polje the year before. In March 2004 when the village was attacked, he was in Serbia.

“That week I went to Belgrade for some medical treatment. Then the unrest happened,” Petrovic told BIRN. Three weeks later, he came back to the village to find his house destroyed.

“At that time, it seemed there was a stark choice facing the Serb people in Kosovo. But despite what happened, I decided to return and continue to live here,” he said.

Petrovic’s rebuilt house has been surrounded by the ruins of other Serbs’ houses ever since, and most of his relatives and neighbours never came back to the village. These days, new homes are being built on the sites of properties sold by the Serbs who once resided here.

“I continue to live with my wife here, and we never had any problem,” Petrovic said.

A bullet to the heart

Near the Orthodox church in Bellopoja/Belo Polje is Blazenka Dasic’s house. Dasic was in Montenegro on March 17, 2004 when one of the people from the crowd that stormed the village that day, 30-year-old Esat Tahiraj from Novosella/Novo Selo near the city of Peja/Pec, was killed, close to Dasic’s home.

According to a police report, Tahiraj, who was a KLA member, was shot dead by a US policewoman who was working for UNMIK. No further proceedings were taken. However, at least 20 people from the group that attacked Bellopoja/Belo Polje were given sentences ranging from four to six years in prison.

Muhamet Tahiraj remembers that Esat, his youngest brother, was at home that day but was called out to protest by his former KLA comrades. He said that it was not only the story of the three boys killed in Mitrovica that instigated the protests.

“What frustrated them were the hundreds of injured people who were being brought from Mitrovica here to the hospital in Peja,” Tahiraj told BIRN, referring to protesters injured in clashes with police and KFOR troops.

“It was a very chaotic and confusing situation. Lots of panic and euphoria. I heard the crowd was heading to Gorazhdec [a Serb-populated village] but they stopped at Bellopoja,” he added. “I think my brother became a victim because of that.”

Tahiraj said that his brother was shot dead while he was sitting down because he had lost his voice while shouting at protesters to stop. “It is true that Esat slapped a Serb man, but he was not armed and when he was killed, he was sitting down,” Tahiraj said.

After his brother was killed, Tahiraj said that rumours spread that he was murdered by a Serb, inciting frustration among the crowds of protesters, who wanted to retaliate by surrounding the Peja/Pec municipality building and police station and burning then down.

“I took my [other] brother, who was a policeman at that time but had been disarmed by UN police, and we went to the hospital. I saw the Glock bullet in [Esat’s] heart, and I understood he had been killed by the police,” he said. “Then I called his friends to save the [municipality and police station] buildings.”

That evening, Kosovo’s Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi, speaking in the village of Caglavica/Cagllavica where the protests started, urged ethnic Albanians to refrain from violence.

A USAID report issued in the months after the March 2004 violence, said that the houses of about 800 Serbs, 90 Ashkali people and two Albanians were completely destroyed or severely damaged.

Thirty Serbian Orthodox Churches were destroyed and 11 others damaged; three schools were also damaged, according to the report. It said that more than 260 people were arrested for organising and participating in the riots.

According to data collected by the Pristina-based Humanitarian Law Centre, citing UNMIK and OSCE statistics from 2008, a total of 399 people were charged over the March violence. Another 157 people were charged with misdemeanours.

It remains unclear how many people were ultimately convicted, however. Kosovo’s Judicial Council told BIRN that it doesn’t have any total figures for the number of trials or those sentenced over the March 2004 unrest.

In the years that followed, the government of Kosovo, along with various international donors, has paid more than 200 million euros to repair the damage caused to churches, cemeteries and private houses.

But this hasn’t given many who left Bellopoja/Belo Polje because of the unrest the confidence to return to the village, where what happened back in March 2004 has left lasting scars on both buildings and people.

“It was the worst day of my life,” Pavlovic said.