Happy that he had been able to contact his son, he carved the date on a wall in front of the house while he was doing his lookout duty. At dawn, he went back inside, but couldn’t sleep. “He and the other men had been staying awake for months, waiting for their fate,” his son Butrint Bicurri told BIRN.

A Kosovo Liberation Army post was not far from his house, and the guerrillas who were fighting against Serbian forces used to go and eat at Bicurri’s house and other houses nearby. On the morning of May 7, houses in the neighbouhood started to come under artillery fire. Bicurri, along with his family, his two brothers and their families, decided to get out.

But 100 metres away, they were stopped by Serbian forces. Bicurri and his brothers Ferhat and Nexhdet, along with 12 other men, were separated from their families.

“They were taken to the bridge called Ura e Taliqit [Taliqi’s Bridge] in the centre of the city and executed several metres away,” Butrint Bicurri said.

At that point however, his family didn’t know he had been killed. His mother and eldest sister went from door to door, asking if anyone had heard anything about the missing men.

“My mother, grandmother, and two sisters heard the shootings but didn’t want to believe it,” Butrint Bicurri said. “With them was the pregnant wife of my cousin, who went into labour early. Later, we understood she was giving birth to a baby girl at the same time when her husband was killed.”

Two days later in Skopje, Bicurri’s son would hear that his father and the men had been seized, and that no one knew where they were.

“For me and the others, it was a torment that was being absorbed little by little, refusing to believe what had happened,” he said.

An illustrious career

Esat Bicurri had an illustrious career as a singer before his death at the age of 50, and was known across what was then Yugoslavia, in neighbouring Albania and beyond. He had been active on the music scene since joining a cultural-artistic group called Bajram Curri in 1970, and had won a series of awards for his work.

He was a three-time winner of the ‘Golden Ocarina’ award at the Kosovo Chords contest with his songs ‘I Remember That Meeting’, ‘Come, Come, White Summer’ and ‘There is Nothing More Beautiful Than Spring’, which are considered to be Albanian-language pop classics of their era.

Later, he became involved in organising concerts and festivals in neighbouring Albania, which was against the law because the border between Yugoslavia and Albania was closed and Kosovo Albanians were not allowed to travel there. “He crossed the border illegally to organise or participate in artistic activities in Albania,” his son said.

Bicurri was also responsible for two books. Three years before the war broke out in Kosovo, he published ‘I Sent You a Golden Box’, a collection of lyrics of old Albanian songs. His second book was titled ‘Gjakova’s Party of the Centuries’, a collection of old songs and traditional music from his hometown, which was published posthumously in 2006.

Composer Pranvera Badivuku, who wrote three award-winning songs for Bicurri, remembers him as a unique performer. “With his special voice and his dedication, he left behind artistic achievements that represent a rich heritage for Albanian music,” Badiviku told BIRN.

As well as being a singer, Bicurri was also an economist and worked in the managerial department of the hospital in Gjakovo/Djakovica, at a point when Kosovo Albanians’ access to healthcare had been limited by Slobodan Milosevic’s repressive regime.

“He and his friends managed to build a parallel clinic within the hospital, and many women from different cities and villages came to give birth,” his son said.

War crimes cover-up

When Bicurri’s son returned home two days after the Kosovo war officially ended on June 14, 1999, he joined many others who were looking for family members who had gone missing. “We were searching for him both among the living and the dead,” he recalled.

But it was more than four years later, in November 2003, when Esat Bicurri’s family was informed that the singer’s remains had been found.

They were discovered in a mass grave at a police training centre Batajnica, a suburb of the Serbian capital Belgrade, where the bodies of hundreds of Kosovo Albanian war victims had been covertly buried as part of an attempted cover-up of wartime crimes.

His son Butrint went to identify the body after it was taken to an improvised morgue in Rahovec/Orahovac in Kosovo.

“There were lots of people, mostly women, screaming for their children who’d been killed. It was a moment when you started to feel the pain of others more than your own,” Butrint Bicurri said.

The remains of his youngest brother Nexhdet were discovered a year later, while his other brother Ferhat was found in a mass grave in Serbia in 2006.

Twenty-five years after one of Kosovo’s best-known singers was silenced forever by Serbian forces, his family’s hopes that someone could be prosecuted for his murder have faded.

“We waited for four years for the body, and then we started to wait for justice because there was a survivor who saw who did it,” his son said.

“But to me, it [now] seems too late to hope for justice.”