The vast majority of cluster munitions contamination in Kosovo is the result of use by NATO forces against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during "Operation Allied Force" from march to June 1999. The United States, the Netherlands and the UK used different types of cluster munitions.
Fikret Braha, 20 years old
- Fikret Braha © Sylvain Ogier / Handicap International
On the day of the accident, Fikret was standing in a field, ten metres away from the explosion. One of his sheep activated a cluster munition that had been in a trench since the bombing in 1999.
Out of the 150 sheep belonging to Fikret’s family, thirteen were killed. In fact, it was the presence of these sheep that saved his life. As Fikret was thrown to the ground there was a strange noise in his head, he felt wounds on his head, in his left eye, on his neck, his torso and his left arm. An employee that was there on his first day of work was standing more than fifty metres away and still received shrapnel in his forehead.
In a daze Fikret stood up and shouted for help. Help came rapidly from the Kosovo Force (KFOR) camp, but even though Fikret was only thirty metres away from the camp’s outer limit, necessary security procedures restrained the rescue workers from reaching him immediately. It took rescuers about twenty minutes to secure a safe route to get to him. He was taken on a stretcher to the KFOR base hospital, where he spent two and a half months recovering from the accident. He was then taken to the Pristina hospital for ten days, where, after all other options where exhausted, what was left of Firket’s left eye had to be removed.
The injury to Fikret’s left arm posed a serious obstacle as he is left-handed. He cannot use his left arm very much now and he’s had to drop out of technical college where he was training to be a welder. He can no longer help his brother repair trucks, as he used to do. Fikret says that the accident shattered his dreams, and it’s been hard for him to adapt to his new situation.
Fikret doesn’t have any projects going at the moment so he focuses on staying with his family and trying to help them as much as he can, in spite of his physical and psychological injuries. He is not as energetic as he used to be. He gets tired quickly and cannot deal with having too many people around him. Despite the troubling memories of the accident his favourite activity is still taking the sheep out to graze. It’s how he remains active and useful to his family.
“His character changed a lot since the accident. He’s more withdrawn. I sleep in the room next to his and I wake up some nights when he screams as he has nightmares”, says his brother. “I took him on a vacation to the beach in Albania. Most of the time he spent on the beach he was sleeping.”
Fikret receives a monthly pension of €50 from the Ministry of Health, but what he really would like is a permanent artificial eye. He received one in Albania, but it doesn’t match his right eye. He has to take it out twice a day to clean it and he has to remove it after three days. That’s all this twenty-year-old man can think of for now.
