`He should also be made to see what he has done to us - how he has left us'

If you want to find jubilation following the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, don't go to Neymiye Hoti, whose husband and teenage…

If you want to find jubilation following the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, don't go to Neymiye Hoti, whose husband and teenage son were among his victims in the worst of seven massacres with which the former Yugoslav president is charged. Her life fell apart on March 25th, 1999, shortly after NATO launched its air war against Serbia. Serb security forces stormed her village, Velika Krusa and she fled along with husband Fahredin, her 15-year-old son Kresnik and her teenage daughters, Tahuta and Ardita.

They became separated, and she hid with other villagers in the trees, as the Serbs fired into the woods and set fire to many of the houses. The next day the Serbs rounded them up. The women and young children were separated from the men who were marched away.

The men were taken first to the mosque, then to a deserted house on the outskirts. They were herded together into the downstairs rooms and locked in. Then the Serbs opened fire. For 15 minutes they poured machine-gun fire into the house. Then they went inside and put straw on the bodies, setting it on fire in an attempt to destroy the evidence.

When it was over, 105 men and boys were dead.

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Neymiye (42) and her daughters began the long grim trudge from the village with thousands of other refugees, part of a mass expulsion of 800,000 Kosovo Albanians. They made it to the border, after some of the women had been raped, only to endure a further agony when news arrived, two weeks later, that at least some of the men they had assumed were arrested had been killed. Weeks of agony passed before a friend from the village brought the news Neymiye dreaded.

"I was relieved when I heard about Milosevic but when I think of what I have lost, I cannot say I am happy," she said. "Milosevic was going to the trial but The Hague is too good for him. What does it mean to be in The Hague? I am sure it is like a hotel. He can sit and eat and be comfortable there. He has a nicer bed than me."

Neymiye would prefer a different fate for the former dictator. "You know, they should bring him here. We would burn his face and tear out his eyes and cut off his hands. And he should also be made to see what he has done to us - how he has left us," she said.

The dead are buried now in a cemetery on a grassy bank on one side of the village, with several Albanian flags, two black eagles on a red background, fluttering above and a view to the east of the Cursed Mountains that border Albania. Those too badly burned to be identified are buried together in a row at the front.

The graves of Fahredin and Kresnik lie further back, along with Fahredin's 63-year-old father Shemsedin.

"When I come here I always feel like I want to hug him," she says, stooping at the grave where masses of red, white and pink plastic flowers sit in bunches. "The sadness never goes. I am always so sad, it does not get any better. What did they want with my son? Why did they shoot him? He was only in the eighth grade."

And the sadness is not her only problem, for Velika Krusa is now no ordinary village. There are few able-bodied men and with so many families without a breadwinner, there is little charity to spare.

Neymiye and her two daughters, one of them a medical student, get by on her nurse's salary of £70 per month. She hopes for better things when her other son, 21-year-old Besnik, starts to earn money. He escaped execution only by a fluke; as a student in the capital, Pristina, he was unable to get to the village when the bombing started and survived.

Before the war, Neymiye and her husband worked as a nurse and doctor team. He was a gynaecologist for the area and downstairs is his clinic, his white coat still hangs on a red hangar. "All my children want to follow in the tradition of their parents; they all want to be involved with medicine," says Neymiye.

Milosevic's trial will be televised in Kosovo. Neymiye will not watch. "No way can I watch, no way could I bear it. I will ignore it. I will not read about it in the papers. It breaks my heart each time I have to think about this again."