Despite the clouds, the sun was shining in Pristina, Jelena Petkovic writes for the Association of Journalists of Serbia (UNS).
At 21 degrees, the cold and the crepuscular rays reminded the journalist Marjan Melonasi too that the autumn was close.
He had just finished a half-hour show on Radio Kosovo, maybe even by warning fellow citizens of the fact that one should have contrived and started preparing for long winter that was knocking at their doors in the destroyed Kosovo.
At 2:10p.m., he left the building located in the center of Pristina and got into an orange taxi. Neighbors whose offices were across the street saw him. It was 9 September 2000 and this is all the family has known about him ever since then.
– The two of us spoke over the phone on 6 September. I was supposed to go to Nis to get some documents, and he called me to tell me not to worry. His phone was playing up and he would not call me for two or three days. He never came back – his mother, Cica Jankovic, recounts for the Journalists’ Association of Serbia (JAS) from her wrung heart.
Appeals to Thaci and Haradinaj
Not suspecting that she would not see him for 18 years, she was waiting to hear his voice over the phone again. Instead of hearing from her son, her soul was screaming upon hearing terrible news from a former neighbor from Novi Pazar.
– She had heard what happened on TV and called me. I had no idea. It was a shock, followed by disbelief. I will not tell you everything I have tried to do. I called Marjan’s grandfather who was living in Pristina. He was trying to calm me; he did not let me come. I would try to find him, he said.
Marjan’s grandfather, Krista Melonasi, had been the Principal of the School of Internal Affairs in Vucitrn for 13 years. He stayed with his grandson in the town because he did not want to let him stay there alone.
– All those generations of police officers, who later became members of KLA and other Albanian structures, had studied in grandfather’s school. He went to Hashim Thaci, and he went to Ramush Haradinaj, but they did not say anything to him. Considering where he had worked, I was firmly convinced that grandfather would be able to find out what happened to my son, no matter what the truth was. As if a living being were water able to evaporate, disappear. Just like Marjan – she says.
Krista Melonasi died last year.
See at: https://www.b92.net/eng/news/crimes.php?yyyy=2018&mm=10&dd=01&nav_id=105180
