Our granddaughter would have been 24: Tragic testimony of parents of pregnant woman killed by cluster bomb

Photo: Niske Vesti

Radmila and Miloje Ilic from Nis lost their daughter Ljiljana (Ljilja) Spasic in the NATO bombing in 1999. Ljiljana was 26 years old, she was a fourth-year student at the Faculty of Medicine in Nis, seven months pregnant, and was looking forward to giving birth to a baby girl.

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When the city center got covered in cluster bombs, on May 7, she was on her way to the market with her mother-in-law, to buy cherries. Time passes, but the wounds remain forever, say Ljilja's parents, Niske Vesti reports.

Even after 24 years, the parents of Ljiljana Spasic, who was killed in the center of Nis by cluster bombs, are inconsolable. Every May 7, they go to Sumatovacka Street to lay flowers and light candles at the place where their daughter perished.

They remember that tragic day like it was yesterday. They had gone to a village on the first day of the war, because they felt safer there. Ljiljana, they say, came back to Nis on May 4 to have a regular medical check-up because she was seven months pregnant.

"Today Ljilja would be 50, and our granddaughter would be 24," her father Miloje Ilic says through tears.

Photo: Niske Vesti

The first cherries had just appeared, and Ljiljana wanted to buy some, so she went to the market with her mother-in-law. Cluster bombs awaited them in Sumatovacka Street. Ljiljana died on the spot, and her mother-in-law was seriously injured and had her leg amputated.

"Our son came to the village with his friends in the afternoon, although we also heard on TV that Nis suffered heavy casualties that day, because it was allegedly done in retaliation because of a NATO plane that had been shot down. He told us, 'our Ljilja is gone'. We were in shock, we didn't know what to do. Disbelief and shock," Ilic remembers.

Ljiljana was in her fourth year studying medicine, she had chosen to be a doctor and help others - and "lost her life to inhumane people," says Ljiljana's father.

The parents say that Ljljana's photo is now displayed in the hall of the Faculty of Medicine in Nis, together with the photo of two medical students who died in Kosovo as mobilized soldiers.

"We still live the same way today, the pain for our daughter hasn't let up. We live in the same building as our son, who now has his own children. We play with the grandchildren and take care of them, and somehow time passes, but it is still as difficult as it was on May 7, 1999," says Radmila's mother.

On that day, NATO dropped a carpet of cluster bombs on Sumatovacka Street, the city's main bus station and the Tvrdjavska marketplace. 16 people were killed and 18 were injured in that attack.

Their lives were extinguished at 11:20 am.

On that day, two containers with 150 banned cluster bombs were thrown down on Nis. No one has ever been held accountable for the killing of civilians, and NATO officials declared the victims to be "collateral damage."

(Telegraf.rs)