Pregnant in a Warzone: Giving Birth as NATO’s Bombs Fell on Yugoslavia

On the night of March 24, 1999, NATO started bombing Yugoslavia. After negotiations failed, the Western military alliance launched a weeks-long series of air strikes aimed at forcing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to end his campaign of ethnic cleansing against Kosovo’s Albanians. That night, in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, Emine Berisha was hiding in the darkness in the basement of the university’s chemistry faculty along with her husband, her sister’s family and two other families. Nine months’ pregnant, Berisha was living at her sister’s house in Pristina after being displaced by the war from her home in the village of Koshare/Kosare almost a year earlier. On the morning before the NATO air campaign started, she went to a hospital, which was then operating as part of the parallel healthcare system set up by Kosovo Albanians outside the Serbian-run state system. However, doctors told her she was still several days away from giving birth. “I asked them if I could stay there because I was afraid,” Berisha tells BIRN. “But the doctor said no, the clinic was full, and there wasn’t even space to sit.” She walked back to her sister’s apartment in a city controlled by Yugoslav Army troops and Serbian police and paramilitaries. NATO air strikes were imminent. Her unborn baby’s survival, like her own, appeared uncertain. That evening, she heard that the NATO air campaign had begun, but recalls that the people around her felt no joy that the Western alliance was targeting Kosovo Albanians’ oppressors. “We had hoped for an agreement. We saw the bombardment as support, but we were also aware of what would follow,” she recalls. As the bombing began, Milosevic’s troops and police intensified their armed attacks, before they were eventually made to withdraw into Serbia. Then Berisha’s luck turned, in one of those rare incidents of solidarity across the war’s ethnic dividing lines that saved lives – and in this case, protected a future life, too. Her sister’s neighbour, Dragica Milicevic, a Serb woman, was trying to help the remaining residents in the building find safety. “Dragica gave my late sister, Adile, the key to the basement of the Chemistry Faculty at the University of Pristina, which was close to her apartment, and advised us to hide there, as she worked at the faculty,” Berisha says. “We went there. It was dark and cold. All we could hear were military vehicles and gunfire. There were around 30 of us,” Berisha says. “We had some blankets, but the floor was like ice. I couldn’t sit or lie down,” she adds. Milicevic promised her neighbours that she would keep an eye on the building where they lived and alert them if anything happened. By that point, most Kosovo Albanians had either fled Pristina or were trying to escape. Only a few remained hidden in basements as NATO’s bombardment targeted Yugoslav military sites within the city. ‘Unbearable anxiety’ in the maternity ward A photograph from a Swedish newspaper of Emine Berisha in hospital in Skopje in North Macedonia after fleeing Kosovo during the war in 1999. Photo courtesy of Emine Berisha. As her due date approached, Berisha’s anxiety about giving birth intensified. After the NATO air campaign began, the Albanian-run hospital had been partly evacuated. Berisha thought she had lost all access to medical care: “I was afraid of how I was going to deliver my baby.” When she and her sister returned briefly to their flat to collect food, they found the water had been cut off. “I remember Dragica brought us water, telling us: ‘Don’t worry about food and water,’” she says. She felt “unbearably anxious”; her anxiety intensifying her discomfort: “At times, I thought my contractions had started because I was in pain.” In the meantime, one of her sister’s neighbours urged her to go to the hospital, saying that some Albanian staff might still be there. She decided to try it. “I went to the hospital with my sister. They admitted me, and I saw that the first floor was full of police, while the upper floors were full of pregnant women, both Albanian and Serb,” she says. There were no Albanian medical staff there anymore. Berisha was placed in a room with a Serb woman. “We could only talk about our shared concern, how the birth would go,” she remembers. The hospital turned out to be a false hope. Berisha said that they heard from nurses and technical staff that maternity and neonatal care services had been partially abandoned, with shortages of medicines and equipment. “The night was a nightmare. They gathered us in the corridor and kept us there for hours, saying NATO was bombing, and only later allowed us to return to our rooms,” she says. Every night, she heard gunfire and explosions, and her fear kept growing. “No images could have captured the hellishness of war as starkly as what was happening inside the maternity ward at that time,” she reflects. One afternoon, she was told by some women who had given birth that day that some babies had been stillborn and their bodies had been taken away. “I was in constant anxiety, and I decided to escape from the hospital. I thought it was too dangerous for my unborn child. I was terrified,” she says. “I remember a woman who was about to give birth, when I told her I was going to escape, she began begging me to take her with me,” she adds. ‘Waiting for a bullet’ View from the Grand Hotel in Pristina on 24 March 1999 as NATO started air strikes on Yugoslavia. Photo: EPA/SASA STANKOVIC. After a couple of failed attempts to get away, she decided to ask the doctor for permission to go out, promising she would return in the afternoon. “I took the woman [who wanted to leave] with me, and we started walking. It was beyond anything one could imagine. The city was empty. But everywhere there were police and paramilitary vehicles,” she says. “I kept listening and expecting a bullet from behind, waiting to be killed.” When Berisha reached the place where her sister and her family had taken refuge, she found them preparing to leave. As they made their way to where people were gathering in an attempt to board a train to neighbouring North Macedonia, she saw paramilitaries separating men from women and children. “I could hear screams, cries and gunfire. I don’t even know how I managed to get onto the train,” she says. “The train stopped again in Fushe Kosove [on the outskirts of Pristina], and once more I saw men being taken away, heard screams and gunfire, and watched as money and gold were taken from people.” Berisha eventually gave birth at a hospital in North Macedonia’s capital, Skopje. She and her family were among nearly a million Kosovo Albanians who fled Kosovo at the time, leaving behind homes and possessions. “I didn’t even have clothes for the baby, because I had left them in the hospital in Pristina,” she recalls. For women, war is especially traumatic Emine Berisha in Ferizaj/Urosevac in March 2026. Photo: BIRN. Before she became pregnant, Berisha had worked as an unpaid teacher in the Kosovo Albanian parallel education system. These days, aged 57, she is a professor of Albanian at the Arts High School in Ferizaj/Urosevac. Looking back on her experiences during the NATO bombing, Berisha says it made her understand the price women pay in conflict. “War is terrible for everyone it come to, regardless of gender or nationality. But for women, particularly those who are pregnant, it is extremely traumatic,” she says. Vulnerable and often needing expert care and medicines, pregnant women often suffer disproportionately in conflict zones where proper medical facilities and trained staff are sparse or non-existent. Many become, as the British Medical Journal noted, “forgotten victims, killed by violence and by a lack of available care”. An investigation by the Guardian newspaper in December 2025 said that maternity care facilities, delivery wards, hospitals and medics had been targeted or disrupted some 300 times in the previous three years, mostly in conflict zones in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan. After the war in Kosovo ended in June 1999, Berisha turned remembrance into a family ritual, going to see her sister in Pristina every March 24 until her death three years ago. “We would revisit those memories. We would talk about [their Serb neighbour] Dragica [Milicevic] and her solidarity,” she says. When the NATO bombing led to the withdrawal of the Yugoslav Army and Serbian police from Kosovo, refugees like Berisha were safe to return. But many Serbs then fled, in fear of retribution. Berisha hasn’t seen Milicevic since March 1999. “After the war, she left immediately and we never heard from her again,” she explains. But, for Berisha, the empathy shown across what was supposedly an insurmountable divide during wartime was simply natural. “We would have helped her, just as she helped us. We are human,” she says. “Only the inhumane committed such atrocities in Kosovo.”