The Wild Boars

The Wild Boars is a fictional story about the life of the protagonist, Ermal Bllaca. Ermal is a ten-year-old boy, living with his family in the city of Gjakova, when a Serbian police patrol swarms through their neighbourhood identifying and massacring ethnic Albanians. The mass killings of civilians were conducted across Kosovo as part of the ethnic cleansing that followed in the wake of the NATO airstrikes of March 1999. This fictional story mirrors the real life events of Dren Caka, who as a young boy fled from Serbian police along with thousands of other Albanians to neighbouring countries. I had the chance to meet Dren for the first time when as a journalist covering the plight of the refugees, I interviewed him at the military hospital where he was being treated for a bullet wound. Dren described to me how his mother and three sisters were killed by the Serbian Police. I want to thank him for being my inspiration to write The Wild Boars. I did not meet him again, even though he lives somewhere in Canada. Through my research I discovered that he had several times been called to The Hague as a witness against Slobodan Milosevic. In this novel, the fictional Ermal grows up in Canada. His father moves on with his life, but the boy is consumed by thoughts of revenge and plots to hunt down and kill Spasic, his mother's killer. He tracks down Spasic in Serbia where he is a hunter of wild boar. The story unfolds as a plan for revenge that takes the reader from Canada to Serbia to Australia.--P.I. Kapllani