The Wild Boars

The Wild Boars is a fictional story based on true events in the life of the protagonist, Ermal Bllaca. The previous draft "The Hunter" was shortlisted by Quattro Books in 2015. Ermal was a ten-year-old boy, living with his family in the city of Gjakova, when a Serbian police patrol swarmed 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.
The fictional aspects of the story are that the police patrol was led by Dragan Spasic, who is the Bllaca family’s neighbour. Young Ermal witnesses Spasic killing his mother and sisters along with scores of other women and children in the attack on a hideout in the neighbourhood.
The young boy flees with thousands of other Albanians to neighbouring countries. He reunites with his father and the two come to Canada, where they start a new life struggling with the ghosts of the past.
Ermal Bllaca, the sole surviving witness to the Gjakova massacre is called to The Hague Tribunal to testify against former president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic. Though Milosevic died in a prison cell, many of his warlords and other vigilantes fled to Serbia and elsewhere, where they live carefree lives.
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 Spasic and kill him. He tracks down his former neighbour 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.
As an Albanian who is very active in the North American and European Albanian community, I came to know of the story of the ten-year-old boy whose experience forms the basis of the story. The boy settled in Ottawa and is now an adult. He is tortured by memories of a tragedy that shattered his childhood and took his family from him.
The novel is written as a work of fiction, but the corresponding historical events are factual and accurate in dates and big-picture detail. I want to thank the editors Nina Munteanu, Cheryl Xavier and Brandon Pitts for their contributions to this novel Special thanks to TiranaWeb and the programer Sokol Papathimiu for making this dream come true through Smashwords.