FORMER POLICEMEN ON TRIAL

The entire territory of Kosovo resembles a big courtroom for years now. The Prishtina Committee for protection of Human Rights, headed by Adem Demaqi, has been warning for a long time that on the average at least one member of each and every Albanian family was either summoned by the police to a so-called informative conversation, has spent some time, "by mistake" or due to an offence, behind bars, or, if the worst came to the worst, has been taken to court where his destiny was decided for several future years of his life. "A whole nation seems to be on trial" - respectable Kosovo analysts tend to say. Since November last year, the public in Kosovo is preocuppied with the outcome of a pending court trial which, by a large number of defendants, is comparable with those from the times after the Second World War.

It is a matter of over 150 arrested former workers of the Kosovo Ministry of Internal Affairs of Albanian nationality who are charged with "having committed the crime of association aimed at inimical activity pursuant paragraph 1 of Article 136 which refers to threatening territorial integrity pursuant paragraph 1 of Article 116 of the Criminal Code of FRY", that is, that they have "from 1991 until November 1994, by order of the 'Government of the Republic of Kosovo', formed a parallel 'Ministry of Internal Affairs' and 'State Security Service' in seven centres, with the objective to threaten the constitutional system and territorial integrity of Serbia and Yugoslavia".

At the Tribunal of five chaired by Dragoljub Zdravkovic, 49 lawyers of the defence are trying to refute allegations of the District Public Prosecutor, Jovica Jovanovic, about any involvement of their 72 clients (out of which 11 are not in Kosovo) in actions listed in the charges. In the building of the Assembly of Kosovo suspended by the Serb parliament back in 1990, where the trial is taking place, all the defendants have rejected the charges. The fact that during investigation they had "confessed" that they had formed the parallel ministry of internal affairs, the defendants explained by "terrible physical torture" applied by the workers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia for Kosovo, so that in the converted courtroom, one could even often hear names of men who had partaken in it.

For instance, the first of the accused, Avdija Mehmedovic, mentioned the notorious room no. 45 in the building of the Prishtina Ministry of Internal Affairs, where Miomir Jevtovic and Dragoljub Miolic waited for him, and men he often "met" with until April this year, Dusan Jovanovic from Sremska Kamenica, Dusan Jovanovic from Prishtina and his pupil, as he stressed, Momcilo Dojcilo from Lipljani. Apart from the failures in the investigation procedure unprecedented in court practice, such as the fact that the statements of the defendants were signed by the investigative judge only on the day of the trial, after remarks of the defender and at a court recess, or the fact that the Tribunal did not prolong the custody for the defendants so they were detained in jail for six days unlawfully, the defence seems to be founded on the manner in which "confessions" were obtained.

One of the lawyers of the defence, a former Kosovo official who also experienced the bench of the accused after the present President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia had come to power and who was quickly acquitted when it was determined that the charges were unfounded, Azem Vllasi, believes that "the police had been given orders to 'prove' the existence of a criminal offence, and due to a lack of material evidence, it set out to extort confessions from the defendants about forming of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Kosovo by brutal force, which is directly contrary to provisions of the Law on Criminal Proceedings (Article 10, 218) which even more directly bans such actions. In lack of other material evidence, even these extorted confessions do not imply that actually such a police was established as an inimical association, nor are there traces of the fact in the investigation that the accused wished to secede a part of the territory by force in order to form a separate state or annect it to another state - Albania. Unfortunately," Vllasi says, "based on experience, the courts just simply copy the charges for the verdict".

In December last year, Amnesty International reacted to the "treatment" of the accused in jail by their "guards", demanding "urgent measures in order to organize medical check-ups" of the suspected former policemen of the Ministry of the Interior of Kosovo, and demanded that the "members of state security who participated in the wave of violence be suspended from duty". Just a few days ago, a delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross was issued a permit to visit the accused workers of State Security Service in jail, having waited for six months for it. In a conversation with the interested journalists, they declared that they could not inform the public about the state they found the prisoners in, but that they would prepare a special report. It is interesting that their visit to the accused occurred after a former policeman from Urosevac, Bajram Jakaj, had attempted suicide in his prison cell, and is for days in prison hospital in Belgrade.

All the interrogated persons in this court proceedings claimed that they had acted solely within the established Independent Trade Union of Former workers of the Kosovo Ministry of the interior who were discharged from jobs in the period from 1990 until 1992, and that their activities, according to the testimony of the first defendant, Avdija Mehmedovic, were humanitarian, that they were collecting data about their colleagues who had been summoned for informative conversations, and that there were 700 of them, according to Mehmedovic. "Physical torture was applied against 300 of them, and in 200 cases apartments were searched, there was one murder, and 650 of them had left Kosovo with their families due to various threats", Mehmedovic said. It was not denied either that conversations of police bodies were tracked by 10 talky-walkies, "but only when the situation was so complicated that a danger existed that conflicts of great proportions might have occurred, that is, in order to inform the international public in time for it to prevent possible conflicts". In his presentation, Mehmedovic went back to the times of the beginning of the war in Croatia and in Bosnia, reminding that activities of Seselj's and Arkan's supporters were intensified in Kosovo at the time, when massive and often public distribution of arms took place among the local Serb and Montenegrin population, adding that a lot was done in the trade union for "better informing for the sake of personal and collective safety". The public here still remembers the interview published by Belgrade journal BORBA in November last year, at the time former policemen Albanians were arrested, with one of the Leaders of the so-called Serb Resistance Movement, Mirolsav Colevic, who publicly admitted that, after talks between the Serb President, Slobodan Milosevic, and representatives of the Movement, Serb and Montenegrin population in Kosovo was very often publicly armed "but insufficiently", he complained and demanded creation, as he said, of the First and the Second Krajina Corps.

One of the three layers of defence of the first defendant Mehmedovic, Azem Vllasi, claims that fear is just a logical feeling of people who hear information that the opposed party is being armed. "Based on a detailed insight into the Gnjilane and Prishtina cases in which I defend several accused persons, I claim with full responsibility that in the actions of the defendants there were no elements of criminal acts, because their activity was primarily the activity of a trade union. If it had exceeded the limits of a classical trade union activity at any time, it was due to the circumstances we live in, and, which is extremely important, it remained on the level of mere verbalism, but never penetrated into the sphere of anything criminal". To a question how he comments on this trial, Vllasi was resolute in the assessment that the criminal proceedings instigated against the former workers of the Albanian Province police is "a classical and drastic example of staged police trials. Namely," he continues, "the prosecution and the court in this case appear only as a formal procedural cover-up for what the politics plans and the police effectuates. In this case, the authorities decided to settle accounts with what they call parallel institutions and forms of political organization and operation of the Albanians in Kosocvo, and the police then started action to 'reveal' their existence and 'prove' their 'incriminated' activity", Vllasi explains.

So far, three trials have been terminated - two in Pec and one in Gnjilane - against the former workers of Kosovo police of Albanian nationality. The first group in Pec, which consisted of nine men, was sentendced to the total of 34 years, and the other group of seven Alnbanians were sentenced to the total sentence of 25 years of imprisonment. It remained quite surprising that the group in Gnjilane who were charged also with a serious criminal act of "subversion of territorial integrity of the FRY and establishment of a parallel Ministry of Internal Affairs" resulted in much more lenient sentences. Out of the 28 former policemen, 16 were sentenced to imprisonment from six months to three years. Eight of them are not in Kosovo, and four were acquitted. The surprise is even greater that they were all set free until the verdict comes into force. Azem Vllasi who is a protagonist of this trial too, says that "in all cases, sentences are a surprise because they were pronounced in a total lack of evidence that any criminal offence was committed. If the verdicts differ, the biggest surprise for me are the penalties pronounced in Pec because they are drastically high and there is no proved act. They are much less surprising in Gnjilane, because although pronounced for acts which were not proved, they are lower than those in Pec. It seems that the height of the penalty in certain courts is determined arbitrarily, depending on the court which just assesses whether the punishment will be satisfactory for those 'up'", Vllasi claims.

Connoisseurs of the situation in Kosovo, however, expect that sentences which will be pronounced in the trial to 72 former policemen going on in Prishtina and 44 of them which is taking place in Prizren (among them there are those who are charged for discharging duties in parallel municipal bodies) will be somewhat more lenient. As reason for such opinion, the recent arrest of the leader of Serb Radicals in Gnjilane, Vojislav Seselj is mentioned most frequently and the reaction of the League of Communists-Movement for Yugoslavia concerning it saying that he is to blame for stirring up interethnic and religious hatred. In other words, they say, "it is an alleged manifestation of good will towards the Kosovo Albanians and an alleged demonstration to the international community that good will exists, but that the other party must show it too"...

Violeta OROSI