KLECKA, CRIME OR PROPAGANDA

AIM Pristina, 9 September, 1998

When a few days ago Kosovo was visited by assistant US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, for human rights, John Shatack and president of international commission for the questions of disappeared persons on the territory of former Yugoslavia, Bob Dole, it was expected that they would finally publicly state their stand concerning the case which occurred in the village of Klecka near Lipljani about ten days ago when according to what the official Serbian authorities claimed, remains of 22 Serb civilians were found who had been killed, as stated, by members of the Liberation Army of Kosovo (OVK). They were expected to give a statement especially because regime press and electronic media were already reporting that this crime (committed by the Albanians?!) was condemned by international mediator for re-establishing of Serb-Albanian negotiations, Christopher Hill, although in his appearance in front of the journalists in Pristina, without mentioning this specific misdeed, he had condemned every such crime regardless of who had committed it. Nevertheless, both Shatack and Dole insisted that independent international experts be permitted to come in order to clarify how the crime had been committed, who had committed it, what the exact number of persons killed was and whether the mass grave existed in the first place, which state media were reporting about for days, although not a single specific piece of evidence was given. In the eyes of the local public how did the Klecka case happen and how is it experienced?

On 29 August this year, at the height of the Serb offensive, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia (MUP) issued a statement claiming that, after taking over control of the village of Klecka near Lipljani, remains of 22 kidnapped and then killed Serb civilians were found, whose bodies were then put on fire by members of the OVK in the pit for slaking lime which served as a crematory. State television presented this piece of news with shots from this village and a statement of young men Bekim Mazreku and Luan Mazreku - Albanians who spoke about shooting of Serb civilians by a firing squad, raping of women, their physical maltreatment... Remains of bones neatly arranged on a piece of white cloth could be seen on the film, which the spokesman of MUP of Serbia, Bozidar Filic, claimed were remains of kidnapped civilians.

The news about this monstrous crime shook up the public in Kosovo and elsewhere. However, the accompanying texts written by regime journalists which were extremely vehement, aggressive and, one would say, with insufficient evidence on perpetrators of this misdeed, and different data even in the statements of brothers Bekim and Luan Mazreku, soon started to cause doubts about reality of interpretation of the event in the village Klecka. The "discovery" of the crematory started increasingly to impose the question not only among the Albanian but also among the Serb intellectual public that this might have been just another fabrication of Serb propaganda?!

In the first few days, which is customary for Kosovo and everything concerning Kosovo, the conflicting parties, Serb and ethnic Albanian, accused each other of the murder in the village of Klecka. While Serbian authorities and circles in Kosovo close to them imputed this crime to Kosovo Albanians, more precisely to the OVK, Kosovo Albanians firmly denied the possibility that this beastly misdeed could have been committed by members of the OVK. While the Serb party demanded that the world immediately take the discovery of the mass grave and crematory for granted and tried to force the world on its basis to put the OVK on the list of terrorist organizations, on the other hand, the Committee for Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms in Pristina demanded that this case be investigated and clarified by unbiased international experts. After the news on discovery of the crematory in the village of Klecka had been published, representative of the OVK who is somewhere in the West, Barhyl Mahmuti, declared that "the OVK has never killed Serb civilians", while the Main Staff of the OVK, in its statement for the public, stressed that witnesses who appeared in front of local and foreign TV cameras, Bekim and Luan Mazreku, had never been members of the OVK. These young men who, one would say, are not more than 20 years old, were called "collaborationists and smugglers". To corroborate the allegation that Mazreku brothers had never carried guns, the Albanian press carried the testimony of their cousin Nevledin Mazreku who stated that these two had been arrested on their way to find food for their family, expressing readiness to give evidence that his cousins had not been members of the OVK.

Political representative of the OVK, Adem Demaqi, assessed the case in the village of Klecka as "fabrication of Serbian propaganda and a trap in which the Serb regime itself will be caught". Nevertheless, the Pristina Committee for protection of human rights, in the request addressed to the Hague Tribunal for war crimes to form a special and independent team of experts for forensic medicine and pathologists, underlined the following: "should it be confirmed that this act had actually taken place, we sharply condemn perpetrators of this terrible crime against whom criminal proceedings should be instigated".

In the meantime, the propagandist machinery reached its climax in launching this piece of news, in order to incriminate Kosovo Albanians, as it was commented, but also, as the analysts estimate, in order to improve as much as possible the unfavourable image of the Serb party in this conflict in the world, especially because international associations spoke about the figure of more than 800 killed Kosovo Albanians, many of whom were women (127), children (88) and and elderly, and due to armed conflicts, of more than 300 thousand civilians who were forced to leave their homes which were then set on fire by police forces.

The very manner in which the news about the crime in Klecka was presented raises certain doubt about its truthfulness. On 27 August, the police, the investigative judge of the district public prosecutor's office in Pristina and Bekim and Luan Mazreku, who were presented as and later declared themselves to be members of the OVK, went to the village of Klecka to give statements of the crime on site and to reconstruct its course. The exclusive right to be present was given to a TV crew of the Associated Press, on the very same day when a convoy of local and foreign journalists was taken by the Media Centre to Dulje, on the road between Stimlje and Suva Reka, which the police had taken control of the previous day. Having recorded the situation in the village and the questioning by the investigative judge, (without the presence of the investigative judge) the two men were interviewed by military commentator Milovan Drecun which was then broadcast in a special program from this village. Mazreku brothers testified for the third time about the mentioned crimes the next day, when the Media Centre organized another visit of a large group of domestic and foreign journalists, as if it was happening for the first time, without the presence of their lawyer. Although the journalists were accommodated in Grand Hotel in Pristina and had had the opportunity to see the film of the Associated Press on the very first evening and to send reports about this event, state media started mentioning this crime only in the evening of the next day.

A detail from the "investigative procedure" is also interesting. Luan and Bekim Mazreku talked about ten killed Serb civilians, two children inclusive, but then state media reached the figure of "more than 20", and then ended up with the statement of MUP of Serbia in which it was claimed that there were 22 civilians of Serb and Albanian origin. In his statement Luan Mazreku said that the bodies of the killed civilians were buried "around here, by the road", but never even mentioned cremation. It is also absurd that the official authorities have not shown interest to investigate the "confession" about the existence of the mass grave, so that the indicated spot remained unexamined. If one knows that the village of Klecka had been controlled by the police for more than a week before the statement on the crime, and that Luan and Bekim Mazreku were arrested back on 30 July in a completely different place, this not only causes doubt but raises the question why murder of Serb civilians was at first passed over in silence. Or maybe it was the matter of choice of the right moment for presenting the news to the public. And it was presented just a day after the 11-member Aslani family had been killed by a tank shell at the moment they were leaving their home because the conflict in their village near Suva Reka was flaring up. There were eight children among them at the age from six months to 13, and three women, which was especially disturbing for the international public.

The haste with which the Union of Journalists of Serbia invited world organizations of journalists "to come immediately to Klecka in order to write about the crime of Albanian terrorists and to condemn this crime" also speaks in favour of the thesis that the authorities wished to make a quick propagandist breakthrough about suffering of (only) the Serb population. Since the desired impact was not achieved, because the world media published the news very cautiously expressing doubts about its truthfulness, state television started a counter-attack. In a special program, Serb correspondents spoke with bitterness about "boycott" of the information about the crematory in the village of Klecka by foreign media. They were angry even with the Russian and Chinese media which are around here known as "friends of the Serb people".

The news about atrocities in Klecka were accompanied by films and testimonies in the nearby village of Senik where thousands of Albanian civilians found refuge when after shelling by Serb armed forces 10 Kosovo Albanians were killed and over 40 were wounded. The International Committee of the Red Cross brought that very evening 13 seriously wounded women and children from this region to the hospital in Pristina, and a few ten of them were offered medical assistance on the spot.

That the case in Klecka cannot be taken for granted as the truth even by Serb intellectuals and experts is best illustrated by the statement of the pathologist of the Military Medical Academy in Belgrade, Zoran Stankovic, carried by Belgrade daily Blic: "We should have concrete evidence. There is plenty of emotion, but the investigative authorities should be permitted to do their job". He assessed the procedure of interrogation of the indicted was illegitimate. Stankovic stressed that "an indictment cannot be constructed only on statements of two witnesses". And it is known that Serb investigative authorities repeatedly applied torture in investigations of arrested Kosovo Albanians and that five persons died in the past month and a half as the result of that.

Indeed, practice shows that there has never been an armed conflict in which there were no misdeeds of either parties involved. That is why investigation carried out by a truly independent expert team would reveal plenty, if for no other reason, it would mitigate the unfounded hatred of the other party especially in this situation in Kosovo in which it is easy and simple to manipulate human remains. Therefore, it is necessary to find answers to the following questions: how many persons were actually killed, whether the bones in the "crematory" - pit for slaking lime (experts say that at the temperature of 1000 degrees, remains of bones cannot be preserved) belonged to the Serbs or Serb civilians alone, or perhaps to the killed Kosovo Albanians in the village of Poklek near Glogovac and other surrounding places (which the municipal Committee for protection of human rights in Pristina doubts), in what way they had lost their lives, whether there was a massacre, raping, cutting off parts of the bodies...

There is also the open question whether Yugoslav authorities will permit an investigation by world experts for forensic medicine, including arrival of David Schaffer, American envoy for war crimes on the territory of former Yugoslavia, who has not been issued a visa to this day.

And while analysts of the developments in Kosovo assumed that in the following few days, another "discovery" of mass graves could be expected, MUP of Serbia issued a statement that 11 bodies of shot Serb civilians were found near Glodjane, and that it had information about another 40 killed and six mass graves in the vicinity of this village and the village of Irznic. It seems that the story about "the good guys and the bad guys" in Kosovo will last for a long time to come...

AIM Pristina

Rrahman PACARIZI