Crimes in Kosovo

Taking Turns in Violence

AIM Podgorica, 21 August, 1999 (By AIM correspondent from Belgrade)

In almost virtual Serbian reality, two months after the war and NATO intervention, both Kosovo Albanians and the Serbs are euphorically celebrating victory: the former wish to believe that they have on their own with the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) "liberated Kosovo", and the latter that they have triumphed over NATO. The Western alliance has had its say concerning this issue a long time ago and now it is to say the least confused in its attempt to introduce order in Kosovo between the Albanians who have returned home and the remaining Serbs. The effect of the "victory" according to the initial estimates are about ten thousand killed and murdered Kosovo Albanians, 700 thousand banished and fled Kosovo Albanians. On the Serb side, in the past two months, also according to the preliminary raw data collected by international organisations,the result is almost 200 thousand refugees and banished Kosovo Serbs, two hundred killed, three hundred wounded. There are still no data about the number of the kidnapped and the disappeared.

In accordance with the still prevailing theory in this region where priority over human lives is given to territory and plunder, the only ones interested in crimes committed in Kosovo and those which are still going are international expert teams and investigators of the Hague tribunal, as well as the few nongovernmental organisations which deal with humanitarian law in FRY. In concealing crimes Serbian authorities have gone further than the Albanians. Pursuing the same principle according to which they concealed information on the exodus and violence against Kosovo Albanians, during the first postwar month data about violence against the Serbs and columns of Serb refugees who were trying to flee into Serbia proper escaping from violence were also shoved under the carpet.

What actually happened in postwar Kosovo is the shift of violence: now the Albanians are the perpetrators and the victims are the Serbs. KFOR is in between. While the Albanians were suffering during the three war months, there was nobody in between. NATO in the sky, military and police forces of Serbia on the ground, UCK abroad. Initiators and creators of the drama of Kosovo, of ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population, mass graves, banishment of hundreds of thousands of people and burning houses are not to be found in Kosovo any more. With the plundered loot, resting on laurels of "defenders of the Serb cause", they have left the Province and gone back to Serbia or who knows where.

The crimes in Kosovo certainly are no news. More than 60 thousand houses burnt to the ground mostly belonging to the Albanians, since they were the majority population, God knows how many killed civilians, women, children, whole families, are the result of the state's attempts in the past ten years to introduce order in the Province by the power of arms and force. Such policy culminated during the three war months in crimes committed against Kosovo Albanians which are hardly conceivable to the normal human brain. Collective guilt for the committed crimes has fallen on the entire Serb people, and international indictments for war crimes were raised against the leadership of the country.

For the time being there are no complete data about what was going on in Kosovo. One of the rare, perhaps even the only organisation which during the entire latest war and before it investigated the proportions of the crimes committed in Kosovo is the Humanitarian Law Fund. Its director, Natasa Kandic, on the basis of data and interviews with refugees and her own visits to the scenes of crime, says that violence against Kosovo Albanians reached its climax when NATO bombing started:

"My three-month long dealing with Kosovo was motivated by the wish to see what was happening in the Province while it was solely in the hands of the army of Yugoslavia, the police and various additional formations.

What I can say based on this and a large number of interviews with displaced Albanians in Montenegro, what I stand behind and what I can corroborate by data is what was happening in Pristina, Pec, villages around Pec, Istok, Kosovska Mitrovica.

Pec is the city which has been demolished and destroyed the most. Very classical case of ethnic cleansing has been committed in it. During those three days, 26, 27 and 28 March, members of regular police, certain other police units, special forces and certain additional forces entered homes of the people there. Noone mentions that regular army was in the city at the time, nor that this was done by conscripts doing their regular military service. There is no such thing. The order issed was that the houses be abandoned within ten minutes. People were directed towards downtown. According to my estimate 20 thousand people were banished by these orders within those three days. Those were the people from Kapesnica, part of Pec inhabited by purely Albanian population.

Apart from entering homes, the other characteristic is plunder, and there is also intimidation: in those days we registered more than 30 individual murders. They entered homes, demanded and took money and then killed people. Data and statements show that there was no other criterion: murders were comitted radnomly, just to intimidate people and to make as many people as possible join the column of the banished. In such a situation, some people were trying to leave the column and find refuge in a street or part of town which had not been the target of the evictions. Several thousand people were put into trucks and driven towards Albania. This was done in a brutal manner. Numerous families were split..."

Our interlocutor says that it is evident and that it can be claimed with certainty that there is not a single piece of evidence that young soldiers participated in violence: "The Albanians even speak about having seen in various places they were passing through during banishment young men in uniforms with sadness in their faces, sense of being lost, disoriented. From their soldiers' bags they pulled out and gave them their own rations of food, bread, liver paste... They usually told the banished persons: 'I know nothing, do not think that I am doing anything here. I am forced to be here'. They were soldiers doing regular military service".

As a recipe for the crimes in Kosovo, she mentions those comitted in the villages of Cusk, Pavljane, Zahace, in immediate vicinity of Pec: "In mid June I went to the village of Cusk. I kept going back there a few times. When the data are summed up they show that the population survived during the whole three months in the village which is at the very entrance of Pec. They had no arms, military control visited the village a couple of times, the whole village had two pistols and a single rifle and they handed them in. On 17 April the army told them that nobody would harm them, but on 14 May a military group (they wore hats similar to cowboy hats, others had their faces painted, some spoke with a Bosnian accent) entered the village. People did not recognise them.

They set the houses on fire and the population of the village gathered in the part near the village cemetery. And there they were surrounded. About one hundred men managed to run away into the woods outside the village, and majority of the inhabitants with their families were gathered together. Men were separated from women and children. Plunder began. They were all forced to take out everything they had, money, jewellery and show car keys. Those who had them were ordered to bring their tractors. Homes of members of Gasi families were set on fire. Women and children were taken to the yards of houses that were on fire and they were threatened again that they would be left in burning houses if they did not give up everything they had. Women took off their jewellery in the burning houses. They were then ordered to get on the tractors with the children and go towards Albania. There were cases of children of only seven driving the tractors. They arrived to the police check point held by regular police. One of the women told the police what had happened. 'We have nothing to do with it, they are a paramilitary formation, but you cannot go on, children canot drive tractors'. They turned them back towards the village. They went to their homes, shut themselves up. Nobody knew what had become of the men. Until the next day when a few women gathered the courage to go to the cemetery and the houses where they had been gathered the previous day.

In the houses of Gasi family they found burned men's bodies and telling only by parts of their clothing, belts, they recognised their husbands and relatives. Out of this group of 40 men who had been divided into three groups, only three have survived.

On that same day and in the same manner, about thirty men were killed in the villages of Pavljan and Zahac. I did not manage to talk to anyone in Ljubrenica, because just a few families had returned to the village. The village looks dreadful. There are data that more than 300 men were killed and burned there. I saw a yard of a house where the murder was committed, the place where there are still bones, bodies, five or six separate spots where they were burned. Ashes are still there and bones in the ashes. I have never seen a more horrible thing than that field of bones.

When on 18 June I returned to Pec, the Serbs had already gone from that town. Two hundred of them had stayed. I found about twenty Serbs in Pec patriarch's seat none of whom dared go out. I found a woman there who was very respected among the Albanians and who had managed to save a few houses of her neighbours during the three months. Mitra was talked about even in Pristina. Her husband and cousin had also disappeared and she was sitting there, not in her house any more, waiting to hear news about her husband and cousin. Despite having to face the fact that her husband had disappeared she was telling me that terrible things had happened there, pure horror. 'I had to keep watch day and night minding that these few Albanian homes would not be robbed. I stayed in Pec because I have a clear conscience and wish to wait for my neighbours. I have lived peacefully here. It is hard for me that the town was robbed and destroyed'. Her husband disappeared on 18 June, after KFOR had entered Pec when there were many cases of revenge directed against those who had remained. Ordinary people paid the bill.

I spoke with a few people whose relatives had disappeared and they all started from the fact that they had done nothing. They had lived in good relations with their Albanian neighbours, but they were the ones who suffered. Those who had committed crimes, those who had carried out orders and who had participated in it, they had gone with the loot, the money and the jewellery. Those who had stayed are sitting at the seat of the Patriarch hoping that their kidnapped dear ones are still alive.

Local members of the UCK made a public statement that they supported their leadership and that they did not wish ethnnically cleansed Kosovo and that they would not commit a single crime against the Serbs. I believe that there is plenty of evidence that nevertheless UCK is responsible for disappearance of the Serbs in Pec..."

Natasa Kandic mentions Kosovska Mitrovica as the second example where there was no massive murders. The story of this town has a cruel dimension because these people were treated cruelly. Some of them were forbidden to go downtown to buy food. In the end of April and during the month of May, the Albanians in Mitrovica were starving:

"They were robbed of everything they had. For a few days in a row they just drank water and ate bread, salt and onions. Children ate bread soaked in water with some salt and onions on top. The civilian population was pushed back from the town towards the outskirts on the first day of bombing.

In the beginning of bombing, action began in towns of Kosovo, Mitrovica included. They enetered houses, set the nicest ones on fire, several people were killed. The Albanians withdrew towards parts inside Mitrovica, but then on 14 April, about 20 to 30 thousand of them were banished and directed towards Pec, Djakovica and Albania. They went on foot, there were no cars, carrying plastic bags, with their children. They walked down the road towards Djakovica, encountering various police formations, from those on whose uniforms there were no insignia to the ones dressed half in army uniforms and half in plain clothes, those they call paramilitary, who followed them in cars, threateninbg and robbing them of their belongings, and the regular police which did not maltreat them but would not let them stop. They walked for five days. They would not let them rest, but forced them to walk for more than 24 hours".

While the horrible ethnic cleansing and killing of Kosovo Albanians was going on all around the Province, under bombs Serbia was watching on television "the heroic deeds" of its army and police in "the struggle against the whole world". It had no opportunity to either see, hear or read that their glorified units manifested the greatest courage in persecution, killing and plundering Kosovo Albanians, civilians, women and children.

The few individuals who dared say anything under NATO bombs about the crimes against the Albanians, acquired the already customary label of traitors and mercenaries. Columns of suffering and tortured people could be seen only by the privileged owners of satellite tv antennas. Those who knew and pertetrated and planned the crimes interpreted all the warnings coming from the world as propaganda against Serbia.

Now there is no more doubt: state military and police and paramilitary forces committed horrible crimes in Kosovo. Only the proportions of the crimes can be debatable, the number of people who have been killed and the readiness of the Serb people to face what was done in Kosovo in their name.

Just a month after the interruption of NATO intervention against Yugoslavia, Serbia faced the effects of its policy pursued in the southern province for years. What the official authorities in Serbia admit is only the damage done by NATO bombing worth tens of billions of dollars. Other effects of the latest battle of Kosovo are having difficulties in reaching the public: the dead are counted only among their "own", almost 200 thousand Serbs have fled from Kosovo after the war either because of retaliation of Kosovo Albanians or due to guilty conscience. Those who have stayed are squeezed into a few Kosovo enclaves or Serb monasteries. Every day in Kosovo a Serb house is set on fire, someone is killed or kidnapped. Everything in Kosovo is nowadays going on according to the unwritten rule that crime causes crime.

Judging by everyday reports of independent media in Belgrade, according to the official reports of KFOR and UNHCR, the mechanism of banishing and killing Kosovo Serbs by armed Albanian groups can be brought down to intimidation and demands that they move out of their homes. The houses and apartments are broken into, people thrown out and in the worse variety the remaining Serbs, Romanies and other non-Albanian inhabitants in Kosovo are killed or kidnapped. Due to disturbing increase of terrorism, UNHCR even announced that the Serbs would be moved into safer parts of Kosovo.

Momcilo Trajkovic, president of the Serb Resistance Movement and one of the few officials, apart from representatives of the Church, who has remained in Kosovo (in the beginning of the nineties, at the time Milosevic was taking over power, an ardent supporter of his policy), says that "nowadays, the bill for what the military, the state and the police forces had done to the Albanians in Kosovo is paid by innocent people. Apartments are demolished with axes. The whole of Metohija has been cleansed of the Serbs. They are not to be found in Suva Reka, Urosevac and Srbica either. The Serbs in Pristina and Gnjilane are in the worst position. Out of the 20 thousand in Pristina hardly one thousand of them have remained. According to our sources, 200 people have been kidnapped after peace has been declared. Demolition of the temples and churches is a separate story. Those who are doing this do not shrink from assaulting and killing women and children. Recently a woman with a two-month old baby was burned in a house. KFOR mostly watches this with no wish to look into the problems. They are soldiers and things happening here are a matter for the police, and a sufficient number of members of the police still have not come to Kosovo. My impression is that the international community has come unprepared to Kosovo. In this tide of crime, the Albanians who are trying to protect the Serbs also suffer, people living in mixed marriages suffer..."

On Monday, 16 August, a group of Kosovo Albanians used mortars in an attack on a Serb village called Klokot. When members of KFOR arrived, they found the bodies of a 14-year old girl and a boy who was two years older than her. Six people were wounded. On that same day, an armed Albanian attacked an old woman in Gnjilane, locked her up in the kitchen of her house, beat up and robbed her, and then tried to rape her daughetr-in-law. British soldiers reacted swiftly noting that this was the third incident that day in this town.

The obvious target of Kosovo Albanians, those who are thoroughly and systematically retaliating with the remaining non-Albanian population, are the Romanies. Out of 548 of their houses in Rasadnik, the Romany village which is in the non-Albanian part of Kosovska Mitrovica, only three are left. All the others were burned to the ground and more than 6 thousand people were banished, said for the media Nusret Saiti, president of the Union of Romanies from Kosovska Mitrovica. Last week, together with his house which was set on fire, 78-year old Azem Azizi was burned alive.

The Undesirable: Contrary to certain previous years when "the people (and Slobodan Milosevic) happened" in Serbia and Kosovo Serbs were the main protagonists of salvation of the sacred Serb land, refugees from Kosovo (officially: "the temporarily displaced persons") nowadays in Serbia keep away from the authorities and buses prepared for their return. They resolve their existential problems silently and with the help of their relatives and friends who had found refuge in Serb cities outside the province at more fortunate times.

With or without personal belongings, fleeing the Province from violence of their newly returned compatriots - Kosovo Albanians, they had an unpleasant experience when they realised, as they themselves said, that they would not be allowed to go further than Vranje and other municipalities bordering Kosovo. "The police was selective. Those who already had houses in Serbia had no problem. We had to argue with them. Some stayed in Vranje, and I managed to come to Kragujevac with my family. Half of my relatives are here since 1990", says former citizen of Pristina, engineer by profession and according to his present status a "temporarily displaced person" who has not a single paper to prove this fact. He does not want his name mentioned until he legalises for good his stay in Serbia.

It has become dramatic when they tried to reach Belgrade where, as they say, they wanted to "demand answers from Serbian authorities about the war in Kosovo, persecution, treachery of Serb interests and fleeing of the Serb state cadre from the Province...". Only those who possess apartments in the capital or its surroundings were allowed to go to Belgrade.

The state of Serbia responded with a new surprise by publicly stating via TV and the press that they could practice their rights only in Kosovo. Although there are no decisions in writing, majority of refugee children from Kosovo, by recommendation of the Ministry of education of Serbia, could not enroll in Serbian secondary schools. Those who managed to do that, succeeded only because they were lucky that inspectors who controlled enrolment demanded on their own responsibility that the children from Kosovo be enrolled.

The Belgrade centre for human rights warns about the appearance of discrimination against Kosovo refugees. The head of this non-governmental organisation, Professor Dr Vojin Dimitrijevic says that this is no news:

"This regime needed the Serbs from outside Serbia only as long as they caused disorder where they are from. When that did not succeed and when led by natural instict they decided to come to the country which is their parent state, everything was done to prevent them. Because, when they come they are nothing but an unpleasant reminder of the political mistake. "A Serb from Kosovo who is a citizen of Yugoslavia simply must not be treated as a citizen of the second order. This is violation of laws in our own legislature. These are the examples concerning school, and even coupons for fuel which they cannot get here. If you ask a man to meet conditions he cannot meet, for instance, if he wants to be issued coupons for fuel and you tell him that he must return to Pristina in order to do that and he has fled in fear, and you are pushing him into danger, then this is discrimination. At the same time he reads in the newspaper about terrible crimes going on against the Serbs. Instead of helping its citizens, the state punishes them for not purauing some of the objectives of the regime. They call them the temporarily displaced persons on television. How can they say this, and how can they tell in advance how long it will last. Now they are being threatened. And instead of becoming qualified for social welfare and care and support, these wretched people are ignored as an unpleasant reminder of yet another defeat. This is not only violation of international human rights, but also of what is written in our Constitution and laws".

With a few honourable exceptions (the Church, certain intellectuals, non-governmental organisations and a political organisation here and there, a part of the independent media), complete silence about crimes committed in Kosovo still prevails in Serbia.

Ice was broken by the reservists and the soldiers doing military service who spoke of what was happening in Kosovo when they went on leave. The former were mostly proud of their own doing and contribution to "squaring accounts with the Shquiptars" and the latter were shocked by the violence done to the Albanian people.

After Shkelzen Maliqi, the head of the Kosovar Open Society Fund, in his editorial in Koha ditore, the respectable intellectual from Kosovo Veton Surroi also declared himself against violence against the Serbs warning his compatriots that "collective shame for crimes" committed against the Serbs would "fall on all of them". Surroi writes that the Serbs in Kosovo "live in such fear that in every car they see those who have come to banish or kill them while their Albanian neighbours are afraid even to buy bread for their Serb neighbours for fear of being accused of feeding the Serbs". He also warns that two months after the entrance of NATO troops "it is not the matter of emotional reactions of the Albanians, but of systematic organised violence against the Serbs, a way of thinking which is concealed behind such violence, and such a way of thinking is called fascism..."

Those who are producing crime and who were producing crime in Kosovo are silent and have more urgent matters to attend to. Having brought their mutual conflict to the end with an enormous number of victims they are becoming increasingly nervous when KFOR soldiers are concerned and for the sake of their own power and posts, both parties would be very glad to see them go. Kosovo Albanians are increasingly clashing even with the American and the British soldiers, nothing to say about the Russians and the French. The Belgrade party, partly due to fear of being taken to the Hague and partly due to local accusations of "having sold Kosovo" is increasingly mentioning return of the Yugoslav army to Kosovo. In the meantime the list of victims and cases of violence is growing, and the voices of reason have difficulties reaching the public and its consciousness.

Branka Kaljevic

(AIM)