[ALBSA-Info] Body of Evidence-NEWSWEEK

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

Body of Evidence
In the cover-up at Suva Reka, prosecutors may have a powerful case against 
Milosevic

By Roy Gutman and Rod Nordland
NEWSWEEK

The cover-up began in the gloom of night, shortly after NATO launched its 
Kosovo bombing campaign in March 1999. A Serbian manager at the sanitation 
department in the southern Kosovo town of Prizren barged into the homes of 
four employees and roused them from sleep. The sanitation workers, all 
Gypsies (or Roma), were packed into a white van and driven to the Yugoslav 
military’s rifle range on the outskirts of town. As they emerged from the van 
into the freezing rain, and saw police and Army officers milling about, the 
four men wondered if they were about to become the next victims of the 
Serbian rampage.      

THE RIFLE RANGE was illuminated only by a pile of burning tires that spewed 
foul, dark smoke. But the Gypsy workers could see the silhouette of a backhoe 
at work in the distance. As they moved closer, it slowly became clear what 
the Serbian authorities were up to, and why they had summoned a sanitation 
crew. The Serbs were exhuming a mass grave. A white refrigerator truck pulled 
up, and the sanitation workers were ordered to load it. “Hurry, hurry,” 
shouted their Serbian taskmaster, nicknamed “Buda.” It was a nightmarish 
task: in the dim light, the excavator sliced through bodies, scooping up some 
without arms or legs, cutting others in half. 

A massive campaign to erase the evidence of Serbian crimes in Kosovo 
continued for two months, until the war ended on June 20. Refrigerated trucks 
made repeated shuttles between Kosovo and Serbia, hauling corpses away from 
the sites of massacres because the Serbs feared that NATO troops might 
discover the bodies. Many mass graves were exhumed. At least one truck 
stuffed with 86 dead civilians was dumped into the Danube northeast of 
Belgrade. A NEWSWEEK investigation into the cover-up, focusing mainly on the 
botched disposal of corpses from a massacre at the village of Suva Reka in 
Kosovo, indicates that it was directed from the highest levels of the Serbian 
leadership in Belgrade. In fact, it appears that Slobodan Milosevic himself 
gave the order for the cover-up campaign on March 26, the day of the 
slaughter in Suva Reka.
       
WHERE’S THE EVIDENCE?
How important is the evidence of this cover-up, given that the atrocities 
themselves are so well known? Few people in the NATO countries of the United 
States and Europe, anyway, can doubt that Milosevic is guilty of 
orchestrating war crimes in the Balkans. But the legal case before the 
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague is 
less airtight than some might believe. This is a trial, like Nuremberg more 
than half a century ago, that will reverberate for many decades to come. It 
is the first war-crimes trial of a former head of state. The trial could set 
important precedents for international law—or, perhaps somewhat like 
Nuremberg, it could come to be viewed as legally dubious, mere victor’s 
justice. Certainly that was what Milosevic had in mind during his first 
appearance before the court, when he stated in broken English: “I consider 
this tribunal false tribunal.”

An extraordinary onus is on the judges and prosecutors to conduct a trial 
that not only brings justice, but is also perceived to be just. As a result, 
much depends on proving Milosevic’s complicity in a few documented massacres 
like Suva Reka, prosecutors say. In interviews, they now concede they have 
not yet been able to directly connect Milosevic to earlier war crimes in 
Bosnia and Croatia that were often carried out by proxy militias. In the 
Serbian province of Kosovo, by contrast, there was a formal chain of command 
between Milosevic and the people carrying out deportations and massacres. As 
it stands now, Milosevic faces three counts of crimes against humanity, and 
one count of violation of the laws or customs of war. And the chain of 
command may be enough, in and of itself, to convict. (Even if Milosevic 
didn’t directly order the massacres, it may be argued, he should have known 
about the ethnic-cleansing campaign and stopped it.) But good defense lawyers 
can cast doubt on even the best-looking cases. So for the trial to be fully 
convincing, prosecutors will need to establish more than indirect 
responsibility. That is why fresh evidence of a cover-up could be vital: the 
details of the campaign to hide corpses include the first apparent 
evidence—in the public domain, at least—directly implicating Milosevic in the 
crimes committed under his command.
     
HIDING THE EVIDENCE
The four Gypsies shoveling corpses on that rainy night in late March were 
part of an orchestrated if badly bungled effort to eliminate evidence from a 
horrific slaughter in and around the village of Suva Reka in southern Kosovo. 
The accounts of the killings come directly from survivors (and were first 
reported in NEWSWEEK in June 1999). In one gruesome incident, the Serbs 
killed 49 people from one extended family. In the dry, bloodless language of 
the tribunal indictment, the story of the Berisha family massacre unfolds 
like this: 

That night the Serbs loaded the corpses onto a truck headed for the Prizren 
town dump, according to participants. Three survivors who had played dead dug 
themselves free of the pile of bodies and rolled off the truck. When the 
driver of the truck realized that survivors had escaped, he radioed his 
superiors for instructions; they diverted the truck to the Army rifle range, 
where the bodies were dumped into several pits.
       
WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED
But in Belgrade that same day, Milosevic met with worried police and Army 
brass. Deputy Interior Minister Lt. Gen. Vlastimir Djordjevic warned that 
Yugoslav forces might soon have to surrender Kosovo, according to a Yugoslav 
source familiar with the meeting. Djordjevic cautioned that NATO forces would 
find corpses in many places—including victims between 2 days and 2 years old 
that could be used as evidence of war crimes. (The Suva Reka victims included 
a woman eight months pregnant, and six children under the age of 5.) “Take 
care of it,” Milosevic told the group, according to Dusan Mihajlovic, 
Serbia’s reformist Interior minister, who learned about the meeting from 
participants. That account of the meeting was confirmed by a senior Western 
diplomat in Belgrade, who told NEWSWEEK that the order to remove evidence 
“was done from the very top.” He also says that a tape of the meeting was 
provided to The Hague. (Two participants are certain to be called on to 
testify on the decision: retired Lt. Gen. Rade Markovic, at the time chief of 
state security, and retired Lt. Gen. Geza Farkas, then head of Army security. 
Djordjevic himself has fled to Russia. Another participant is under 
indictment by the tribunal at The Hague for the war in Kosovo.) 

Fortunately for investigators, the Serbs were as sloppy in their cleanup as 
they were in their killing. It was well into the night before the four 
Gypsies finished the job at the Kroni Popit rifle range, where they loaded 
what they estimated to be 60 to 80 corpses into the truck. The Gypsies, by 
their own accounts, were then ordered to the Prizren town dump, where they 
loaded the remains of an additional 20 to 30 people—presumably victims from 
the Suva Reka area—into a second refrigerator truck. The bodies then were 
supposed to be disposed of, and never seen again. But in early April, a 
fisherman on the Danube spotted one of the two trucks—with markings from the 
Progres food-processing firm in Prizren—floating in the river. According to 
later investigations, the driver had brought the truck to the riverbank, 
placed a rock to the gas pedal, and sent it sputtering into the water. But 
nobody had thought to shoot holes in the truck or its tires, and it floated 
away. Local police in the town of Kladovo recovered the truck from the river, 
expecting to find a load of meat. But when they smashed open one of the doors 
to the container, out fell a human leg.  

The police quickly realized that the decomposing bodies in the truck were 
Kosovo Albanians, and called their superiors in Belgrade for instructions. 
>From there, Milosevic’s security apparatus again took over. According to 
Dragan Karleusa, chief investigator for the Serbian Interior Ministry, Deputy 
Interior Minister Djordjevic instructed local police to treat the incident as 
a state secret. Eventually, on Djordjevic’s orders, the 86 corpses were 
transported to Batajnica, north of Belgrade, a base for the Yugoslav military 
and Milosevic’s elite “antiterrorism” police, Karleusa told NEWSWEEK. The 
bodies were then placed on wooden beams, covered with tires, doused with 
gasoline and burned. The truck itself was blown up at an elite police base in 
Petrovo Selo, in eastern Serbia.
       
NEW EVIDENCE OF MASS GRAVES 
Mass graves like those at Batajnica, filled with bodies from various Kosovo 
massacres, are now being unearthed in at least four locations around Serbia. 
One truckload appears to have been dumped in a NATO bomb crater on the main 
Belgrade-to-Athens highway and then paved over. Reformist leaders in Belgrade 
used the new evidence of mass graves to help prepare the public for its 
decision to hand Milosevic over to the tribunal at The Hague. But since his 
hasty transfer and his defiant first appearance, sympathy for Milosevic has 
bounced back to 5o percent.

That doesn’t bode well for the trial itself. In the thinking of the 
war-crimes tribunal, the prosecution of Milosevic may make it possible for 
ordinary Albanians and Serbs to face up to what happened and once again live 
together. Yet many Serbs remain defiant, and Albanian Kosovars are deeply 
dissatisfied. “I’m not interested in Milosevic,” says Halid Berisha, whose 
brother Geshar was among the victims in Suva Reka. “Someone did the actual 
killing and he should be tried. It’s not Milosevic’s fault; it’s all the 
Serbs’ fault.”

Many witnesses know the actual killers in Suva Reka. Hague officials have 
collected depositions from witnesses accusing Milorad (Misko) Nisavic, Zoran 
Petkovic, Boban Vuksanovic and Slobodan Krtic of being the key figures and 
the actual killers. Nisavic is now running a driving school in Kraguljevac in 
southern Serbia. Petkovic now lives in Pancevo, a suburb of Belgrade. Krtic’s 
whereabouts are unknown. Vuksanovic was killed in a KLA reprisal ambush only 
a few weeks after the massacres.

Even now one of the survivors, Vjollca Berisha, bursts into tears at any 
discussion of the massacre. With her 8-year-old son Gramos, Vjollca managed 
to roll off the truck taking the victims to the mass grave at the rifle 
range. “Why didn’t I die? Why am I the one to survive?” she asks. Her 
children Dafina and Drilon, who were 15 and 13 at the time of the massacre, 
are among those presumed dead. Vjollca never actually saw them die, and still 
feels guilty about jumping off with only Gramos. She knows Drilon was on the 
truck, and that he had been shot, but she doesn’t know if he was dead when 
she escaped. The body of Vjollca’s husband, Sedat, was found not far from her 
house.
 
 Vjollca doesn’t expect the trial to change anything. “For me it’s nothing if 
Milosevic is prosecuted,” she says. “My life is destroyed whether he is 
punished, or the individuals who did this are punished. It doesn’t matter. 
Nothing will bring my children back.” Still, she plans to testify at The 
Hague tribunal, and has given depositions to investigators. Last week The 
Hague’s investigators were back in Suva Reka, taking additional testimony. 
Vjollca is likely to be a key part of the case prosecutors make against 
Milosevic in the Berisha massacre—and against the actual killers if they ever 
go to trial. The question is whether for her, as for Milosevic himself, the 
verdict at The Hague will amount to more than victor’s justice.