[ALST-L] Southeast European Politics (SEEP) 2/2000

[Isa Blumi]

I tried for months while in Kosova, almost two years
ago, to get Washington Post, NYTIMES and others to
cover this story...finally it is coming to light.

I still live with this war in me and justice must be
served.  What happened inside Kosova was pure evil.

Thursday January 25 11:09 PM ET
US Report Says Serbs Burned Ethnic Albanian Bodies 


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Serbian security forces
incinerated the remains of hundreds of ethnic
Albanians in a lead refinery during the 1999
hostilities in the Yugoslav province, a U.S. radio
reporting team said on Thursday.

The report on National Public Radio said the secret
operation to gather the victims of the ``ethnic
cleansing'' of Kosovo and destroy them at the mining
complex of Trepca was part of efforts to conceal
potential evidence of war crimes by the Serb armed
forces.

The report quoted members of the Serbian police, army
and intelligence services as saying they dug up
corpses in mass graves and burned them in the furnace
of the lead refinery, which is near the
ethnically-divided northern Kosovo city of Mitrovica.

Thousands of ethnic Albanians and others are still
missing in the province, where a ferocious assault by
Serb security forces to drive ethnic Albanians from
their homes was halted and reversed by a NATO bombing
campaign.

One Serbian fighter identified only as Branko told the
reporters: ``The point was not to hide the bodies in
mass graves but to totally destroy them. It would be
as if these people never existed.''

He also said: ``I think our people understood that
sooner or later some of these Western organizations
like the Hague tribunal might come into Kosovo. We
needed a good way to destroy the evidence.''

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia, based in the Hague, has indicted former
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes
in Kosovo.

The documentary was made by American Radio Works, a
joint project by Minnesota Public Radio and National
Public Radio News.

The reporters said their sources, who spoke on
condition of anonymity, said the operation was
coordinated by an elite unit of the Serbian security
service, under orders from close associates of former
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Representatives of the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping
force in Pristina could not immediately be reached for comment

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