From mentor at alb-net.com Sun Jul 8 02:37:55 2001 From: mentor at alb-net.com (Mentor Cana) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 02:37:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Kcc-News] Serbian Police Say 800 May Be in Mass Graves; All War Criminals Should Be On Trial, Say Recak Residents Message-ID: 1. Serbian Police Say 800 May Be in Mass Graves (7/7/2001; REUTERS) 2. All War Criminals Should Be On Trial, Say Recak Residents (7/5/2001; KosovaLive) 3. KTC: After Milosevic's extradition, all the Albanian prisoners in the Serbia's jails must be released (7/4/2001; Radio21) 4. Justice Will Never Be Done, Say the Shehu Sisters from Krusha e Vogel (7/4/2001; KosovaLive) ##### (1) ##### http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/07/world/07YUGO.html?searchpv=nytToday July 7, 2001 Serbian Police Say 800 May Be in Mass Graves By REUTERS BELGRADE, Serbia, July 6 - Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic said today that the police believed that 800 victims of the Kosovo conflict in 1999 had been buried in mass graves and promised that the guilty would not elude responsibility. Mr. Mihajlovic, a leading member of the alliance that ousted the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, last year, said the police would learn who had ordered the "monstrous operation" to send bodies to mass graves across Serbia. He spoke at a news conference just over a week after the Serbian government sent Mr. Milosevic to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague to face charges stemming from the Kosovo conflict. "No one in Serbia will sleep in peace and have a clear conscience until the truth is found and justice done," Mr. Mihajlovic said. The authorities have announced finding three mass graves with 110 bodies, believed to be Kosovo Albanians. Mr. Mihajlovic said the figure of 800 bodies included those exhumed from the three mass graves and was based on information gathered after that finding. In May, the police accused Mr. Milosevic and top aides of covering up evidence of possible war crimes committed in military operations against ethnic Albanian guerrillas in Kosovo. They said they arrived at the findings while investigating a truckload of corpses dumped in the Danube in the 1999 NATO bombing. Mr. Mihajlovic said the police were determined to find every mass grave in Serbia, including Kosovo. "We can expect around 800 bodies of victims in all possible locations in the whole of Serbia," he said. "We want to identify the victims, return them to their families so that they can be buried in a dignified way." The police, who have a special war crimes section, are trying to establish how the deaths occurred. The police, Mr. Mihajlovic said, are cooperating with the United Nations mission in Kosovo and other organizations that could have information on crimes against Albanians or Serbs. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company ##### (2) ##### http://kosovalive.com/english/mayjunjuly/05_07_2001_recak-am.htm All War Criminals Should Be On Trial, Say Recak Residents July, 2001 RECAK (KosovaLive) - Angry inhabitants of Recak, filled with grief and dissatisfaction, watched on Tuesday the first appearance of Slobodan Milosevic at the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. They told KosovaLive that there were still many war criminals that belonged at The Hague but were still at large in Serbia. The country has recently been filled with the smell of dead Albanian bodies, people killed during the war whose bodies are now being exhumed from mass graves and from the Danube River. In January 15, 1999, Serbian forces executed 45 ethnic Albanian civilians. The incident was described at the time by Ambassador William Walker, the head of the Kosovo Verification Mission, as an explicit massacre and a crime against humanity. Milosevic has been charged with the crimes committed in Recak, which marked the biggest turning point in international political opinion regarding Kosova, prior to the bombing of NATO. Three elderly men with their traditional hats talk on a rainy morning under the porch roof of a nearby shop. "Today, when Milosevic is on trial, not only he and a part of his regime but also a great part of the Serbian nation that followed his policies is on trial," said ashopkeeper named Avdiu. The three old men nodded their heads in agreement. At the crossroads leading to Kodra e Bebushit, where the massacre took place, Hyzer Emini is speaking. He says that the other accused, Nikola Sainovic, along with other Milosevic associates, should be handed over to The Hague. Ismet Emini, who is retired, was hiding in a cave near the village of Topilla in January 18, 1999. Showing his brother's scull to the reporters, Emini said that putting Milosevic on trial did not mean that justice was being done. In the small chamber, where hangs the portrait of his slain brother, Ajet Bajrami, Emini received two KosovaLive staff members and his village-mate Xheme Beqa, who survived the massacred but lost eight members of his clan. At 10 a.m., Minushi, the son of Beqa's dead brother, who is sitting close to the television set, is tricked into leaving the room with the offer of candy and chocolates. Slobodan Milosevic appears on the television. While Milosevic, scowling, denies the legality of the tribunal, Ismet Eminim shows us the album with photos of the victims, including his brother. "All of them were shot in the head," he added, smoking a cigarette, as his eyes filled with tears. Milosevic is saying that he considers the indictment to be false, along with the legality of the court. Halit Emini, the younger brother of Ismet Emini, shouts: "Idiot!" Xheme Beqa calls Milosevic a bad name. "He will recognize it; he will have eyewitnesses against him, his associates to whom he issued orders in the first place," he added. Both of the men would be of one voiced, if they had the opportunity to testify. "I would go to Hague with pleasure. Even though I take care of eights orphans, I would have gone to The Hague, covering the expenses personally, in order to demonstrate the truth. I would have gone to tell the truth, because Milosevic is responsible for the deaths in Recak," says Emini. Beqa is also ready to go to The Hague. "I have given statements to the Hague tribunal employees that have come here, but I am ready to go there and testify yet again. Thank God Walker saw Recak and now he can't run away from it," says Beqa. "Light a cigarette," Ismet Emini says to his friend, throwing him one. Watching Milosevic on the television before the tribunal, Emini tells KosovaLive that he is more sad today than he was in the first days after the massacre, saddened by seeing Milosevic deny the facts in front of the world, when there have been books written about the massacre. "How can he say that it is all lies? They should convict him straight away and end this thing once and forever. Today Milosevic appeared at the place where he belongs, but the whole world has financed Serbia for having handed him over to The Hague, and now Serbia is being turned into America," says Emini. "We are not satisfied with the fact that they took Milosevic. Milosevic led this campaign, but he did not come here to do it himself. The people who committed crimes, and who ate the food of Kosova, killed our people. The criminals of Kosova are from Slivova, Shtime, Shterpca," he said, alluding to local Serbs. Xheme Beqa agrees that local Serbs took part in the massacre. "We know them," claims Beqa, who says that Serb forces beat their victims on different parts of the body, including the head, with pieces of wood until they could no longer stand up. "Afterwards, they executed them from a short distance away," Beqa asserts. He said that justice would be done only if all the horrors of war, including mass graves and missing people, were revealed. "How do I feel, when we sit down at the table and see that my family members are not there!?" Beqa asks. Emini, who worked in Switzerland for 25 years and is now is retired, says that he is for democracy and justice but with people who have shown human values. "With a man who stabbed my brother, cut off his head, and who beat me up and broke my ribs and teeth, and I survived and have gone through that and can remember perfectly, and the same man comes in front of me in Shtime, enters the same office, same school, that is really out of the question, even if I were to be hanged in the center of Prishtina," says Emini, revealing to his nephew for the first time that his father's head was cut by the Serb forces. "About the head thing, I have never said this in front of Munishi, my brother's son. Today is the first time," he said, as his eyes sparkled with tears and the room filled with cigarette smoke. Although Emini considers that the extradition of war criminals is a task for the international community, and he hopes that it will be carried out until the end, he is pessimistic and cannot feel satisfied. According to Emini, justice can be done now, once and forever. "Serbs still dream about Kosova, but let them forget it, because if it happens that we fight again, there will be neither Kosova nor Serbia any longer, we will fight 'till the last one," Emini asserts. Emini says that if Albin Kurti, Ukshin Hoti and other prisoners are released, and if the dead bodies of Albanians are returned to Kosova and Albanians unite, justice will be done. "This land cries for them," says Emini, as he points out the place in his yard where his brother was killed and where his scull was latter found. On the 44 graves of the village, fresh wreaths of flowers had been placed, while one tomb is still open and waiting for the body of the missing Zahide Murati. The scene seemed a fitting symbol of the way the wounded hearts of the people of Recak had been reopened on this day, like the open tomb. This was yet another hard day in their hard lives. (lulzim mjeku) ##### (3) ##### radio 21 KOSOVA 4 July 2001 http://www.radio21.net/english/index.htm Kosova Transitory Council: After Milosevic's extradition, all the Albanian prisoners in the Serbia's jails must be released "The first step after Milosevic extradition to the Hague Tribunal is the immediate and unconditional release of all the Albanian prisoners from the Serbia's jails and the lighting of the destiny of the lost people. It's unacceptable for the victims to be in the jails, at the time when the main criminal is arrested", declared today the members of the Transitory Council of Kosova. Not only the Milosevic must be condemned, but also his entire policy", Kol? Berisha, deputy leader of the Democratic League of Kosova, said. Whereas the representative of the Democratic Party, Fatmir Limaj said that Haekkerup's request for the release of the prisoners must be fulfilled. Jonuz Salihaj, representative of the Alliance for the Future of Kosova declared that he asked Haekkerup to insist more about this issue. ##### (4) ##### KosovaLive 4 July 2001 http://kosovalive.com/english/latest.htm Justice Will Never Be Done, Say the Shehu Sisters from Krusha e Vogel KRUSHA E VOGEL (KosovaLive) - Twenty-eight year old Kimete Shehu from Krusha e Vogel, whose husband and younger brother were killed by Serb forces on March 26, 1999, says that she is able to put up with her life and continue to live with her sister and mother in their newly reconstructed one-room house. She does not talk about the trial of Milosevic at The Hague Tribunal. Instead she asks: what do we get out of it? Slobodan Milosevic appeared for the first time at the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague on Tuesday, after being handed over to the tribunal on June 28, 2001. The killings at Krusha e Madhe and Krusha e Vogel have been included in the indictment against Milosevic. FRY and Serbian armed forces killed over 100 men from both villages on that day two years ago. The destruction in Krusha is very noticeable, as is the trauma that the people still suffer from. Of necessity, the females do all the work in the village. KosovaLive talked to both Shehu sisters regarding the handover of Milosevic to The Hague. The conversation took place in a shaded area of their yard near the cornfield and henhouse. "Milosevic has been jailed, but there are many Miloseviches in Serbia who are still free," said Kimete Shehu. "If we had the chance to get our loved ones back, then that would be justice," Kimete moaned. "They forced Milosevic from power, extradited him to The Hague, got as much money as they wanted " her voice trailed off. Both sisters, Kimete and Hyrmete, are skeptical about the conviction of Milosevic. "With the evidence that has survived, there is little hope," Kimete said. "Take a look at the trials in Prizren," they said. "Instead of convicting him for killings, they convicted one man because he slapped another," the sisters spoke simultaneously. Kimete is willing to voice her opinion but when it comes to justice, she asserts: "Never! Justice is never done!" Kimete said that when she saw the TV documentary on the massacre of the Berisha family in Theranda, she found out that the crimes in Theranda and Krusha had taken place on the same day and at the same hour. According to Kimete, one day after Milosevic's handover, representatives of the War Crimes Tribunal came to Krusha e Vogel and contacted the six eyewitnesses in the village. On Sunday, Peter Steward, an expert from the tribunal who has been working in Kosova since the summer of 1999, arrived in Krusha e Vogel. Steward told KosovaLive that he had come back to maintain contacts with the inhabitants of the village, to inform them about the latest developments and to obtain further evidence. Steward said that people, in general, were happy about Milosevic but they cared more about the people who carried out the executions than the people who gave the orders. He observed that the villagers were not showing explicit emotions about it. "We are just carrying on with our lives, with our duties and tasks, and sometimes we are smiling also. Then we ask ourselves: how can we laugh?" said Hyrmete. "We're carrying on with our lives, in a manner of speaking!" she added. (lulzim mjeku) From mentor at alb-net.com Mon Jul 16 16:39:56 2001 From: mentor at alb-net.com (Mentor Cana) Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 16:39:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Kcc-News] Bodies of 3 Americans found in mass grave in Serbia; Serbian investigators open second mass grave on edge of Belgrade Message-ID: 1. Bodies of 3 New Yorkers Believed Found in Serbian Grave 2. Serbian investigators open second mass grave on edge of Belgrade ##### 1 ##### http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/16/international/europe/16ALBA.html July 16, 2001 Bodies of 3 New Yorkers Believed Found in Serbian Grave By CARLOTTA GALL ELGRADE, Serbia, July 15 The Serbian authorities have found what may be the remains of three Albanian-American brothers from New York who were arrested and apparently executed under Slobodan Milosevic's government shortly after NATO's war against Yugoslavia ended. They would be the first Albanian- American dead found in Serbia since the war ended in 1999. They were among several hundred from the United States who formed what they had called the Atlantic Brigade to help in the fight against Serbian forces in Kosovo. But at the time that the brothers disappeared, the war was over. And according to accounts provided by witnesses and investigators familiar with the case, the three men were apparently not engaged in combat, but were escorting frightened neighbors out of the Serbian province. The three bodies, blindfolded and their hands bound by wire, were found last week lying at the top of a mass grave holding as many as 16 bodies at Petrovo Selo, in eastern Serbia. Documents apparently found on them indicated that they were three brothers of the Bytyqi family of New York: Ylli, 24; Agron, 23; and Mehmet, 21. They were last seen alive on July 8, 1999, when they were released from a prison in southern Serbia, then driven away in a white car by the Serbian special police. While officials in Belgrade would not confirm the identities of the bodies, a lawyer who is acting as a spokesman for the family, Martin G. Vulaj, said in New York that the family had received a call last week from an American official in Macedonia who said there was a "very high probability" that the bodies were those of the three brothers. "They had identification documents on them apparently when they were found." he said. "The information is that two of them were in civilian clothes, and one of them, at least partially, had on fatigues. We don't know which one." "The language they used," he added, referring to the American official, "was that they were 99 percent certain it was them." Natasa Kandic, head of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, who has investigated the case, says their membership in the Atlantic Brigade was not the reason for their arrest by the Serbian police. The young men had been staying with their mother in the town of Prizren, in southern Kosovo, after the war ended and NATO troops had moved into the province, she said. The Bytyqis agreed to help their mother's neighbors, three Roma, or Gypsy men, who wanted to leave for Serbia. Fearful of the revenge attacks by Albanians that were widespread at the time, the three Roma asked the Bytyqi brothers to accompany them on the two-hour drive to the border with Serbia proper. One of the Roma, Miroslav Mitrovic, later reported the incident to Ms. Kandic in her office in Belgrade. He said the men set off from home on June 26 and drove north via the Kosovo capital, Pristina, where they were stopped by members of the Albanian rebel force, the Kosovo Liberation Army. The rebels accused them of helping the Roma men to escape, but allowed the Bytyqis to proceed. Once over the boundary into Serbia, at Merdare, they were stopped by the police and arrested for entering Serbia proper without visas. They were sentenced before a judge to 15 days' imprisonment and moved to the jail in the nearby town of Prokuplje. On July 8, four days before their sentence was up, they were released into the hands of two plainclothes policemen who drove them away. According to Ms. Kandic, one policeman who had been preparing to take them back to Kosovo was ordered off the case by his chief and told that others would deal with them. The implication was that the chief had received orders from the authorities in Belgrade, she said. She said she did not know who had ordered the killings or why. "They were registered by the court and the prison, and afterwards they were taken away and killed," she said. "Why?" After the exhumation, Ms. Kandic's organization, which investigates war crimes in the Balkans, sent an open letter to the Serbian authorities demanding that they provide an answer to the Bytyqis' mother. Observers from the center were present at the exhumation. The grave found at Petrovo Selo is on the grounds of a former training camp of the Special Operations Units of the Secret Police, the most feared of the Serbian forces operating in Kosovo. Investigators have found 75 bodies in two graves so far, and say that apart from the three Americans, the rest are Kosovo Albanians who were transported from Kosovo during the war with NATO in an operation ordered by Mr. Milosevic to remove evidence of war crimes from the province. Another mass grave containing 36 bodies has been discovered at Batajnica, a suburb of Belgrade, in a training base belonging to the Interior Ministry's Special Antiterrorist Unit. Today the Serbian authorities announced that they had found yet another mass grave, the fourth in the last two months, holding some 50 to 60 bodies in western Serbia. These bodies are also believed to hold victims of the Kosovo war. ##### 2 ##### http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010716/1/19cib.html Tuesday July 17, 12:59 AM Serbian investigators open second mass grave on edge of Belgrade BELGRADE, July 16 (AFP) - Serbian investigators have started work on a second mass grave on the grounds of a special police base that is thought to contain a large number of murdered Kosovo Albanians, the state news agency Tanjug said Monday. The grave is at Batajnica, some 15 kilometres (10 miles) northwest of the capital, where investigators exhumed around 36 corpses earlier this month, Tanjug quoted a Belgrade district court statement as saying. It said the second grave contained "a large number of corpses" but gave no further details. Serbian police confirmed Sunday they had found yet another mass grave thought to contain the corpses of more than 60 Kosovo Albanians presumed to have been killed by Serbian forces, put in a truck and dumped in a reservoir in 1999. A statement on the Serbian government Internet site said the bodies had been buried in southwest Serbia on the border with Bosnia by the former regime after corpses were spotted floating to the surface. "More than 60 bodies were found in the Perucac hydroelectric plant reservoir," the statement said. The Perucac discovery bore the hallmarks of a similar attempt to hide bodies in another refrigerated truck recovered from the bed of the river Danube. The truck contained the bodies of more than 70 elderly people, women and children, thought to have been from the Prizren region in the south of Kosovo. The bodies showed signs of bullet wounds and mutilation. Thousands of ethnic Albanians went missing during the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict, and the West accused Milosevic's forces of committing widespread atrocities. Milosevic is now awaiting trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague for his alleged part in war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the province. The head of the organised crime unit, Dragan Karleusa, has openly accused Milosevic and his supporters of ordering the destruction of criminal evidence of crimes committed by Serbian forces against the ethnic Albanian civilian population. He said that some 800 ethnic Albanians are thought to have been buried in mass graves around Belgrade, including the Batajnica site. Some 2,500 ethnic Albanians and 1,300 Serbs are still listed as missing, two years after the end of the conflict.