[Kcc-News] Massacre children testify in Serb trial ... (Guardian/Reuters/AP/AP, 10/9 July 2003)

[Kosova Crisis Center News and Information]

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Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 21:15:04 +0200
From: Wolfgang Plarre <wplarre at BNDLG.DE>
Subject: NEWS: Massacre children testify in Serb trial ...(Guardian/Reuters/AP/AP, 10/9 July 2003)

# Massacre children testify in Serb trial
    Four Kosovans relive slaughter they survived in a back garden
     (Guardian, 10 July 2003)

# Kosovo Survivor Testifies at Serb War Crimes Trial
     (Reuters, 10 July 2003)

# Tale of horror in Belgrade court:
   ethnic Albanian teenager describes Kosovo massacre
     (Associated Press, 10 July 2003)

# Ethnic Albanian Children Recall Massacre
     (Associated Press, 9 July 2003)
_______________________________________________________________________

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,995043,00.html

Massacre children testify in Serb trial

Four Kosovans relive slaughter they survived in a back garden

Ian Traynor in Belgrade
Thursday July 10, 2003
The Guardian

Four Kosovan Albanian children who survived a Serbian massacre and were
given the right to live in Manchester went to court in Belgrade
yesterday to tell their story to a war crimes trial.
     They are the first Albanian victims of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo
four years ago to testify to a Serbian judge and the Serbian public
about the horrors they survived.
     The four Bogujevci children, Saranda, 18, and her cousins Fatos,
16, Jehona, 15, and Lirie, 13, told a closed session of Belgrade
district court of the massacre of 14 women and children in a back garden
in the town of Podujevo on March 28 1999.
     Sasa Cvjetan, a 28-year-old Serbian paramilitary from the notorious
interior ministry unit the Scorpions, is charged with war crimes in
taking part in the murder of 19 civilians, all Albanians and mostly
women and children, four days after Nato began its bombing campaign
against the Serbs.
     Five Bogujevci children - the four in Belgrade yesterday and
10-year-old Genc - were grievously maimed when Serb paramilitaries
herded them into the backyard of a neighbour's house, put them against
the wall and opened fire with automatic weapons.
     The five children were the sole survivors. Another seven children
and seven women died. Mr Cvjetan is also charged with taking part in the
murders of five more Albanians on the same day.
     Saranda Bogujevci lost her mother, grandmother and two younger
brothers. The other four, all brothers and sisters, lost their mother,
the same grandmother and their eldest sister.
     Their fathers, the brothers Selatin and Safet, fled the town hours
before the Serbian death squads arrived.
     The wounded children were taken to hospital in the Kosovan capital,
Pristina, where they were found at the end of the war by British army
doctors, who arranged their evacuation to Manchester for emergency
medical treatment.
     The children and their fathers have been in Manchester ever since,
and last December they were given indefinite leave to remain in Britain.
     Lirie, aged nine at the time of the crime, was shot through the
neck and requires complex reconstructive surgery of a type unavailable
in the Balkans.
     She was fed through her stomach for eight months.
     Saranda, now a sixth-form college student in central Manchester,
survived 16 bullet wounds to the back, leg and arm, has had five
operations in England and is undergoing weekly physiotherapy on her
scarred left arm.
     "It's much better now," she said. "I can use it much more than before."
     Judge Biljana Silanovic conducted a thorough if sensitive
questioning of the fathers in open court and then heard the evidence of
two of the four children in closed session.
     The other two children will give evidence today, also in closed
session.
     The judge forbade any reporting of the evidence given in the closed
sessions until the children have left Belgrade.
     British aid workers and Serbian human rights campaigners
accompanying the children said the two girls who testified yesterday
were "very brave" and performed with stamina, dignity, and determination.
     The trial is the result of research, investigation and lobbying by
the Serbian human rights campaigner Natasa Kandic, who began pursuing
the case a month after the crime was committed.
     The Manchester branch of Workers' Aid to Kosovo helped to get the
Bogujevcis to court.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
_______________________________________________________________________

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-serbiamontenegro-warcrimes.html?pagewanted=print&position=

July 10, 2003

Kosovo Survivor Testifies at Serb War Crimes Trial

By REUTERS
Filed at 12:33 p.m. ET

BELGRADE (Reuters) - A Kosovo Albanian woman with an arm maimed by 13
machinegun bullets told a Belgrade court on Thursday how she saw Serbs
kill 19 members of her family.
     Saranda Bogujevci, now 18, was among five child survivors who have
been living in Britain since the slaughter in the town of Podujevo,
carried out as NATO was bombing Serbia in the spring of 1999 to force
its troops out of Kosovo.
     She was testifying at the war crimes trial of former Serbian
policeman Sasa Cvjetan, who has pleaded not guilty.
     The frail dark-haired girl and her four cousins were the only ones
left alive on a cold March day after rowdy soldiers and police gunned
down her brothers, mother, grandmother, aunt and cousins, killing 19 in all.
     Saranda said soldiers were laughing, shouting, swearing and
``breaking the windows of all the shops'' in Podujevo. Speaking calmly
and dispassionately she said the soldiers marched the family to a yard.
She saw one in his late 30s, with a short beard and brown hair, take a
gun and shoot her aunt.
     ``I could not stop crying. Then my cousins started crying too. When
I looked she was on the ground and he shot her again,'' she said. The
man discarded his weapon, took another one from another soldier standing
by and opened fire on the group.
     The shooting ``went on and on'' and afterwards there was a long
silence. Only then did she dare look around.
     ``My brother Shpetim was lying behind me, his face was on my
feet.'' Sheptim, who was killed, was nine. She saw her cousin shot, then
the disfigured face of a child, and her grandmother yellow and staring.
She heard whimpering.
     Serb men pulled her out and she woke in hospital.
     The young witnesses are the first Kosovo Albanians to testify at a
war crimes trial in Serbia. They have been under guard since arriving,
after threats against the prosecution forced the trial to be moved to
Belgrade from a provincial town. Saranda picked out Cvjetan, 28, in a
line-up saying he looked familiar. But she could not positively identify
him as being at the scene. He said she may have seen him in the media.
     Several hundred Serbs died in NATO bombing to stop a Serbian
onslaught against separatist Kosovo Albanian guerrillas and thousands of
Albanians were killed as Serb forces took revenge.
     Human rights lawyer Natasa Kandic said the children's testimony
marked the first time ethnic Albanians appeared in a court in Serbia --
a fact likely to be welcomed by the West as a fresh step by the Balkan
state toward facing its bloody past.

Copyright 2003 Reuters Ltd.
_______________________________________________________________________

http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/ap07-10-085143.asp?reg=EUROPE

Tale of horror in Belgrade court: ethnic Albanian teenager describes
Kosovo massacre

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro, July 10 ? Pale and drawn, Saranda Bogojevci
spoke just above a whisper Thursday as she described how Serbian
paramilitaries shouted and jeered before gunning down her family in a
hail of bullets four years ago.
        ''I just lay on the ground, my eyes shut, pretending to be
dead,'' the ethnic Albanian teenager told a court in a landmark case
expected to shed new light on one of the worst massacres of Kosovo's
1998-99 war.
        Bogojevci testified along with her three cousins, all of whom
survived the March 28, 1999, slaughter of 19 ethnic Albanians in the
northern Kosovo town of Podujevo. The children were flown in this week
from Manchester, England, where they have lived since the war.
        Although the proceedings were closed to media and the public to
protect the young witnesses, Bogojevci ? who is 18 ? mustered the
courage to testify in open session Thursday in the trial of Sasa
Cvjetan, a Serb police officer charged with participating in the massacre.
        The case is sensitive for Serbia, still struggling to come to
terms with atrocities committed by Serb troops in Kosovo, where they
cracked down on independence-minded ethnic Albanians, and elsewhere in
the Balkans under the regime of former Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic.
        Milosevic is now on trial for war crimes and genocide at the
U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.
        Bogojevci, her frail figure clothed in a simple black T-shirt
and jeans, spoke calmly but quietly, cradling in her right hand her
badly scarred and now paralyzed left arm mutilated by bullet wounds she
sustained in the Serb rampage. She was also shot in the leg and back.
        Bogojevci described how Serb troops stormed into Podujevo, an
ethnic Albanian town where her extended family ? including her mother,
aunts, grandparents, many cousins and other relatives ? had sought
shelter in a neighbor's house.
        The soldiers forced the family into the street, strip-searched
them and marched them through the town center and past the police
station before taking them through several paths to a garden.
        ''They told us to hold our hands up in the air and leave our
belongings outside the house,'' Bogojevci said.
        A soldier found marbles in her 6-year-old cousin Genc's pocket
and threw them on the ground. The older ethnic Albanian women were
ordered to remove their traditional headscarves.
        ''They were shouting, laughing and cursing us,'' Bogojevci said,
describing how soldiers shot her uncle, another male relative and an
aunt before spraying the rest of the group with automatic gunfire.
        ''They started shooting at us all. I was somewhere in the middle
of the group and I slid against a wall before falling down,'' she said.
''It felt like the bullets came from all over the place. No one else
survived but us children.''
        Cvjetan has proclaimed his innocence during the trial, which
began last October as one of Serbia's first local war crimes proceedings.
        Throughout Thursday's testimony, Cvjetan ? a huge, burly figure
in a crew cut and checkered shirt ? sat expressionless in court and
never looked at Bogojevci.
        After she finished, Cvjetan said he wanted to ''express regret''
for her suffering.
        But he said he objected to the charges against him and the
manner in which the children were taken to his prison cell earlier in
the week to identify him, contending they easily could have recognized
him from newspapers or television accounts.
        ''What you are doing here is ridiculous,'' Cvjetan told the
court. ''I was not in the garden when all that was going on.''
        Bogojevci, asked by the judges if she would pursue compensation
from Cvjetan if he is convicted, said simply: ''If he did do it, I want
him to answer for his crime to my family.''
        ''As for me personally, I am not asking for anything, nothing
can bring my family back,'' she said.
        Despite the courtroom drama, Lynne Jones, an English
psychologist who has worked with the children for the past four years,
said their testimony has been ''very therapeutic.''
        ''They feel much better for having been here,'' Jones told The
Associated Press. ''The children have a sense that they want the truth
to come out. ... What has really helped them is the knowledge of how
important their testimony is.''

© 2003 Associated Press
_______________________________________________________________________

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030709/ap_on_re_eu/serbia_war_crimes_1

Ethnic Albanian Children Recall Massacre

Wed Jul 9, 4:01 PM ET

By KATARINA KRATOVAC, Associated Press Writer

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro - Four ethnic Albanian children told a court
Wednesday how Serb forces rounded up and gunned down their families with
automatic weapons in one of the most brutal acts of the 1998-99 Kosovo war.
     Their testimony came during the trial of a Serb police officer
accused of leading an assassination squad through their community during
the war.
     The children, who were said to have positively identified the
officer, Sasa Cvjetan, in his prison cell Tuesday, watched as Serb
troops slaughtered 19 ethnic Albanian relatives, including their
mothers, siblings and grandparents, on March 28, 1999, in the town of
Podujevo. The children were also wounded.
     The Serbian government's decision to prosecute those responsible
for the crimes appears to mark a new willingness to punish Serb troops
who slaughtered ethnic Albanian civilians during the conflict. The
troops were under the command of then-President Slobodan Milosevic (news
- web sites), who is being tried on genocide and war crimes charges at
the U.N. tribunal in The Hague (news - web sites), Netherlands.
     Reflecting the sensitive nature of the trial in Belgrade, security
has been tight. The children, who arrived Monday from their homes in
Manchester, England, were driven to the courthouse in jeeps with
dark-tinted windows, under top police security and shielded from cameras.
     Reporters were denied access to the trial Wednesday, making details
of the proceedings sketchy. But one witness at the trial, Natasa Kandic,
whose Humanitarian Law Center has provided legal assistance to the
victims, said the children and their fathers described to the court how
their families were rounded up and gunned down.
     A fifth child who witnessed the killings, 10-year-old Genc
Bogojevci, arrived with the others this week but ended up not
testifying. "Psychologists decided that he is too young" and sent him to
stay with surviving relatives in Kosovo, Kandic said.
     The five children, aged from 10 to 18, individually identified
Cvjetan, at his Belgrade prison on Tuesday, Kandic said.
     "The children ... all showed a maturity and consistency in their
statements," Kandic told The Associated Press. "They were able to
identify the suspect with great precision."
     Cvjetan's lawyer, Djordje Kalanj, confirmed the children had
identified his client, but told AP he would seek to bar their
identifications as evidence.
     "They could easily have seen his photographs in any of the papers
since the killing," Kalanj said.
     The trial against Cvjetan began last October. Another former
officer, Dejan Demirovic, is being tried in absentia for the same
charges after fleeing to Canada.
     "As victims, they (the children) will be the first in this trial to
offer firsthand evidence on the massacre," Kandic said. Other witnesses
at the trial so far were Serb policemen who denied the killings.
     Cvjetan has denied the charges against him. He testified that his
unit ordered a group of ethnic Albanians to leave their houses in
Podujevo so Serb troops could move in. He said he did not see who fired
the shots that killed the victims.
     Both officers were members of the notorious Serbian special police
units known as Scorpions. The indictment accuses them of carrying out
the massacre four days after NATO (news - web sites) launched a bombing
campaign on March 24, 1999 to punish Belgrade for its crackdown on
Kosovo Albanians.

Copyright © 2003 The Associated Pres