[NYC-L] Letter to Powell - Demand for American leadership to take lead role for return of Albanian Prisoners

[kosova at jps.net]

Alice Mead 
Albanian Prisoner Advocacy 
July 14, 2001 

Dear Secretary Powell, 

Yet another outrage has occurred regarding the Kosovar Albanian prisoners.
Only this time, the dead prisoners happened to be American citizens as well.
Their bodies have been found in a mass grave in
Serbia. 
    For two years, no one knew the whereabouts of the three missing Bytiqi
brothers. It was assumed by many Albanians that they were being detained in
Serb prisons, along with the other Albanian prisoners. The reason for this
was that people knew they had been arrested in late June, 1999, after the
NATO war, and accused of illegally crossing the border into Serbia. Now
their bodies have been found in a mass grave in Serbia, their hands bound
with wire, their prison documents in their pockets. But if it weren't for
the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, we wouldn't know how they got
there. American officials have made no attempts to find their own missing
citizens. 
    As prisoners began to be released from Serb prisons, none of them knew
any details regarding the whereabouts of these American citizens. Inquiries
from the Office of Political Prisoners in Prishtina produced no answers or
even replies. But then, Serb Ministry of Justice officials never notify
Albanian families when their imprisoned relatives are transferred, released,
ill, or even dead. When Albanian prisoners are transferred inside Serbia,
family members in Kosova scramble frantically, trying to get word of mouth
information on where their relatives have gone. So people hoped the Bytiqi
brothers were being held in some military prison someplace. 
    And what is the American role in the whole Albanian prisoner debacle?
Over two hundred Kosovar Albanians are still deprived of basic civil rights,
remaining indefinitely in Serb prisons. Why? According to retired General
Wesley Clark, because the U.S. Pentagon intentionally REMOVED the language
of the Geneva Conventions from the Kumanovo Agreement on June 9, 1999. One
day later, over 2,000 Kosovars effectively disappeared. 
    We demand that American leadership take a lead role in pressing for the
return of all Albanian prisoners to Kosova. Americans created this
particular mess two years ago, it's high time they cleaned it up. 

Sincerely, 

Alice Mead, coordinator of A-PAL (Albanian Prisoner Advocacy) 
www.khao.org/appkosova.htm




-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: winmail.dat
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 2788 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.alb-net.com/pipermail/nyc-l/attachments/20010717/a2d218a4/attachment.bin