[NYC-L] [Kcc-News] (1) He [Milosevic] denied the right of non-Serbs to live; (2) Prosecution says Milosevic was "controlling force" behind a "concerted effort" to expel Albanians from Kosovo

[Mentor Cana]

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 1. He [Milosevic] denied the right of non-Serbs to live
2. Prosecution says Milosevic was "controlling force" behind a
   "concerted effort" to expel Albanians from Kosovo.
3. Many Kosovo Albanian victims of Milosevic's policies are
   reluctant to testify against him.
4. "The Mastermind of Ethnic Cleansing"


### 1 ###

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/story.html?f=/stories/20020214/54254.html

'He denied the right of non-Serbs to live'
Milosevic trial: In great detail, prosecutors describe series of massacres

Isabel Vincent
National Post

THE HAGUE - Prosecutors at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic told a United
Nations tribunal yesterday how the former leader ordered the systematic
deportation, torture, rape and death of hundreds of Muslim civilians,
then commanded his forces to destroy evidence of their deeds by
reburying the bodies in mass graves in other parts of the country.
    "The accused never expected that the international community would
go to the lengths it did to uncover evidence of ethnic cleansing," said
senior prosecutor Dirk Ryneveld, a Canadian, on the second day of Mr.
Milosevic's trial before the UN Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia.
    He was summing up the indictment, which includes deportations and
ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the southern province of Serbia Mr.
Milosevic tried to rid of ethnic Albanians during the late 1990s. These
actions led to the 78-day NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.
    Mr. Ryneveld said he will produce forensic evidence and witnesses to
show how Mr. Milosevic's forces swept through Kosovo, systematically
destroying villages and towns, deporting, and in some cases torturing
and killing, ethnic Albanians.
    In all, Serb forces deported about 800,000 ethnic Albanians and
killed an unknown number. They also took advantage of the NATO air
strikes to increase their reign of terror over Kosovo Muslims, whom they
tried to expel to such neighbouring countries as Macedonia and Albania.
    "They were intending to blame the deaths on NATO bombing," said Mr.
Ryneveld, speaking of Serb paramilitary and Yugoslav army forces that he
tried to prove were both under Mr. Milosevic's command.
    "Serb forces went from hamlet to hamlet, village to village, town to
town, murdering, raping, looting and destroying property in their path.
The looting and burning had the desired consequence of ensuring that
there would be nothing to return to."
    One of the key prosecution witnesses will be a 10-year-old boy, the
only survivor of a massacre in which his entire family was killed. He
was spared, Mr. Ryneveld said, because his mother's dead body, which was
lying on top of him, shielded him from the bullets. He managed to
escape, but his sister, a toddler, was pinned under the body, unable to
flee.
    Mr. Ryneveld said the boy tried to save his sister, who called out
to him, but was forced to watch as Serb forces torched the bodies,
burning his sister alive.
    The corpses -- 80 in total -- were later found along with some of
their identity documents in a refrigerator truck submerged in the Danube
River near Belgrade, several hundred kilometres away from the massacre
site in Kosovo.
    The prosecution conducted its opening arguments yesterday by
continuing the pattern it began on the trial's opening day-- using
detailed accounts of massacres in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, the three
conflicts Mr. Milosevic is alleged to have started in order to cement
his hold on power in Yugoslavia.
    The prosecution's description of some of the massacres resembled
mass killings of Jews by Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units armed
by the Nazis in the Second World War.
    In March, 1999, in the village of Bela Crkva, Kosovo, the men were
separated from the women and children, Mr. Ryneveld said. The men were
then stripped and robbed of their belongings before being forced into
the bed of a stream where they were shot by Serb forces. Some survived
by pretending to be dead. Those survivors are expected to testify
against Mr. Milosevic.
    In another Kosovo village, Serb forces ordered a group of men into
two mine shafts and threw explosives down the holes. An Austrian
forensic team recovered 22 of the bodies last year.
    In a massacre in the village of Suva Reka, also in Kosovo, nearly 40
people, including a 12-month- old baby and a 24-year-old woman who was
eight months pregnant, were killed by Serb forces. Thirty-seven bodies,
including that of the pregnant woman, were later found in a mass grave
on the outskirts of Belgrade.
    During the conflict in Kosovo in 1999, women and girls were
systematically raped by Serb forces, said Mr. Ryneveld. The rapes were
designed to spread panic and fear among ethnic Albanians.
    "Soldiers taking part in deportations selected women and raped them
in front of the rest of the group," said Mr. Ryneveld, adding some of
the rape victims will testify, but will have their identities protected.
    "In one case, a 14-year-old girl was raped in front of her family.
Others were gang-raped by soldiers in succession before they were
killed."
    Although some senior members of the Yugoslav army refused to take
part in some atrocities and told Mr. Milosevic he may have gone too far
in Kosovo, he did not listen to them, said Geoffrey Nice, another
prosecutor.
    He simply dismissed those who did not agree with him, replacing them
with others who were more compliant. Those who exhorted their troops to
carry out atrocities in the field were decorated by Mr. Milosevic at the
end of the conflict in Kosovo.
    "He was a man capable of persuading, a man capable of having others
follow him," said Mr. Nice, describing Mr. Milosevic and his
relationship with the commanders of the army and the paramilitary forces
he is alleged to have controlled.
    "His own staff was telling him that he was overdoing it in Kosovo,"
said Mr. Nice, concluding opening arguments that took up the better part
of the trial's first two days.
    "The accused got away with so much in the past, he thought he could
get away with this. The chamber will hear evidence that reveals an
atmosphere of impunity to crimes being committed, no matter how brutal
they may be."
    Other atrocities allegedly committed by Serb forces during earlier
conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia were also compared to events during the
Second World War.
    Mr. Nice described the slaughter of 6,500 Muslim men and boys at
Srebrenica in July, 1995, as the biggest single massacre in Europe since
the Second World War. During the siege of Sarajevo, Serb forces reduced
the people of the Bosnian capital to a state of "medieval deprivation so
that they lived in constant fear of death."
    The prosecutor also pointed out that Mr. Milosevic turned on his own
people, the Serbs, when it suited his grand scheme of creating a Greater
Serbia within Yugoslavia.
    In one instance, Serb refugees fleeing fighting in Croatia were
ordered by Mr. Milosevic's forces back into Croatia to shore up the Serb
population in the region.
    "Things that happened weren't inevitable," said Mr. Nice. "They were
not the acts of God, but the acts of men, taken with no regard to the
interests or even to the lives of others.
    "In a career spanning 13 years --a criminal career spanning nearly
eight years -- throughout that period [Mr. Milosevic] sought two things:
to maximize his power and control. He did this by denying fundamental
rights to those who did not agree with him, and denied the right of
non-Serbs to live among their neighbours or indeed to live at all."
    The former Yugoslav leader, who is charged with 66 counts of war
crimes and genocide, sat impassively through the proceedings yesterday,
becoming upset only when it was his turn to address the court.
    "Do you stop work today at 4?" said Mr. Milosevic, clad in a
banker's blue suit, white shirt and red, white and navy tie.
    He was allowed to speak half an hour before the proceedings ended.
    "I have spent two days listening to these speeches by the
prosecution and now you are telling me that I will be cut off after half
an hour?" he said, using the opportunity to denounce the UN tribunal as
being an "illegitimate court," a charge he has often repeated.
    He claimed Richard May, one of the trial judges, did not give him a
proper response to a previous question regarding the legality of the UN
tribunal.
    "Your views of the tribunal are completely irrelevant," said Judge
May, adding Mr. Milosevic had not read the tribunal's previous judgments
on the question of its own legality.
    Since his arrival at The Hague last June, Mr. Milosevic has refused
to recognize the legitimacy of the UN court. He has not appointed
defence counsel and has used appearances before the tribunal to condemn
NATO for its bombing of Yugoslavia.
    He is expected to sum up his defence today.

Copyright © 2002 National Post Online


### 2 ###

part of IWPR'S BALKAN CRISIS REPORT, NO. 317, February 13, 2002

MILOSEVIC "PLANNED" KOSOVO DEPORTATION

Prosecution says Milosevic was "controlling force" behind a "concerted
effort" to expel Albanians from Kosovo.

By Anthony Borden in The Hague

"Your views about the tribunal are now completely irrelevant."
    With this sharp rebuke, presiding judge Richard May once again
silenced a defiant Slobodan Milosevic, after losing patience with the
defendant's continued attempts to evade engagement with the prosecution
case on the second day of his trial.
    "We have become more convinced that not only is [this court] partial
but that your prosecutor has already proclaimed my sentence and my
judgment," Milosevic insisted, in his first remarks at the trial.
    "It has orchestrated a media campaign which along with this illegal
tribunal is a parallel lynch process." He accused the judge of failing
to respond to his arguments that his arrest and detention were illegal,
and that another court must review the legality of the tribunal itself.
    The judge, referring to his own written ruling of November 8, 2001,
noted that "the matters you are choosing to address . . . we have
already ruled on - which you would know if you bothered to read the
papers we have given you".
    The heated exchange in the final minutes of the day's proceedings
could not have contrasted more sharply with the harrowing (if not always
new) details of atrocities in Kosovo outlined by the prosecution.
    Chief trial attorney Geoffrey Nice alleged that the primary crime
was "a wholesale and concerted effort to round up and deport as many
Kosovo Albanians as possible". Killings and other violence were part of
that plan, in order to compel others to flee, and the "controlling
force" was Milosevic himself.
    Completing his opening remarks, Nice outlined the run-up to the war
with NATO, launched March 24. Throughout the preceding months, with
reports of more and more killings of Kosovo Albanians and destruction of
their villages, Western diplomats warned the Yugoslav president that
these were criminal acts.
    A joint command had been created for the province, under then
Yugoslav deputy prime minister Nikola Sainovic, giving Milosevic control
over the federal ministry of defence, the Yugoslav army, the ministry of
the interior, and local defence units within Kosovo.
    Convinced that Serbia was on a collision course with NATO which
would result in the destruction of the Yugoslav army, General Momcilo
Perisic, then the army chief of staff, confirmed, according to the
prosecution, that the "situation in Kosovo was the result of one man's
actions". Even senior Serbian officials urged the Yugoslav president to
avoid atrocities.
    Yet throughout this period, according to the prosecution, Milosevic
followed a clear pattern: denying reports of civilian massacres and
expulsions, replacing top military and political officials who expressed
any unease over the policy (including Perisic himself), and boasting to
senior Western military officials that he could quickly resolve the
Kosovo problem through military means.
    Setting up a large "deportation map", Nice pointed out a series of
blue dots throughout the province, marking a dozen expulsions of Kosovo
Albanians on Mach 24-27. Completing a similar exercise, with similar
dates, on a "killings map", Nice concluded, "Can there be any doubt from
that simple coincidence of dates that what was happening was an overall
and planned deportation?"
    Dirk Ryneveld, lead prosecutor on the Kosovo case, followed with
more detail, outlining some of the specific incidents, and extraordinary
circumstances out of which evidence would be revealed.
    One trial witness is a young boy, among dozens shot at 17 Milos Ilic
Street, in Djakovica, who was unable to help his sister, trapped and
crying out underneath the body of their dead mother. When Serb forces
torched the house, he could not rescue her, but managed somehow himself
to survive.
    In another case, two women and a child, left for dead after a
massacre of around twenty people, crammed into a coffee shop in Suva
Reka, escaped by rolling themselves off a truck full of the victims,
which was heading towards a mass grave. One of the women will testify.
    Other evidence would, of necessity, be more scientific. Of the
nearly 50 people from the Berisha family killed that day in Suva Reka,
one was a 24-year-old woman, eight month's pregnant. Two years later,
when mass reburial sites were discovered at Batajnica, outside Belgrade,
various details identified bodies of people last seen at Suva Reka -
among them a late-term foetus.
    "The same pattern happens at the same time in different
municipalities all over Kosovo," concluded Ryneveld. "Attacks included
verbal abuse, threats of violence, removal of identification, killing of
livestock, killing of men, destruction of religious sites and herding
women and children into trains and buses and forcing them to flee."
    And when Serb authorities feared their crimes would be discovered,
they dug up the bodies, and transported them in refrigerator trucks to
Serbia to try to conceal the atrocities.
    "All the events into which this chamber will have to inquire point
towards a central personality, the existence a controlling human force,"
concluded Nice. "When you have examined all the evidence, the silhouette
of that personality, the full-faced view of that personality at the
centre of these events, is unmistakably that of the accused."
    Unfortunately for the case, the historical record, and ultimately
perhaps for the defendant himself, the one person almost certain not to
examine that evidence, and challenge it in detail, is the accused.

Anthony Borden is executive director of the Institute for War & Peace
Reporting.


### 3 ###

part of IWPR'S BALKAN CRISIS REPORT, NO. 317, February 13, 2002

KOSOVARS SPLIT OVER MILOSEVIC TRIAL

Many Kosovo Albanian victims of Milosevic's policies are reluctant to
testify against him.

By Adriatik Kelmendi in Suhareka, Qyshk and Pristina

Drita was adamant. She wouldn't go to The Hague to testify against
Slobodan Milosevic. "There's no reason to," she insisted.
    Her decision seems incredible given that Milosevic's forces executed
her son, daughter, and husband three years ago.
    They were among 48 Kosovo Albanian civilians shot by a Serbian
firing squad on March 26, 1999, at a restaurant in Suhareka, in
south-east Kosovo.
    Drita, not her real name, and another son were wounded in the
execution, but left for dead. They escaped by jumping from the truck
loaded with the victims that was heading for Serbia.
    The passports of relatives and neighbours killed in the atrocity
were found two years later in a mass grave in Batajnica, nearby
Belgrade.
    Although the woman has been summoned to testify against the former
Yugoslav president, she will not be going.
    "There are many like Milosevic. He is not the only one to be
blamed," she said. "Where are his henchmen who fired on us? They are
free."
    Many Albanians share her anger that Milosevic is the only leading
figure from the old regime in Belgrade to face justice. The courts in
Kosovo have tried only about 15 war crimes suspects.
    Florence Hartman, spokesperson for the tribunal chief prosecutor
Carla Del Ponte, says just 60 per cent of the 150 Kosovars who've
provided evidence against Milosevic have agreed to testify in person at
his trial.
    According to the Council of Human Rights and Freedoms in Pristina,
some 10,000 Albanian civilians perished in the 1998-1999 conflict, while
another 3,000 remain unaccounted for. Altogether around a million people
were forced from their homes.
    About 100 km from Drita's home, in the Albanian village of Qyshk,
Isa Gashi was putting the finishing touches to his new house.
    The Serbs razed his farm house on May 14, 1999, after opening fire
on him and 11 other villagers. Only he survived. They killed another 42
Albanians from the neighbouring villages of Pavlan and Zahaq.
    Gashi has watched the pre-trial sessions of the Milosevic case with
disgust. "That murderer is enjoying a comfortable cell and makes fun of
the court," he said. "If they won't do to him what he did to us, they
might as well set him free." Unlike Drita, he is ready to testify " for
the sake of justice".
    Nekibe Kelmendi, secretary-general of the Democratic League of
Kosovo, LDK, headed by Ibrahim Rugova, the largest party in Kosovo, will
be attending the trial as an official observer.
    But she also has personal reasons for being there. Milosevic's
henchmen murdered her husband, the well-known lawyer Bajram Kelmendi,
along with her two sons, Kushtrim and Kreshnik, on the day NATO air
strikes began.
    "The conviction of Milosevic and other indicted criminals and the
prosecution of Yugoslavia for genocide is the only thing that will
satisfy the survivors," she said.
    Hysni Berisha, of the Victims Identification Commission, shares her
opinion. " The Milosevic case should lead to the trial of all those who
committed crimes in Kosovo," he said. Kosovars Split Over Milosevic
Trial
    "This would help to prepare the ground for an eventual
reconciliation between Serbs and Albanians."
    The more time passes, the more difficult that reconciliation seems
to be. Gashi often goes back to his old farm, separated by a river from
the Serbian enclave of Gorazdec.
    "Everyday I think of going over there to look for those who murdered
us," he said. "They followed the orders of Milosevic. As long as these
criminals remain free, I could not bring myself to say 'Hello' to
someone in Serbian."

Adriatik Kelmendi is an editor at the Pristina daily Koha ditore


### 4 ###

http://www.usofficepristina.usia.co.at/com/menz3.htm

"The Mastermind of Ethnic Cleansing"

by Ambassador John K. Menzies
Chief of Mission, U.S. Office Pristina

Op-Ed Exclusively Published in Kosovo Daily Newspaper "Koha Ditore".

February 12, 2001

Today begins the most important war crimes trial since the Nuremberg
trials at the end of World War II - the trial of Slobodan Milosevic for
genocide in Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Kosovo. As the first head
of state to be tried for war crimes, his trial will be watched live on
television around the world. His every utterance - and those of
witnesses, attorneys, and forensic specialists who will describe his
alleged crimes in horrifying detail - will be read in every corner of
the world and will be studied for generations to come by people who wish
to understand the workings of his mind.
    Kosovars will certainly follow his trial closely because Kosovo's
wounds are the freshest and the pain of those wounds still cuts deep
into the hearts of lives of thousands of people across Kosovo. Everyone
in Kosovo, across all ethnic lines, will have to live with the results
of Milosevic's rule and his hateful legacy for many years to come.
However, it is vital to Kosovo's future, and to the healing of his many
thousands of innocent victims and their loved ones, that this trial be
the beginning of a healing process that will enable Kosovo and all
Kosovars to move forward and put the pain of those years behind.
    At the end of World War II, a large number of men and women in
Germany and Japan, as well as in other countries, went on trial for war
crimes. For the most part, only the "big fish" were caught, tried, and
punished, while thousands of "little fish" went free with no punishment
beyond what their own consciences dealt them. In the fifty-plus years
since the end of World War II, war crimes trials have continued off and
on as more people were caught; justice will continue to pursue surviving
war criminals, pursuing them until justice is done. However, in spite of
the heroic efforts by many nations to bring all those evil men and women
to justice, only a small fraction of the guilty ones were caught. This
is a very important lesson for Kosovars today to understand.
    Slobodan Milosevic is the biggest of the big fish. There are several
other big fish still out there, most notably Gen. Ratko Mladic and
Radovan Karadzic. I have no doubt that they, too, will one day face the
court of international justice. In the meantime, though, we must all
accept that many people guilty of war crimes in Kosovo, Croatia, and
Bosnia-Hercegovina will simply never be caught and many people will not
get the satisfaction of having the perpetrators of crimes they
themselves experienced brought to justice. But that should not deter
those people from taking satisfaction in seeing the mastermind behind
ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia made to answer for his crimes.
    War crimes trials are not important just for the victims of the war
criminals and their collaborators, but also for the people in whose name
they acted. War crimes trials at the end of World War II played an
important part in helping the people of Germany and Japan come to grips
with what their leaders led them into doing, and the same should happen
now as the people who followed Milosevic and voted for him come to grips
with the evil he perpetrated, both at home and in neighboring regions.
In other words, this trial is important not just for Albanians, Croats,
and Bosnians, but also for Serbs and Montenegrins. It is also important
for other areas of the world in which ethnic conflicts have raged to see
that justice can and will be done.
    In closing, I would like to speak directly to all those in Kosovo
who suffered from Milosevic's forces, to all of you who lost loved ones
during the war, to the families in Racak, Suha Reka, Likoshan, Mramor,
Krusha e Madhe, Poklet, Izbica, Shtedime, Makoc, Katundi e Re, Qyshk,
Lubeniq, Abri, Prekaz, and others where Milosevic's forces did their
worst deeds, and to everyone who suffered indignity, humiliation,
beatings, or other abuses during his rule. True justice can never
actually be done. It is not possible to catch and bring to trial every
single perpetrator who followed Milosevic's orders and did his bidding.
It is not possible for those people to pay a high enough price to bring
back your dead loved ones or to restore the dignity you lost during his
oppression. But seeing him in the court, seeing him taken back to his
cell every night after the trial, seeing him under guard as he seeks to
explain away his nationalistic ideology and ethnic hatred, should give
each and every one of us great satisfaction. It should allow each of his
victims to feel that some justice has been done, to feel that healing
can begin to take place, to feel that their loved ones and their fellow
countrymen will be avenged in some way.
    But we must also remember that his actions, and those of his
followers, do not justify similar acts in retribution. Two wrongs never
make a right. The courts must decide what to do with those who are
accused. Perhaps most importantly, the trial should allow the victims to
feel that perhaps the time for forgiveness - but never forgetting - is
at hand. While many criminals who actually got blood on their hands may
not be in jail, their boss is. Without the boss at the top, those things
would never have happened. Without those criminals at the bottom, awful
things would probably still have happened with different criminals doing
the dirty work. The criminals acted because of Milosevic. They were cogs
in an evil machine designed and built by Slobodan Milosevic. It is
because of him that those criminals were in Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina,
and Kosovo doing their evil deeds. Today he must begin to answer for it.

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