[Prishtina-E] Serbs must face up to Kosovo crimes!

[Uk Lushi]

>Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 21:59:30 +0200
>
>http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,380984,00.html
>
>Serbs must face up to Kosovo crimes, says freed reporter
>
>Jonathan Steele in Belgrade
>Thursday October 12, 2000
>
>Like most first-time prisoners, Miroslav Filipovic, the courageous
>Serbian journalist who was given a seven-year sentence for "revealing
>state secrets" and "spreading false information", says he learned a
>great deal from his time behind bars.
>      "I shared a cell with two or three others. The inmates were moved
>around but I usually had Albanians with me. I had never had such close
>contact with them before," Filipovic said in Belgrade after he was freed
>on Tuesday on the instructions of the new president, Vojislav Kostunica.
>      His crime was to be the first Serb journalist to write directly
>about atrocities in Kosovo and to try to explain how some Serb units
>attacked Albanian civilians.
>      He was tried in a military court and held in a military prison in
>Nis, in southern Serbia. Some of his Albanian fellow inmates were
>convicted of membership of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Others were
>awaiting trial. He believes most are innocent and ought to be freed.
>      "The Albanians treated me well. I made friends with several. I had
>written about Kosovo and in some way was on their side," he said. They
>listened together to radio reports of Slobodan Milosevic's downfall.
>      Exhausted but neatly dressed in a suit, ready for an interview on a
>Serbian TV channel, Filipovic does not look the part of a brave
>investigative reporter. Now 50, he was not trying to start a career as a
>young journalist with a splash. He had not done any critical reporting
>before he joined the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting
>as its correspondent in Kraljevo, a town in southern Serbia.
>      "If I had known what would happen to me, I would not have written
>those articles. I am not so brave," he said. "I was just in the right
>place at the right time."
>      What he picked up, and then published, was a series of searing
>accounts given after the war by several officers and men who had served
>in Kosovo. One saw a three-year-old Albanian boy beheaded in front of
>his family. Others witnessed the artillery shelling of defenceless
>villages, and forces going in to massacre civilians.
>      Filipovic does not believe that collective guilt can be placed on a
>whole people. The atrocities were carried out by particular units. But
>he does not accept that few Serbs knew what was happening in Kosovo.
>      "Everyone who was in Kosovo knew, as well as their friends and
>families. They talked about it. There are people who still cannot sleep
>properly for thinking about what was done," he said.
>      Unlike most Serbs, he believes that Mr Milosevic and the other
>suspected war criminals should go on trial in the Hague, not in Serbia.
>"They will get a fairer trial there," he said.
>      Serbs have to start to face up to and discuss war crimes fully, he
>believes. This is vital if good relations are to be restored with
>Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. "We cannot go forward otherwise."
>      After some rest, Filipovic plans to write a book and more articles
>on atrocities. The pieces which caused the military to put him in prison
>this summer appeared only on the internet.
>
>Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000
>

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