You must be kidding?
U.S.: Thousands Of
Kosovo Men Reported
Missing
05:29 p.m Apr 19, 1999 Eastern
By Carol Giacomo
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - At
least 100,000 and possibly as
many as 500,000 Kosovo
Albanian men are unaccounted for,
raising fears that they may have
been killed by Serb forces, U.S.
officials said Monday.
Underscoring these concerns are
reports of multiple sites in Kosovo
where large areas of earth have
been disturbed, suggesting they
may be mass graves, one official
told Reuters.
''There are still 100,000 men that
we are unable to account for,
simply based on the number of
men that ought to have
accompanied women and children
into Macedonia and Albania,''
State Department spokesman
James Rubin said.
''Based on past practice, it is
chilling to think where those
100,000 men are. We don't know
though we know that civilian
casualties are the objective of
President (Slobodan) Milosevic's
policies,'' he said.
But a State Department written
report on ''ethnic cleansing'' in
Kosovo issued Monday said the
number of missing men ranges
''from a low of 100,000, looking
only at the men missing from
among refugee families in Albania,
up to nearly 500,000, if reports of
widespread separation of men
among internally displaced persons
within Kosovo are true.''
U.S. officials cautioned they
probably would not really know
the full extent of the problem until
Kosovo was once again opened to
international observers.
But, said one official, ''There's a
tremendous amount of concern
that the worst case scenario that
many feared has happened.''
He said the United States has
reports -- at least two from
satellite imagery and others from
refugees and members of the
Kosovo Liberation Army -- of
what may be 43 mass burial sites
in Kosovo.
These are places where large areas
of earth have been disrupted since
NATO began its air war against
Yugoslavia on March 24.
''We're working to confirm the
precise location of mass burial sites
through a variety of sources,'' the
official said.
Authorities are reluctant to make
too much information public
because it may cause Serbs to try
to conceal or destroy any grave
sites and thus make it harder to
build a case against Serb forces for
war crimes prosecution, the official
said.
U.S. officials said there is good
reason to presume the worst about
any of the Kosovo Albanians
reported missing.
Since the NATO air strikes began,
Serb forces under Milosevic's
control have forced hundreds of
thousands of ethnic Albanians out
of Kosovo into a life of deprivation
and hardship in neighboring poor
Balkan countries. There are many
reports of rapes and other
atrocities, also by Serb forces.
Beyond that is the case of
Srebrenica, the Bosnian town that
fell victim to brutal ethnic cleansing
by separatist Serb forces allied
with Milosevic during Bosnia's
1992-1995 war.
Over a few days in July 1995
thousands of Muslim men were
massacred by Serb gunmen,
despite the area having been
declared a United Nations ''safe
haven'' two years earlier.
At least 1,400 bodies have been
exhumed from mass graves in the
region around the eastern town.
Thousands of other men are still
missing and presumed dead.
Undersecretary of State Thomas
Pickering told a briefing Monday
the United States has heard ''from
numerous refugee reports of Serb
police now assembling Kosovar
Albanians into grave-digging chain
gangs, reportedly put in red
jackets and forced to dig graves
for their countrymen killed by
Serbian ethnic cleansing.''
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited. |
