Tony, this supports what you have heard. BTW, moving people out of Macedonia and Albania and into the US involves refugee and immigration laws in each of the three countries, some of which may be very strict. No amount of public clamor will overcome prevailing US law. I suggest you try and make your requests conform with what is allowed. Just MHO.
Accounts of Serb Atrocities Multiplying
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 22, 1999; Page A1
SKOPJE, Macedonia, April 21 – As Western governments and human rights groups intensify their collection of evidence of war crimes in Kosovo, they are accumulating scores of accounts of Yugoslav forces killing small groups of ethnic Albanian civilians in an apparent pattern of atrocities across the province.
Detailed and corroborated stories of individual atrocities told by refugees in camps in Albania and Macedonia have been supplemented in recent days by intelligence information provided to international war crimes investigators by Western governments hoping to secure indictments against Yugoslav leaders.
Many reports from survivors and other refugees describe what one official called "summary, random executions of small groups," including many victims whose sole offense was to refuse an order to leave their homes. While NATO estimates the total number of civilian deaths at 3,500 since the Serb-led Yugoslav operation began four weeks ago, most independent experts say the available evidence corroborates that a minimum of several hundred civilians have been killed by army troops, Serbian police, paramilitary units and civilians.
It has proved more difficult to gather evidence to confirm reports by NATO and Western governments of massacres involving scores or hundreds of victims.
The U.S. government cites evidence of 19 towns or villages where 50 or more ethnic Albanian civilians allegedly have been executed. NATO has presented evidence of what it calls 43 mass graves in Kosovo, some containing perhaps more than 100 bodies. But independent investigators have been unable to visit any of these sites, and dozens of interviews and a review of other evidence by Washington Post reporters have turned up a single corroborated eyewitness account of scores of massed bodies, in this case those of 150 people near the village of Izbica in western Kosovo.
Today, the chief prosecutor of the U.N. war crimes tribunal, Louise Arbour, said in an interview that the mounting evidence could lead to indictments of alleged perpetrators, including senior Yugoslav leaders and military commanders, before the NATO air campaign ends.
With foreign observers, including journalists, denied free access to Kosovo, gathering first-hand evidence of war crimes has been extraordinarily difficult. In addition, Western officials have alleged that Yugoslav forces are taking greater care than they did during the war in Bosnia to hide evidence of mass deaths by burying bodies at numerous sites far from where the people were killed and by limiting radio communications.
Since January, when the government's role in the massacre of dozens of women and children at the Kosovo village of Racak was detected partly because damning radio communications were intercepted by Western governments, such interceptions have declined dramatically. "We haven't gotten a thing since then," a Western official said.
Some physical evidence has been recovered from Kosovo, however. Several photographs and tapes were smuggled out last weekend by a wounded Kosovo Liberation Army brigade commander and transferred to officials of the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, officials said. One photo depicts 15 to 20 bodies splayed on the ground in a village south of Orahovac, a city in southwestern Kosovo, a U.S. official said. Others depict scores of burning homes and refugees being used as human shields in front of tanks.
Other evidence reportedly has been gathered and sent to The Hague by at least one team of British special forces soldiers that has operated in Kosovo, Western officials said Tuesday.
Some reports of larger-scale massacres disseminated by NATO, British, and U.S. officials have originated with top leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army who remain in touch with Western contacts by satellite telephone from command posts in Kosovo that are frequently moved to elude government shelling. For example, Sokol Bashota, a leader of the ethnic Albanian rebel group's political directorate, said in a call two days ago that he understands that at least 125 people were executed in Iznic; 70 in Rezal; 36 in Jovce; and more than 20 each in Prekaz, Uzdrin and Nedrovc.
How such reports migrate to the daily press briefings by NATO or U.S. officials is illustrated by the use of an account provided several weeks ago by another rebel leader. The leader said that a Kosovo Liberation Army unit operating south and west of Orahovac came across the bodies of 35 men, women and children in one group and 13 in another group, all of whom were reportedly killed the night of March 26, two days after NATO airstrikes began.
Kosovo Liberation Army sources also said that rebel soldiers feared that as many as 500 people may have been killed in the area, and it was this claim that formed the principal basis for the U.S. government's assertion April 5 that "Serb forces had reportedly killed as many as 500 people" there.
Many Western officials say they are convinced that although rebels have a motive to present false or exaggerated stories of atrocities by Serbs, such allegations eventually will be confirmed because the refugees' overall picture of Yugoslav military activities is so grim. The few direct refugee accounts, while compelling and internally consistent, primarily involve small-scale executions. Evidence of hundreds of ethnic Albanians being killed at a time remains elusive.
The single such account was given by Ahmed Hasanaj, a refugee from the village of Kladrenica in western Kosovo. Hasanaj said in an interview that he was hiding from Yugoslav forces in the woods in late March when he came across scores of bodies lying in a long row in a clearing. He said that he found at least 17 acquaintances, men with the family names of Osmani, Ramaj, Haxhaj, Neziri, Smaka, Beka, Bajra and Draga, who ranged in age from 18 to 80. The total number of victims, he said, approached 150.
Villagers and uniformed rebels from the Kosovo Liberation Army buried the bodies, Hasanaj and several of his relatives said. A NATO reconnaissance plane took a photo of the graves last weekend, and on Saturday, NATO officials displayed the image to illustrate what they described as "reports of atrocities near Izbica."
Hasanaj said his 70-year-old brother-in-law was in Izbica at the time of the deaths and saw the victims being machine-gunned after soldiers robbed them and burned their tractors. The man, Sadik Januzi, survived by lying still beneath a pile of bodies, Hasanaj said in an interview two days before the NATO announcement.
But Januzi could not be contacted immediately, and although the photo corroborates Hasanaj's account that about 150 people died in the village, it does not resolve the critical question of how they died.
Evidence of mutilations and other acts of brutality against civilians also is piling up at offices in Albania and Macedonia recently established by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The latter organization said Tuesday that refugees are providing accounts of "throat-cutting, cutting out eyes, cutting off breasts, nose, fingers, hands, and/or feet, slicing of body parts, and carving of Serb nationalistic marks on the chest, forehead, or other parts of the body."
Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, said in a report released Tuesday that at least 11 people had been killed in recent days during the forced evacuations of villages near Urosevac. They said that one witness reported seeing a 60-year-old man shot April 3, and three others reported seeing the man's mutilated body later that day. Three other people reported seeing three men from another village shot when they tried to escape into the hills.
"People are without protection," said a European official as he summarized the results of more than 250 interviews conducted by human rights experts with refugees at camps in northern Macedonia. Government forces "kill them if they feel like killing; they rob them; they harass them."
Nemka Hasanaj, a refugee from Kladrenica, said in an interview she saw 11 men shot by Yugoslav troops who said they were avenging the deaths of four Serbian civilians killed by rebels the previous May. "For four Serbs, 400 Albanians," one soldier allegedly said, and his companions began pulling men out of a line and shooting them.
One place where human rights investigators have focused their work is near the southern city of Djakovica, the fourth largest in Kosovo, which a Western official today called the "heart of darkness" during the war. Although the city's population of 100,000 was almost entirely ethnic Albanian, it had a large police station and was a base of operations for army units that patrolled Kosovo's border with Albania. Refugees interviewed by Human Rights Watch this month said they saw "clusters of corpses, numbering one to six . . . each."
One refugee contacted Monday in Macedonia, Neshti Buza, 33, said that troops along the town's main street approached a woman walking a few yards behind him to demand that she surrender 1,000 German marks. She claimed that she had no money. When they searched her and found some currency in her bra, one of the soldiers carved both of her breasts and two others carted her away, Buza and his brother Rion said. "No one reacted," Neshti Buza said. "We were all too stunned."
Djakovica, in western Kosovo, is the alleged site of a Yugoslav army "rape camp," according to Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. But another U.S. official said that reports vary as to which military camp is involved.
A second area that has attracted particular attention is a seven-mile stretch of highway through a handful of villages between Djakovica and Prizren, extending north to Orahovac. Human Rights Watch has interviewed witnesses who confirmed the killings of at least 40 men in the town of Velika Krusa on March 26 and provided "highly credible" reports of mass killings in the villages of Mala Krusa, Celina and Pirane.
The area was not only a stronghold of the Kosovo Liberation Army but also a critical arms smuggling route for the rebels. Early this year, however, one of the government's anti-terrorist units – perhaps the one suspected of being based in a wine factory at Orahovac – executed nearly two dozen men suspected of helping the rebels in the town of Rogovo. About the same time, a paramilitary group established a base of operations in Velika Krusa, Western officials said.
Investigators also are studying the town of Malisevo, which once served as a rebel stronghold and had its police station attacked by the Kosovo Liberation Army shortly after the NATO bombing began March 24. Western officials say that they have credible evidence that government troops separated scores of men from women and children who had moved back into the village during the winter; the men allegedly were then herded into the hills and have not been seen since.
A fourth town that has attracted interest is Kosovo Polje, outside Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, which is the site of a historic battlefield defeat of the Serbs in 1389 and is a shrine to Serbian unity and defiance. Once the home of the U.S. inspection mission in Kosovo, it became in the weeks before NATO's first airstrike a virtual armed camp for Yugoslav troops, including sharpshooters who occupied the top floor of the postal station, according to refugees and Western officials. A half dozen refugees who passed through the train station there after being expelled from their homes reported seeing the station littered with burned bodies.
Smith reported from Skopje; Vick from Kukes, Albania. Correspondent Charles Trueheart in Paris contributed to this report
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