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<A HREF="aol://5863:126/alt.conspiracy:519486">Kosovars document atrocities
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Subject: Kosovars document atrocities
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (JR3000)
Date: Fri, Apr 30, 1999 7:25 PM
Message-id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
TIRANA, Albania, April 29 –– At 11:15 p.m. on April 1, a night of hard rain,
Serbian security forces swept into a neighborhood of 1,300 houses beside the
Krena River in the southwestern Kosovo city of Djakovica.
Moving house to house, dozens of police and militiamen, all
wearing black masks, unleashed a spasm of terror. Six hours later, at least 55
people had been gunned down, including 20 women and children who were shot
when
they were found hiding in the basement of a pool hall. Many of the corpses
were
consumed by flames as the uniformed gunmen systematically torched homes and
buildings after killing their occupants.
Unlike many reported atrocities in Kosovo, the violence in
Djakovica that night was witnessed by residents who had set up an elaborate
neighborhood watch system and who are now mapping out a detailed,
murder-by-murder, house-by-house, street-by-street account of the destruction
for international war crimes investigators.
As a result of their testimony, and that of others who have
since fled the city, investigators have identified Djakovica as the site of
some of the most wholesale atrocities committed by Serbian police and
paramilitary units since the Serb-led Yugoslav government began a massive
campaign of expulsion and terror against Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population
36
days ago.
While refugees in recent weeks have told of killings,
brutality and destruction across the Serbian province, Djakovica and its
surrounding villages are emerging as, in the words of one Western official,
Kosovo's "heart of darkness." The killings continue, most recently on Tuesday,
when, according to refugees arriving in Albania, Yugoslav troops pulled 100 to
200 men from a convoy of Kosovo Albanians fleeing villages near Djakovica and
executed them in a roadside field.
The testimony of Djakovica's survivors may prove central to
efforts by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague as it seeks to
bring charges against the civilian and military leadership of both Yugoslavia
and its dominant republic, Serbia. Witnesses are still being interviewed, but
the tribunal is already building a clear portrait of what has occurred.
"We have numerous, independent accounts of killings in
Djakovica," said one tribunal official. "We may be looking at hundreds of
dead.
And that may be a conservative figure."
Bodies Dripping Blood
In dozens of interviews with Western officials, Djakovica
residents have provided minute details of killings in particular neighborhoods
and described widespread violence and destruction across the city. One refugee
told investigators that he saw bulldozers moving through Djakovica laden with
bodies that were dripping blood. The bodies reportedly were buried in a single
grave at the city cemetery.
Another resident said he saw the body of a young man
dangling
from a rope on a pole near the police station, while another reported seeing
30
to 40 bodies lying in the street.
Residents of Djakovica -- pronounced Jah-koh-VEET-sah --
anticipated an onslaught by government security forces once NATO bombing began
on March 24, but nothing could have prepared them for the level of barbarity
that descended on the city in the ensuing weeks. "We expected them to come,"
said Afrim Berisha, 45, an engineer and a neighborhood organizer, in an
interview at a refugee camp in Tirana, the Albanian capital. "But not with
this
intensity."
Djakovica is a historic industrial city of dark-stained
wooden buildings that date to the Ottoman Empire. The city's old town, an area
of 300 stores, Turkish architecture and an ancient mosque, bustled daily; an
industrial base of textile production, metalwork and winemaking underlay the
city's prosperity.
A month before the NATO bombing began, Djakovica, which is
named after the Biblical Patriarch Jacob, had a population of 100,000 --
swollen from 60,000 by refugees fleeing Yugoslav troops and Serbian police and
paramilitary units that had swept through nearby villages. Long known as a
center of ethnic Albanian commercial and cultural activity, its population
included physicians, merchants, skilled tradesmen and goldsmiths.
But government forces had other motives for focusing on
Djakovica --and for using it as a base to move against separatist ethnic
Albanian rebels who had been operating for more than a year in villages
surrounding the city. One Yugoslav army installation in Djakovica was a key
logistics center for troops guarding the nearby border with Albania, across
which the Kosovo Liberation Army, the main rebel group, was trying to smuggle
weapons and combatants. "The KLA was in the villages around the city, but not
in the city itself," said Neshti Buza, 33, a refugee from the city who fled to
Macedonia.
According to refugee accounts, tensions in the city erupted
into full-scale violence on March 20. That was the day international monitors
who had been stationed in Kosovo since the previous fall withdrew from the
province because they feared for their safety. In Djakovica, Serbian Interior
Ministry policemen and anti-terrorist squads began going door-to-door,
searching for young men suspected of being members of the KLA. One refugee
told
Western investigators that his uncle was executed in front of his family
during
this operation; others said that over a four-day period, more than a dozen men
were found slain on their own doorsteps.
At the same time, Serbian police warned residents that once
NATO airstrikes began, they would execute more ethnic Albanians. As a result,
scores of residents went into hiding after the first NATO cruise missiles
struck Yugoslav military targets, emerging from basements for only a few hours
a day to collect food and water. On March 29, five days after the NATO
bombardment began, the Yugoslav army issued a general order that all remaining
ethnic Albanians must leave the city.
"They came at 4 p.m. with armored cars equipped with
loudspeakers and said you should evacuate because everyone who stays will be
executed," one refugee said. Government troops shelled the city and then
fanned
out to set fire to shops, homes and marketplaces. The oldest part of the city
--an ethnic Albanian district of small shops built of dark-stained wood with
large plate glass windows -- was burned first, refugees said.
Active in the region, according to U.S. intelligence
reports,
were the Yugoslav 3rd Army's 125th Motorized Brigade, commanded by Col. Seba
Zdravkovic; its 252nd Armored Brigade, commanded by Col. Milos Mandic; and its
52nd Mixed Artillery Brigade, commanded by Col. Rudojko Stefanovic.
On April 1, the punishment of Djakovica intensified.
A Night of Gunfire
Among those who have spoken to officials of the war-crimes
tribunal is Berisha, whose account of the depredations in Djakovica has been
corroborated by others. Berisha's brother-in-law, Ilirjan Dushi, 35,
separately
confirmed details of his story to investigators. Theirs is an account of the
systematic emptying of the city's Qerim neighborhood and the killing of dozens
of its inhabitants.
Forty-five minutes before midnight on April 1, a convoy of
police cars pulled up at the edge of the neighborhood, just off Marshal Tito
Street near the city's bus station. Dozens of masked men emerged.
Running perpendicular to Tito Street is a thoroughfare
called
Sadik Stavaleci. A long loop, with numerous off-shoots, runs off Sadik
Stavaleci, then curves back into it. One group of masked militiamen entered
the
loop; a second group took charge of the main street and its off-shoots. Then
the killing began, according to the refugee accounts. It would continue for
the
next six hours, ending at 5:15 a.m., shortly before sunrise.
At the top of Sadik Stavaleci, a refugee from a nearby
village emerged from a house where he had been given shelter and was shot and
killed. Around the corner, on Sadik Pozhegu street, Rexh Guci, 43, and his
brother, a barber, also came out onto the street. They, too, were shot dead.
But, according to survivors' accounts, the gunmen had a
particular target in the neighborhood -- Besim Bokshi, a retired professor of
Albanian literature who was general secretary of the local branch of a
moderate
political party, the League of Democratic Kosovo. Bokshi, who is now in
Tirana,
had fled to the nearby home of Ali Bytyci.
Bokshi's house was torched. Two doors from it, the gunmen
found Fehim Lleshi, 46, a butcher, who was hiding with his wife. Both were
executed, and their house was set on fire. The militiamen then moved down the
block, burning as they went.
Just below Bokshi's house they found Hysem Deda, 77, his
wife, Saja, 65; their daughter, Drita, 33; and her 6-year-old son. Drita's
husband had fled, believing that the militiamen were searching only for men of
fighting age and would not target women, children or the elderly. All four
were
shot dead, and the house was set alight.
Around midnight, most residents of the area had fled through
their back yards to Berisha's walled house on a cul-de-sac between Sadik
Stavaleci and the loop. Three hundred people huddled in the family compound,
more than 40 in the basement alone. Fourteen men, including Berisha and Dushi,
moved back and forth between the compound and the streets, watching the police
and militiamen spread terror.
"We wanted to know which way to go if we had to flee," said
Dushi. Many of those who remained in their homes believed they were safe
because the younger men in their families had already fled to the hills.
Berisha watched as the masked gunmen crossed from the Deda
house to a pool hall across the street. Twenty people were hiding in a cellar
of the building, mostly old people, women and children whose male relatives
had
already fled. Berisha heard bursts of gunfire and watched the building go up
in
flames.
The next morning, Berisha and others who surveyed the
carnage
walked into the pool hall. "They were just in a pile, burned," he said of the
victim's bodies. "The only thing I could see that wasn't burned almost
unrecognizable was a child's hand. It just hung out of the pile."
One 9-year-old boy, Drene Caka, whose mother perished in the
pool hall, survived the massacre with a bullet wound to the shoulder. When the
building was set afire he fled through a broken window. Drene, who was treated
for his wound in Tirana a number of days ago, is believed to have been removed
from Albania with his father, Ali, by officials of the war-crimes tribunal.
His
father, like other men in the Qerim, had fled the neighborhood before the
security forces arrived.
The Walk to Albania
After burning down the pool hall, the militiamen crossed the
street to the home of Jonuz Cana, 65, a teacher; his wife, Ganimete, 55; their
daughter, Shpresa, an economist in her early thirties; and their son Fatmir,
also in his thirties.
All four were killed and their house burned. The gunmen then
continued along the loop, called Millosh Gilic Street, burning each house up
to
the point on the loop where it turned back into Sadik Stavaleci. In a house
there, they found Hasan Hasani, his wife, daughter and brother-in-law; next
door, they found Hasani's brother, Adem, 45, with his son and daughter. All
seven were shot dead, but their houses were not burned because they stood
alongside houses owned by Serbs.
As the pool hall burned, the second militia detachment
moving
along Sadik Stavaleci began its killing spree, starting at a cul-de-sac behind
the bus station. First they killed Melahim Carkaxhiu, 36; then moved two doors
down and killed Gezim Berdeniqui, 40, an architectural engineer. Skipping one
house, they found Osman Dika, 70, and his sons -- Skender, 50, Blerim, 37, and
Albert, 23. All were executed in front of Dika's wife before she was hustled
outside and told to flee to Albania. The gunmen then crossed the street and
killed Skender Dylatanhu, 34, and his 30-year-old brother.
The militiamen skipped the next three streets, which were
occupied mostly by Serbs. At the end of Sadik Stavaleci, however, they entered
the home of Myrteza Dinaj, 55. There, Dinaj, his son, Lulzim, 24, and four
male
refugees from the nearby village of Herec were shot dead in front of the women
and children.
It was now shortly after 5 a.m., and dawn was approaching.
The police and militiamen returned to their vehicles without ever entering the
streets between Sadik Stavaleci and the loop, where 300 ethnic Albanians were
hiding. That morning -- after men from the neighborhood walked through charred
houses to bear witness to the dead -- all 300 left by foot for Albania.
Today, Djakovica is a smoldering ruin of gutted buildings
and
decomposing bodies. Djakovica "is a Sahara," said Luljeta Morina, 32, who fled
the city with her three children. "We don't have houses. We don't have shops.
We don't have schools. We don't have factories. There is nothing."
-Peter Finn and R. Jeffrey Smith, _Washington Post_, April 30, 1999; Page
A01
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Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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