[PEN-L:5887] (Fwd) THIS ATROCITY IS STILL A MYSTERY TO NATO. PERHAPS I CAN

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Date sent:              Fri, 23 Apr 1999 17:17:28 -0700
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Subject:                THIS ATROCITY IS STILL A MYSTERY TO NATO. PERHAPS I CAN HELP...

The (London) Independent                                        17 April 1999

THIS ATROCITY IS STILL A MYSTERY TO NATO. PERHAPS I CAN HELP...

        By Robert Fisk

        When you stand at the site of a massacre, two things happen. 
First, you wonder about the depths of the human spirit. And then 
you ask yourself how many lies can be told about it. The highway 
of death between Prizren and Djakovica - on which the Serbs say 
Nato slaughtered 74 Kosovo Albanian refugees in a series of 
bombing raids - is no different.
        Only hours after I slipped on a dead man's torso near an old 
Turkish bridge, less than a day after I stood by the body of a young 
and beautiful girl - her eyes gently staring at me between half-closed 
lids, the bottom half of her head bathed in blood - I watched James 
Shea, Nato's spokesman, trying to explain yesterday why Nato still 
didn't know what had happened on Wednesday.
        All those torn and mangled bodies I had just seen - the old man 
ripped in half and blasted into a tree at Gradis, the smouldering 
skeleton with one bloody, still flesh-adhering foot over the back of 
a trailer at Terezick Most, the dead, naked man slouched over the 
steering wheel of a burnt tractor - all, apparently, were a mystery to 
Nato. So perhaps The Independent can help clear up this unhappy 
state of affairs with some evidence – damning perhaps, certainly 
important - from the scene.
        But first a pause, to reflect on atrocities. The Serbs are 
"ethnically cleansing" Kosovo. It is a war crime. If Nato massacred 
the 74 Albanians, the Serbs have killed many more. On Thursday, I 
saw four buses in Kosovo packed with terrified Albanian women 
and children and old men, black curtains at the windows of the 
buses in an attempt to hide their presence. And at a square in the 
otherwise deserted town of Pozeranje, near Urosevac, I passed at 
least 200 pathetic Kosovo Albanians, exhausted, frightened, 
carrying plastic bags of clothes and battered holdalls, the old 
women in scarves, the young women clutching children to their 
bosoms, the old men wearing black berets; all were standing tightly 
together for protection, like animals.
        They were waiting for another bus, I suppose - and, not for the 
first time these past three weeks, I thought of other scenes, in 
Eastern Europe just over half a century ago. At Pozeranje, I was 
seeing these poor people - for a few seconds only, from a vehicle 
window - at the very moment of their dispossession, on the very 
day of their "cleansing", within hours of their arrival among the 
flotsam of humanity along the Serbian border 12 miles away It was 
a wickedness I saw, the very moment of evil. When I drove through 
Pozeranje again yesterday, it was empty save for four horses 
running lose on the main road.
        So why dwell on the 74 dead Kosovo Albanians whose remains 
have been left in such indignity along the Prizren-Djakovica road? 
Because the Serbs wanted us to see them? Because Nato was 
already embarrassed by the Serb claims of their slaughter? Because 
it "evens the balance" - it does not - between Serbia and its 
enemies?
        No, I suspect that the road of death and its terrible corpses is a 
challenge not to Nato's propaganda but to its morality. Nato, we 
are repeatedly told, represents "us", the good moral, decent people 
who oppose lies and murder. So Nato has a case to answer - for all 
our sakes. And the evidence lies on that awful road with its 
eviscerated people and its bomb craters.
        Nato "thinks" it bombed a tractor on a road north of Djakovica. 
Indeed, Nato's military spokesman would say yesterday only that is 
was "possibly" a tractor. Mr Shea - or "Jamie" as he enjoins us to 
call him - says he is still trying to find out what happened to the 74 
refugees. Nato needs more time, he tells us, to assess what it 
bombed and did not bomb.
        Well perhaps I can help Jamie to speed up his enquiries. Of the 
four air-strike locations, I have visited the first three - at Velika 
Krusa, Gradis and Terzick Most - and they run consecutively from 
east to west along the Prizren-Djakovica road. At the third, I came 
across four bomb craters. I saw - and in some cases collected – a 
number of bomb and missile parts. At Gradis, I came across part of 
a missile circuit board, its congealed wiring attached to a plate 
which contains a manufacturer's code.
        Yesterday's Independent carried some of this. But Nato will 
need the fullest possible information to trace this piece of ordnance 
quickly. The full code (the brackets are empty on the original) reads 
as follows:

SCHEM 872110 ( ) 96214ASSY8721122 – MSN 63341 

[remaining figures obscured by detonation damage]

        It shouldn't take Nato armaments experts more than a few hours 
to find out where that code came from – indeed what aircraft 
carried and fired that missile. Its pilot - if it was a Nato bomb - will 
then be able to explain why he fired it.
        At Velika Krusa, I found the fusing of an aerial bomb next to a 
smashed trailer containing the belongings of 35 Albanian refugees, 
four of whom – all women - were killed in this air strike. I also have 
in my possession what may be a swivel system to an aerial bomb. It 
is one-inch square, very damaged (Xs stand for the illegible parts) – 
but carries the code: "X6214 - 837XNY".
        At Gradis, I found a large bomb part, green in colour but with 
stencilled colour code in English, whose full code reads: 

WING ASSEMBLY

96214ASSY

78-201872 872128

DATE OF MFG 3/78

Another similar bomb part contained the numbers:

96214ASSY

887760-4

        At Gradis, too, part of what appeared to be a detonator 
contained a section of manufacturer's name:

- TER Co Inc

13250

        Again, Nato intelligence authorities should be able to work out 
some of those codings within a few minutes. Another piece of a 
bomb had the single word "BENDIX" stamped on the metal. Other 
bomb and missile fragments contained moving fin assembly parts. 
Most of the shrapnel was so sharp it that it cut the hands of those 
who touched it. The corpses showed what happened when the 
bomb parts shredded them alive. One of the bodies lying in a field at 
Terezicki Most - that of a man in his 40s - had the top of his head 
cut cleanly off, along with his brain and eyes so that his face had 
turned into an actor's mask. A middle-aged woman in a purple 
pullover and brightly flowered skirt with her eyes open and a pale 
waxen face, had had her neck cut open.
        Now, maybe Nato will find that these bomb and missile 
assembly parts belonged to weapons sold to other governments. 
Perhaps they will be able to claim that a Balkan nation was given 
the aerial bomb whose wing assembly number is recorded above. In 
which case, maybe Nato will say that the Yugoslav air force - of 
which not a single aircraft has been seen in the air since the start of 
the Nato bombardment - carried out this massacre of Albanian 
refugees.
        Certainly, Yugoslav army officers at the bomb sites made no 
attempt to prevent photographers taking pictures of the larger 
pieces (though they showed no interest in the codings and seemed 
unable to understand my interest). And I saw one photographer 
drag a piece of bomb several metres and turn it over for a better 
photograph. But given the time available and the chaos on the road 
- Nato air raids were going on within a mile of us as we examined 
the bomb sites - it is impossible to believe that the Serbs had time to 
construct these terrible scenes.
        At Gradis, there was evidence of strafing as well as aerial 
bombing. Huge troughs had been cut into the earth, each two feet 
in length, separated by up to 10 feet and unevenly separated as if a 
drunken monster had lurched through the field and on to the road. 
These appeared identical to the cannon fire marks I found at the 
scene of American A-10 "Tankbuster" strikes in the 1991 Gulf War. 
But there were no burnt-out tanks on the Prizren-Djakovica road; 
only tractors and trailers and an old milk-yellow van turned inside 
out by the explosion which destroyed it.
        Along miles of the same road were other tractors, some 
scorched, most abandoned, apparently in panic, at the side of the 
road. The few Kosovo Albanians we found spoke of thousands on 
the road that day - 14 April – and it appears that they were moving 
in both directions. Survivors have said they came from the border, 
were moved to Djakovica and then told by Serb forces to move to 
Prizren. Most say they had no Serb escorts. I saw those awful buses 
with the black curtains moving in both directions near Prizren on 
Thursday. "Ethnic cleansing" is not a precise art. Nor is fear. 
Undoubtedly some of the Kosovo Albanians on the road were 
terrified of the aircraft which bombed them in four separate 
locations. The fourth attack took place at Meja on the other side of 
Djakovica.
        It wasn't difficult for me to imagine the terror on that road. 
While we were picking our way through the corpses of Terezicki 
Most, Nato planes dropped bombs less than a mile away – cluster 
bombs from the sound of them - and a series of massive explosions 
changed the air pressure around us. We watched the skies. From 
time to time, we could hear - but not see - Nato jets power-diving. 
Columns of dark smoke billowed over the bright green fields.
        But we found no military wreckage. Not a smashed rifle, not a 
piece of armour. There was a lot of glass on parts of the road - not 
a commodity to find in large amounts on military vehicles. The only 
victims of these air strikes appeared to be civilians. At Terezicki 
Most, I counted 13 corpses and other body parts. A missile had 
rammed a tractor, setting fire to its trailer and incinerating all inside. 
In the Prizren hospital mortuary, six corpses lay on the concrete 
floor. There was a woman, breasts exposed, on the right, a delicate 
child close to her with a bloodied face. A piece of paper with the 
number "1" written on it had been pinned to the shroud half 
covering an unknown man. We had names for the rest: Fikrija Sulja, 
Imer Celja, Ferat Bajrami, Persad Sanfjli and Nerdgivare Zecin.
        Along the road, there were clothes and rags and broken cups 
and saucers beside the bomb sites and photograph albums and 
family snapshots. I picked up photographs of a pretty young 
Kosovo Albanian woman with a lace blouse and curls and long 
black earrings, of a smiling four-year old boy in a T-shirt standing 
on a sofa behind a vase of sunflowers, of the boy's parents and two 
other brothers on the same sofa, of two old women in Muslim 
scarves and of a blood group certificate – Rhesus positive - for a 
woman named Rama Resmije, dated 16 March 1993.
        Did she live or die? Were the little boy and his parents and 
brothers torn apart in the air strikes on Wednesday? And what of 
the pretty woman in the earrings? If they survived, they deserve to 
know why their family and friends died. If they were killed, we 
deserve to know why. That these people were massacred in air 
strikes I do not doubt. I fear very much that they were slaughtered 
by Nato. If so, why? Was this some terrible error about which Nato 
- after its attack on a passenger train last week - fears to tell us? Or 
did some Nato pilots (and this massacre needed three or four 
planes) make an error and agree to cover it up? Or - most awful of 
all - did a Nato pilot do something terrible, inexplicable, two days 
ago and then lie about it?
        Nato, I suspect, can tell us. And those of us who walked among 
the innocent dead on the road from Prizren to Djakovica this week 
are waiting to hear Jamie tell the truth.