-Caveat Lector- Atrocity bodies come back to haunt Serbs http://www.guardian.co.uk/yugo/article/0,2763,510931,00.html A lorry load of the dead is just part of the evidence emerging of how Belgrade hid Kosovo's dead Special report: war crimes in the former Yugoslavia Nick Thorpe in Belgrade Friday June 22, 2001 The Guardian The butcher's lorry in the photograph is nondescript and painted white. Still visible on the driver's cabin is the name of Pec, a town in western Kosovo. Dragged from the river Danube, its front wheels are still in the water. The credit for the photograph reads: "Serbian ministry of interior". This is the refrigerator lorry that brought the remains of 86 Kosovan Albanians to Serbia in April 1999. On its way to an undisclosed destination, for the disposal of the bodies, it broke down. Concrete blocks were hurriedly loaded in with the bodies, and the container was sunk in the river. But those responsible underestimated the strength of the river and the insulation material on the inside of the container. They even forgot to deflate the tyres. The truck soon came bobbing to the surface. Local police hauled it ashore, and in the course of that operation, the back doors burst open, to reveal the gruesome cargo. These bodies were immediately declared a state secret. Now they have been unearthed from a mass grave beneath a police shooting range in a Belgrade suburb, Batajnica. Hardly a day goes by without new details being published in the Serbian media of this case, and others. The 86 bodies, including those of women and children, are believed to be ethnic Albanians from the village of Suvareka in western Kosovo, not far from Pec. Soon after Nato bombing raids began on March 24 1999 - against Serbian targets and in defence of the ethnic Albanians - these people were rounded up by Serbian special police and locked in a pizzeria. Hand grenades were thrown in through the windows. At the end of that month, according to the Yugoslav interior minister, Dusan Mihajlovic, the then president, Slobodan Milosevic, told senior police officers, state security, and army top brass to remove evidence of war crimes from Kosovo in case the province ever fell into Nato hands. According to the media reports now surfacing in Serbia, lorry loads of bodies, some already buried once in Kosovo, were removed and taken to locations in Serbia for secret reburial. Yesterday's edition of Vreme, a Serbian news weekly, contains the testimony of a driver now said to be under the witness protection scheme of the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague. He says he made 10 journeys in a truck issued to him by the army, in March and April of 1999, after being called up as a reservist. "Soon I realised I was driving dead people," he said, adding: "It was clear to me. It was not clear to me where they were ending up." He drove to the copper smelting complex in Bor, in eastern Serbia. There, he believes, the bodies were incinerated or buried in a disused shaft. Human rights groups in Belgrade say they believe that the remains of up to 2,000 Kosovan Albanians may have been moved to Serbia. The interior minister has mentioned a possible figure of 1,000, buried at three sites so far - Batajnica, where exhumations are under way in the presence of forensic scientists from the war crimes tribunal; Petrovo Selo in eastern Serbia; and an unnamed third location which media speculation suggests may be near the river Drina, on the border with Bosnia. The Albanians claim 4,000 people are still missing. Film of the Batajnica mass grave has been shown on state television. Arms and legs are clearly protruding from the earth. One of the drivers has said that about a third of the bodies in one of his loads were naked. And that they included women and children. The revelations have shocked the Serbian public deeply. "One positive aspect is that this danse macabre cannot be described as some kind of patriotic action," said Dejan Anastasijevic, a journalist at Vreme. "The transport of bodies cannot be dismissed as one of those 'ugly but unavoidable things that happen in every war' - the usual excuse for atrocities." The latest opinion poll, published yesterday, showed that 46% of those asked believed Slobodan Milosevic should be extradited to the Hague - the first time a majority has supported such a move. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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