RIGHTS-KOSOVO: Genocide Warning From Annan

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 7 1999 (IPS) - Signs of genocide have appeared in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared in a speech to the Geneva-based UN Commission on Human Rights Wednesday.

“Of all gross violations, genocide knows no parallel in human history,” Annan told the Commission, citing massacres of Cambodians, Rwandans and Bosnians in recent decades.

“Although we have no independent observers on the ground, the signs are that it may be happening, once again, in Kosovo,” he said.

“The vicious and systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing conducted by the Serbian authorities in Kosovo appears to have one aim: to expel or kill as many ethnic Albanians in Kosovo as possible, thereby denying a people of their most basic rights to life, liberty and security.”

Annan’s warning – which came on the same day that the US State Department listed the names of nine Yugoslav Army coomanders “on notice” for committing war crimes in Kosovo – stepped up the pressure on Belgrade to abide by human rights standards.

The UN secretary-general previously has stayed clear of direct involvement in Kosovo, deferring to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the six-nation Contact Group comprised of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States.

He has mildly rebuked the two-week-old NATO strikes on Yugoslavia for lacking the authorisation by the UN Security Council.

“He has no intention of jumping into a crisis in which he has no useful role to play,” said UN spokesman Fred Eckhard. “He would like to hold himself in reserve if, at any time, there is a useful role for him to play.”

But Annan warned that nations must stand against the Yugoslav crackdown on Kosovo, arguing, “If we allow the United Nations to become the refuge of ethnic cleansers or mass murderers, we will betray the very ideals that inspired the founding of the United Nations.”

At the same time that Annan delivered his warning in Geneva, US State Department spokesman James Rubin announced in Washington that nine Yugoslav Army commanders could be prosecuted “not only for crimes they themselves commit, but also for failing to prevent crimes…or for failure to prosecute those who commit crimes”.

Although the United States, like the United Nations, lacks monitoring on the ground in Kosovo, Rubin echoed Annan’s assertion that massacres seem to be occurring there.

“Refugees continue to say that Serb forces are separating military age men from the (refugee) groups, (and) mass executions continue to be reported by Kosovar Albanian refugees throughout the province,” Rubin said.

The United States will provide Justice Louise Arbour, the Canadian prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, with names of other suspected war criminals in the future, Rubin said. (David Scheffer, senior US State Department official for human rights, is documenting reports of atrocities compiled from interviews with Albanian refugees in neighbouring countries.)

Arbour has declared that her authority to investigate war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina – which declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and 1992, respectively – includes authority over Kosovo.

Vladislav Jovanovic, Yugoslavia’s UN ambassador, has denied this, calling the Kosovo dispute an internal matter sparked by Kosovar “terrorism”.

The implicit message of the US and UN statements Wednesday is that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his top officials could ultimately be prosecuted for genocide or other offenses if they continue to harass and expel Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority.

Rubin acknowledged that “at a political level…President Milosevic clearly bears responsibility for what’s going on in Kosovo”.

Yet what is going on remains unclear. Several NATO reports last week that prominent Kosovar Albanian leaders were executed lacked corroboration, and a few were contradicted in recent days.

Although the expulsions are clearly massive – and could amount to half a million refugees over the past two weeks, according to UN officials – reports of killings are more murky.

That is in itself a marked change since 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces overran two UN-guarded “safe areas” in the Bosnian towns of Srebrenica and Zepa.

Following Srebrenica’s fall to the Serbs, UN peacekeepers witnessed the separation of able-bodied Bosnian Muslim men from the women, children and elderly of the enclave.

Within a week, then-US Ambasador to the UN (and current US Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright displayed photos taken by satellites and NATO planes showing “disturbed” earth in parts of Srebrenica, which Washington claimed proved the existence of mass graves.

Human rights investigators have since asserted that at least 7,000 Muslim men and boys were executed at Srebrenica in the immediate aftermath of the enclave’s fall.

This time around, there have been no displays of aerial photography showing possible mass graves, and little information about what happened to the Kosovar men separated from their families during the Albanians’ expulsion. But the disparity among the numbers of male and female adult refugees has worried UN officials.

“While precise statistics remain to be obtained, the vast majority of refugees appear to be women, children and elderly people, raising the disturbing question as to the fate of a large population of Kosovar Albanian males within Kosovo,” said Sergio Vieira de Mello, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.

Some UN officials told IPS – on condition of anonymity – they had seen signs for months that the Belgrade government was planning a massive assault on the Kosovar Albanians – whose province lost its autonomy in 1989, becoming part of Serbia.

The UN Security Council, however, has been divided on a response, with the United States and Britain leading support for NATO’s actions and Russia and China criticising NATO’s use of force without the Security Council’s authorisation.