RIGHTS-YUGOSLAVIA: The Atrocities In Kosovo Slowly Re-surfacing

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, May 14 2001 (IPS) - For the first time ever, broader Serbian public is becoming aware of atrocities committed against ethnic Albanians in the southern province of Kosovo at the times of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) air raids in 1999.

Last week, a diver from Kladovo, a small town on Danube River, some 250 kilometres east of Belgrade, revealed how he organised a gruesome rescue operation on the Danube River on Apr 6, 1999.

Zivojin Djordjevic, a professional diver, says the police called him, and saw what initially “looked like any normal traffic accident.”

When he dived, Djordjevic says he saw a green Mercedes refrigerator truck. A huge stone was fixed to the gas pedal. The body of the driver was missing.

The truck had Pec licence plates, the name of a firm in Albanian language and its telephone number – 029 22 997. Pec is a Kosovo town, 388 kilometres south of Belgrade, the capital of the Federal Republic of Serbia.

A crane from nearby Djerdap hydropower plant was brought in to tug the truck to the bank of the river.

“Bodies started to slither out of the refrigerator compartment as we opened it… Bodies of women, children and elders… Some of the women were dressed in ‘salvare’ (traditional Muslim clothes)… Some children and elderly people were naked,” Djordjevic recalls.

NATO’s 11 weeks of bombing campaign against Serbia, which began in March 1999, was sparked by the repressive politics of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime against two million Albanians in Kosovo.

During the March-June NATO air raids, Serb security forces expelled more than 800,000 ethnic Albanians into neighbouring countries.

At the same time, according to both Serbian and Kosovo human rights groups, 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed. Five hundred summary execution sites were located in Kosovo.

Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor of The Hague-based War Criminal Tribunal, said recently that some 4,000 bodies were discovered in makeshift graves in Kosovo. The rest of the bodies have remained unaccounted for.

The official version of Milosevic’s regime was that no security forces ever committed atrocities against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. All Serbian media were censored during NATO air raids, strictly prohibited from writing anything on Kosovo.

Attempts by independent media to cover the war in Kosovo led to court cases against journalists, while Milosevic was still in power, between 1999 and 2000. Milosevic lost power last October, after losing presidential elections.

In Kladovo, in the evening of Apr 6, the bodies were re-loaded into another truck that went to an unknown destination. Four undertakers were summoned to dig the graves. During the night, the police blew the green Mercedes truck into pieces with 30 kilogrammes of explosives.

Deputy prosecutor in the nearby town of Negotin, Miroslav Srzentic, was informed of the truck. He started for Kladovo in the morning on Apr 7, but was stopped by his superior.

“The prosecutor, Mr Krsta Manojlovic, told me that there was not going to be an investigation,” Srzentic recalls. Manojlovic, who is retired now, would not talk to Journalists.

But Djordjevic, the diver, says “the time has finally come to tell the truth about the truck”.

Dozens of astonished listeners phoned Belgrade radio stations following the airing of Kladovo’s programme. “He (Milosevic) might have ordered us to be silent,” a listener of popular Belgrade B 92 said. “But we knew that bad things were happening.”

Natasa Kandic of the Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC), one of the most respected rights groups in Serbia, told IPS: “It’s encouraging to see that the public reacted openly about the case.”

She says revealing the truth about the case could lead to the final battle about Milosevic’s crimes against non-Serbs in the past decade. Four wars raged on in the 1990s in the former Yugoslav federation, with Belgrade taking active part in it under the pretext of “defending Serb national interest”.

“I’m afraid that this is just the first case in a row of many,” Goran Vesic, advisor to the interior minister told journalists last week. “It’s a scandal and it’s shocking to know that people from the former state apparatus took part in the whole affair.”

Serbian police have begun to investigate allegations of war crimes. So far, two police chiefs have been sacked for their alleged role in a cover-up.