Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Serbians arrested over wartime massacre in Kosovo

SARAJEVO, Oct 26 (AFP) -

Nine people including six acting Serbian policemen have been arrested on suspicion of killing 48 ethnic Albanian civilians in the 1998-1999 Kosovo conflict, a spokesman for Serbia's war crimes prosecutor said here Wednesday.

"The nine are suspected of having taken part in the murders of 48 civilians including four babies, 10 children, a pregnant woman and an 100-year-old woman," Bruno Vekaric told AFP.

The atrocities had taken place in the small town of Suva Reka, about 60 kilometers (36 miles) southwest of Kosovo's main city of Pristina, said Vekaric.

The remains of the victims were found in a mass grave in Batajnica, a suburb of the Serbian capital Belgrade, Vekaric said, adding the nine were questioned by a magistrate and that the prosecution demanded they be kept in custody.

The arrests are the first of acting Serbian policemen for their possible role in war crimes committed during the Kosovo conflict, which claimed an estimated 10,000 lives.

The remains of some 800 ethnic Albanians killed during the war were found in mass graves across Serbia after the collapse of the regime of former president Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000.

Three mass graves have since been found in Serbia including the one at the secret police training camp in Batajnica, which was discovered in 2001.

The remains of 834 ethnic Albanians have been exhumed from the sites, according to legal authorities in Belgrade. Some 635 of them have been identified and delivered to their families in Kosovo.

Kosovo, which is a province of Serbia, has been under UN protection since a NATO bombing campaign forced Serbian forces to withdraw in 1999 and end a crackdown against ethnic Albanian separatists.

Milosevic is on trial at the UN war crimes court at The Hague for his alleged role in atrocities during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

ELLO MARTYR DO YOU READ THIS YOU MATER TI JEBEM SERBSKU CIGANSKU.......
WOMEN,CHILDREN,, BABIES,,A 100 YEAR OLD MAN??? WOW THEY WERE ALL K.L.A.......?? HUH ALL WERE K.L.A COMON YOU MOTHER PHOCKER TALK IS CHEAP ...HERE IS PROOF TO YOU....SINCE THEY WERE ARESTED BY YOUR OWN UGLY MOTHERPOHCKER ....THIS IS A PROOF THAT THE WEST DID NOT INVENET ALL THESE KILLINGS..... NOW ITS OUR TURN TO RULE SERBCI.... NO STOPPING ..8+ MILLIONS ALBANIANS AND GROWING.LOVE IT

Anonymous said...

fuck u you pieace of muslim dirt! I can POINT TO thousand of SERBS U KILLED IN THE LAST 8 YEARS!!!! TURCINE CIGANSKI JEBEM TI MATER SIPTARSKU! EVERY VICTIM ON ALL SIDES IS A WASTE HOW COME NO ALBO CAN EVER SAY THAT?????????? HOW COME U NEVER SEE AN ARTICEL ABOUT TEH THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF SERBS U HAVE KILLED SINCE 1998????? WHEN CAN U SHOW 1 ARTICEL ABOUT THE 250,000 SERBS U KICKED OUT THAT WILL NEVER RETURN????? THAT IS A GENOCIDE U FUCK COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF A PEOPLE THE ALBOS WENT BAcK AFTER TEHY FLED LIKE RATS SCARED LIKE PUSSIES. THE NUMBER IS 48 48 48 48 ASSHOLE WHERE ARE THE 500,000 dead U CLIAMED???? ????????? FUCKING SHIT HEAD LIAR! DUDE THERE CAM BE 100million albos it wont matter u will still need soemone to fight for your pussy ass, u had FUCKING NATO FLY FOR U WITH over 1,000 planes and ALL U COULD DO IS DESTROY 12 tanks and run like pussies hahahahahahah!!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

What a dick-head. Religion has nothing to do here. And you like the majority of the other dick-heads living in Serbia are proving over and over that you started the wars for religious reasons. The balkans have, in Serbia,a state funded religious fundamentalism that is responsible for the three wars the Serb started. Only this fundamentalism can explain this massacre by the Serbs.

"The 48 victims of the Suva Reka massacre -- among them 14 children, two babies, a pregnant woman and a 100-year-old woman -- were among hundreds of ethnic Albanians killed during the war in Kosovo whose bodies were later transported to Serbia.

They were dumped in mass graves near a high security police facility at Batajnica outside Belgrade, the Serbian capital. Autopsies showed the victims were executed."

Anonymous said...

and thousands of serbs were killed as well, so what is your point?

Anonymous said...

THE SUNDAY TIMES (UK), Sunday, September 3, 2000 EUROPE
KLA faces trials for war crimes on Serbs

Inquiry turns on Albanians

Tom Walker, Diplomatic Correspondent

INTERNATIONAL war crimes investigators are for the first time focusing on atrocities against Serbian civilians that were committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

Sources close to prosecutors in the Hague confirmed last week that its forensic experts were checking five sites where war crimes were allegedly carried out by members of the KLA. Their findings could lead to a request to Nato's Kfor troops to arrest several senior figures in the new Kosovo Albanian elite, including possibly Hashim Thaci, the KLA's former political leader, or Ramush Haridinaj, one of his main political rivals.

United Nations sources have already revealed that Agim Ceku, the guerrillas' former commander, may be the subject of a secret "sealed" indictment for his activities while fighting for the Croatian army against the Serbs. Like Thaci and Haridinaj, Ceku, who now heads the Kosovo Protection Corps, the local defence force, has denied wrong-doing.

The investigation could radically alter the international perception of the conflict, in which Albanians were seen as the largely innocent victims of Serbian aggression. After a year of growing concern about hundreds of revenge killings of Serbs by Albanians in the province, there are signs that the public relations pendulum may begin to swing the Serbs' way.

The investigations by the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia are among its most secretive, with officials fearing retaliation by the Albanians. "The operations of the KLA clearly involved many activities we should scrutinise," said one Hague official.

"There's a real problem in unravelling their cell structure, but we may well end up pointing the finger at senior figures. The difficulty then will be persuading any Nato nation to arrest them."

All five sites were discovered by the Serbian police as they regained territory lost to the KLA in the summer of 1998. As Albanian villages were being destroyed in the Serbian police offensives that grabbed the international media spotlight, the plight of the rural Serbian peasantry was often ignored and dozens of villagers and farmers were abducted, tortured and left in mass graves.

Three of the areas under investigation are thought to be the villages of Klecka and Glodjane and the town of Orahovac.

The killings in Klecka have been linked to Thaci, who now heads the Democratic party of Kosovo. The Belgrade media made great play of the discovery in August 1998 of what it claimed were 22 Serbian bodies in a lime kiln in Klecka.

Glodjane, further west in the Decane area bordering Albania, was fiercely contested by the Serbs and Albanians. In September 1998 the Serbian media centre in Pristina claimed that the bodies of 34 people had been found in a canal there. They were a mixture of Serbian farmers, some gypsies and Albanians suspected of being collaborators. The local commander at the time was Haradinaj, now head of the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo.

In Orahovac, an ancient Balkan maze of cobbled streets and mixed ethnicities, at least 50 Serbs were abducted by the KLA in July 1998, never to be seen again. In the autumn hundreds of angry Serbs marched six miles through the hills to Dragobilj, the local KLA headquarters and one of the few places where Islamic mujaheddin fighters were seen. The protest failed to persuade the KLA to give any details of the missing Serbs.

Most inquiries made so far have been met with silence and few witnesses are thought likely to be brave enough to reveal the brutality of the KLA.

One former Albanian commander, who now lives in the West, told The Sunday Times that he saw two Serbian policemen tied to the backs of Jeeps and dragged to their deaths during the fighting around Glodjane. He said he had no intention of talking to the war crimes prosecutors and wished to forget Kosovo altogether.

The Serbs, too, are unlikely to co-operate with the Hague because Belgrade refuses to recognise the tribunal. Milosevic and Milan Milutinovic, the Serbian president, are both indicted by the tribunal, and Milosevic is believed to have offered a bolthole to Radovan Karadzic, the most wanted suspect of the Bosnian conflict.

"We're not permitted to make any interviews in Serbia proper and that is a considerable hindrance," said Paul Risley, spokesman for Carla Del Ponte, the tribunal's senior prosecutor.

It is also not clear whether investigations into the KLA's activities can be extended into the period after Nato entered Kosovo in June 1999. Authorities in Belgrade claim there have been 1,041 murders in the province since then - with 910 of the victims being Serbs or Montenegrins. In the most recent attacks on Serbs, an eight-year-old child was killed by a hit-and-run driver near the town of Lipljan last month, and a hand grenade was lobbed into a basketball court injuring 10 children north of Pristina. A farmer aged 80 was machine-gunned to death in the nearby village of Crkvna Vodica while he was tending his cattle.

The claims of genocide being made by the Albanians at Belgrade two years ago are now being thrown back at them, but the war crimes tribunal remains dispassionate. "We're not seeing genocide at the moment, but severe human rights violations. There is no evidence that any group wants to annihilate the Serbs rather than just force them out," said an official.

Anonymous said...

Let me clarify things here. First of all there were never 250,000 Serbs in Kosova. Let's start with 200,000. Of them, about 20+ k came as refugees from Croatia. They are gone for good and forever to the land that made them belive that it would support their occupied territories and idea "Serbija do Tokija" and then let them down when shit hit the fan. Another 100,000 still live in Kosova today. About 60,000-80,000 left. This figure is supported by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the only independent source out there with such a service. All others quote either Albanians or Serbs.

A new census will be held in Kosova after 15 years next year. Let's hope that Serbs will vote so they don't resemble even more the Sunnis of Iraq and we on the blogosphere can settle this argument.

Now, how did Serbs leave? Were they cleansed? Were their houses burnt? When did they leave? All these questions are importat and basic.

I was present when it happened. When the BMW with the VJ surrender officers crossed the border into Macedonia, local radio invited all the Serbs into a meeting to decide what to do. That night they decided they would go, and left before VJ was out and NATO had not entered yet. They cleared out in 12 hours. Amazzing!!!

A very good decision in my opinion, because during the previous 11 weeks about 80% of the city's population was cleansed and city streets resembled those of Mostar.

I will risk and say that there was also a sense of shame on the part of Serbs. But not as big as not to steal all the cars and everything that could be carried over to Serbia.

So to conclude, Serbs left before Albanians begun coming back. And then mass graves were found on the outskirts, people came to their burned houses...My neighbhors started talking about how our two Serb neighbhors rode on tanks coming back from another burnt village, how their houses were staging grounds for the paramilitaries, etc.

What is one to think with all this?

Anonymous said...

the same way 800k albos left for fear of a ground war and then another 400k albos from albania came back to kosovo with them.

Anonymous said...

SRBI NEMOJTE DA SE SVADJATE OVDE NA OVOM SAJTU NEGO AJDE DA NAPRAVIMO MI SAJT DA NJIH OGOVARAMO MI SE SADA BORIMO NA NJIHOVU TERRITORIJU NJIHOV SAJT ALI ZA POBEDU TREBAMO DA SE BORIMO NA NASOJ TERRITORIJI. sVAKI DAN PUNO LJUDI CITA OVI SAJT I SVAKI DAN ALBANSI NAGOVORE NEKOLIKO LJUDE DA BUD ZA NEZAVISNU DRZAVU KOSOVA
NAZALOST JA NEZNAM KAKO DA NAPRAVIM SAJT A ONI KOJ ZNA NEK NAPRAVI ZATO STO AKO NENAPRAVI NECEMO MORATI DA SE BORIMO PREKO INTERNETA NEGO NA RATISTU!!!!!

Anonymous said...

the same way 800k albos left for fear of a ground war and then another 400k albos from albania came back to kosovo with them.

are u high?
where do u get these figures? do the voice in uer head give u uer reasons??? u say 400 thousand albananian-albanians came to kosova..ok name 100 of them?? why the fuck do u losers always claim like 500k shkije were clinsed or whatever?? or that the KLA killed the albanians and NON-ALbanians (not fucking true) the only ppl in kosova that are bitching are the shkije..we've always lived close with other minorities (ashkalie, turks, gabel...) SHKIJEt will never get ahold of kosova again..fuck u DICKHEADS I'm so fucking happy Hitler grinded 200k serbs...u all are the dirt of earth...haha nato bombed uer house didnt they?? losers!!

Anonymous said...

Those 200K were Jews living in Serbia. The orthodox Serb with the NAZIS exterminated them. in fact Belgrade was the first Jew Free capital in Europe. After the war was over, they started claiming the Jews as Serbs.

Anonymous said...

Easy boys - stop a cork in this childish banter. Kosovo's going independent, like it or not.

K-albs should keep the moral highground they still have, despite efforts by both their own extremists/mafia to put the boot in, and the Serbian govenment's appalling manipulation and ghetto-ing of K-Serbs.

The hapless international community should have struck a deal on independence in June 1999 and saved 6 years of grinding misery for all.

Anonymous said...

Te dashur bashkeatdhetar, mos i thirrni me emra, se ne nuk jemi ne nivel te tyre, ata le te perdorin emra si koke-kari, e fytyre-kake, por ne jo. Na jemi ma te mire ;)

Anonymous said...

AHAHAHAHAHAHA ASSWIPES IF NATO DIDNT COME TO UR RESCUE YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN BITCH SLAPPED SO HARD BACK TO TURKEY! TEH SERBS FOUGHT THE NAZIS WHILE U WRE THEIR ALLIES, SERBS ARE HEROS WHO FOUGHT NATO WHILE THEY DROPPED TENS OF THOUSANDS OF TONS OF URANIUM IN UR BACKYARDS IN KOSOVO HAHAHAHAHAH EVEN UGLY RUGOVA IS DIEING FROM TEH CANCER!!! HAHAHAHAH Belgrade was Jew free cause ur allies killed them along with serbs, there was never 200k jews in serbia asshole, the SERBS ARE HEROS!!!!! HAHAHAH WHAT WILL U DO WHEN NATO LEAVES????? KOSOVO WILL BE AVENGE INDEPENDENT OR NOT IT DOES NOT MATTER!!!!!!! JEBACEMO VAS DO TURSKE PICKE SIPTARSKE!!! CITAJ CITAJ ZNAS MOJ JEZIK CIGANE JEDAN!

Anonymous said...

the one guy up there said serbs started the wars of the balkans...

he can go fuck himself with all the siptars reading this shit...

after 60 years and more of serbs being killed by siptars, finally someone had guts to kill all you fucking siptars...

GO MILOSEVIC... Your legacy lives on...

Siptars you poor bastards...
Taking whats not yours is fucked up...

NAPRED PLAVI...