| Source: http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/kosovo98/index.htm Accessed 01/05/99
KOSOVO HUMAN RIGHTS FLASH #34
For further information contact: (New York, April 30, 1999, 6:30pm EDT) —Human Rights Watch has concluded three days of investigations into the April 27 massacre of ethnic Albanian men in the village of Meja, northwest of Djakovica. After nineteen separate interviews with eyewitnesses, the organization finds that at least one hundred, and perhaps as many as three hundred, men between the ages of sixteen and sixty were taken out of a convoy of refugees by Serbian forces and systematically executed. The precise number of victims is still unknown. In the early morning of April 27, Serbian special police and paramilitary units, together with soldiers of the Yugoslav Army (VJ), systematically "cleansed" all ethnic Albanians from the villages between Djakovica and Junik, near the Albanian border. Beginning around 7:00 a.m., the security forces forcibly expelled residents from the following villages: Pecaj, Nivokaz, Dobrash, Sheremet, Jahoc, Ponashec, Racaj, Ramoc, Madanaj, and Orize. All of the nineteen witnesses interviewed from these villages, who included people from elsewhere who had sought refuge over the past month in those villages, told Human Rights Watch that soldiers and special police forces surrounded their villages, rounded up the inhabitants, and forced them to flee along the road towards Djakovica, some in tractors and some on foot. Many of the villages were then systematically burned. One eighteen-year-old woman from Dobrash said that the security forces held two male members of her family, Iber and Avdyl, as the family left the village. "The police told us to walk on and then we heard the shooting of automatic guns," she said. The two men are currently missing. The villagers from the region were all forced to follow the road to Meja, a small village just outside of Djakovica. Their accounts reveal how, during the course of the day, the many police and military present in the village systematically pulled hundreds of ethnic Albanian men out of the convoy and away from their families. Villagers who passed through Meja around midday reported seeing security forces holding "hundreds" of men at gunpoint. Those who had passed through Meja later in the afternoon reported having seen a "large pile of bodies," which some estimated to be as many as three hundred. This number could not be independently confirmed and, witnesses admitted, the count is based on the estimated number of men taken from the convoy who are currently missing. Human Rights Watch researchers interviewed all nineteen witnesses in Kukes, northern Albania, within three days after they entered Albania on April 28. Although questions remain about some details of the events, the consistency and specificity of witnesses' testimonies paint an undeniable picture of forced expulsion, the systematic destruction of civilian property, intimidation and robbery, and the forced separation and summary execution of many ethnic Albanian males. The refugees, severely traumatized, began entering Albania through the Morina border crossing near Kukes in the early morning of April 28. A Human Rights Watch researcher at the border at 6:30 a.m. interviewed some of the refugees a short time after they crossed into the country. The newly arrived refugees, made up almost entirely of women, children, and elderly men, spoke of a mass slaughter in Meja. Witnesses interviewed over the next two days in Kukes area refugee camps provided more details of the atrocities. One witness said she was forced out of Sheremet around 8:00 a.m. on April 26 and arrived in Meja with her family on a tractor around 10:00 a.m. "They took the men from the tractors," she said. "There were about forty people on our tractor, and they took twelve men. They took all of the men." Other refugees who traveled through Meja that day confirmed that security forces took men as young as fourteen and as old as sixty out of the convoy. Ray Wilkenson, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Kukes who was on the border as the refugees arrived in Albania, told Human Rights Watch that in his estimation sixty tractors crossed into Albania and "six out of seven" of the tractors reported that some men had been taken from their vehicles. Journalists who were on the border at the same time said that the refugees repeatedly said that at least 100 men had been killed. A nineteen-year-old man who arrived in Meja between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. described the scene to Human Rights Watch. He said:
Human Rights Watch interviewed refugees who passed through Meja between 12:00 and 3:00 p.m. and reported seeing large numbers of ethnic Albanian men in the custody of security forces. One witness, a thirty-eight-year-old teacher who passed through Meja around 1:00 p.m., told Human Rights Watch:
Another witness who was in Meja at the same time, interviewed separately, provided a corroborating account, adding only that the group of men was kneeling with their hands behind their backs, surrounded by soldiers. Other witnesses who were in Meja around midday described slight variations of this scenario. A forty-year-old woman who was in Meja around 12:00 p.m. said she saw "seventy men or more" squatting with their hands behind their heads in a small canal that ran parallel to the road. Another witness said her husband was taken off their cart to join a group of Albanian men at the side of the road and forced to shout: "Long live Serbia; long live Milosevic." All of the witnesses said that Meja was full of police and special forces dressed in blue and green camouflage uniforms, respectively. Many members of the forces wore black ski masks, and some wore red bandanas on their heads, they said. Some reported seeing red patches with a double-headed eagle, a symbol of Yugoslavia, on the soldiers' sleeves. One witness who passed through Meja around 12:00 p.m. claimed to have seen fifteen dead men on the right side of the road. The eighteen-year-old woman told Human Rights Watch:
The refugees who passed through Meja later in the afternoon told of seeing many dead bodies in the village. An eighteen-year-old man and a nineteen-year-old woman, interviewed together, who arrived in Meja on foot around 5:30 p.m., said they saw a large pile of bodies about three meters from the right side of the road in the center of the village. The bodies, tumbled together, covered an area of ground about twelve by twenty feet, and were stacked about four feet high, they said. The witnesses admitted to being very scared and rushed along by the police, factors which prevented them from making any more than a very rough estimate of the body count. Based on the number of men that they believed were missing, they thought the number of dead totaled 300. Fifteen other men, they said, were sitting on the ground with their backs to the pile of dead bodies facing a group of security forces. Human Rights Watch concluded today that Serbian police and paramilitaries, and probably Yugoslav Army forces summarily executed ethnic Albanian men on April 27 in Meja. The precise number of men and boys who were killed will not be known until forensics experts are allowed into Kosovo to examine the site. Urgent international action is needed to stop such slaughter. These war crimes should also be prosecuted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Five Serbian policemen were reportedly killed in Meja on April 21, 1999. Refugees from the region told Human Rights Watch that unidentified ethnic Albanians, perhaps from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), had shot and killed the five policemen after the victims had searched an Albanian house for arms, although this story could not be confirmed. ****
KOSOVO HUMAN RIGHTS FLASH #33 CIVILIANS AT RISK BY YUGOSLAV USE OF CIVILIAN PROPERTY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES NATO Urged to Use Extreme Caution (New York, April 30, 1999, 3:45pm EDT) —Yugoslav forces in Kosovo are hiding tanks and other military equipment in the burned out shells of ethnic Albanians' homes according to refugees arriving in Macedonia. This comes against a background of "ethnic cleansing" and the systematic destruction of civilian property. Residents from three villages close to the southern town of Urosevac (Ferizaj, in Albanian) and from a village close to the Macedonian border told Human Rights Watch that after Serbian security forces attacked their villages and forcibly expelled them from their homes, tanks were hidden in civilian houses and courtyards. Those houses left intact were used as military offices, and to house soldiers. Several witnesses told Human Rights Watch that the Yugoslav military entered the village of Sojevo, approximately 5 kilometers east of Urosevac, on April 6 and searched the village for persons linked to the Kosovo Liberation Army. According to the witnesses, they then hid their tanks in courtyards of civilian homes. The following day, paramilitaries entered the village, setting fire to houses and forcing the remaining population to flee. A refugee from the nearby village of Biba (around 2 kilometers east of Urosevac) described a similar operation in her village on April 14. She told Human Rights Watch, "The day we left, the military came to the village at around 5 p.m. They put tanks inside the houses and covered them in straw. Then they told us to go to NATO." She also explained that "[the military] are staying in the houses of Albanians" in the village. The village was looted and burned as the villagers fled the following morning. The Yugoslav Army also concealed Serbian tanks and soldiers in the village of Kamena Glava (Komoglave in Albania), 5 kilometers southeast of Urosevac. According to one witness interviewed by Human Rights Watch, "The military came into the village with tanks at 11 a.m. on Friday (April 9). They were destroying the doors and putting tanks in the yards of houses. They stayed in the village - they dug trenches, they put tanks in houses, and the three houses they didn't destroy they used as offices." His account was confirmed by another witness from Kamena Glava, who described how the military had established "a headquarters" in the village and estimated that there were as many as 40 tanks hidden in the village. The witness also claimed that "NATO had bombed a tank parked in the yard of one my houses [in the village]." Similarly, another woman from the same village told Human Rights Watch that "nearly all the houses in Komoglave were burnt except for those where the army had hidden their tanks." Serbian forces employed a similar strategy in the village of Globovica (Globocica in Albanian). The village, which is close to the Macedonian border, was attacked on April 10. Witnesses said the police killed farm animals and beat villagers before expelling them. One resident explained that "we didn't leave our village until the tanks came," indicating that there were as many as 50 tanks involved in the operation against the village. Witnesses also described the use of civilian property by Serbian forces for military purposes: "I saw an armored personnel carrier sheltered in the yard of a friend of mine," one man explained to Human Rights Watch. "The military are staying in all of our houses at the moment [in Globovica] because they are afraid of NATO." Human Rights Watch is concerned that a pattern is emerging in which the Yugoslav Army and Serb police are placing equipment, ammunition and vehicles in or near civilian structures, thereby increasing confusion about what is a military and what is a civilian area and significantly increasing the likelihood of loss of civilian lives. Human Rights Watch urges Yugoslav forces to refrain from taking actions that further jeopardize the security and safety of the civilian population. The organization also urges NATO to take this emerging pattern into consideration when identifying targets for attack so as to avoid to the fullest extent possible more civilian casualties. |
Document compiled by Dr S D Stein