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CEKU UNDER 'SEALED' INDICTMENT?
THE SUNDAY TIMES (London)
"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."
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THE SUNDAY TIMES (London)
September 3 2000
EUROPE
PHOTO:
Serbian victims: refugees from Orahovac, where at least 50 people
disappeared after being abducted by KLA fighters
Photograph: Goran Tomasevic
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.
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