[Segue una selezioni di articoli di fonti varie sulle fosse comuni e sulle vittime in Kosovo]


Los Angeles Times

Wednesday, June 16, 1999

Empty Graves a Sign of Crime After Crimes - By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer

IZBICA, Yugoslavia--The graves of about 150 victims of the Serbs' worst alleged massacre in Kosovo are empty, and whoever dug up the bodies obviously had a lot to hide. All that's left of the three neat rows in a hillside cemetery in this remote village are mounds of turned earth, toppled grave markers, discarded latex gloves and a few shovels. There are also two pieces of bone, which look like fragments of a skull, near long tresses of a woman's highlighted brown hair, and a man's blue beret with patches of skin and hair stuck to the inside. In two places, on a hilltop above the graves and on a dirt track passing beside it, there are scattered shell casings from assault rifle or machine gun bullets. In late March, Serbian forces drove about 10,000 ethnic Albanians from nearby villages into the valley next to Izbica, survivor Gani Rama, 54, said Tuesday. As armored vehicles approached on March 27, he said, people held up white flags in surrender. But about 50 Serbs in green uniforms arrived in a heavy rainstorm around midnight and started shooting over people's heads, Rama said. Later, two Serbs came forward and demanded 1,000 German marks (about $535) per family to spare their lives, he said. When the collection came up short, the Serbs returned around 10 a.m. on March 28 and separated the men from the women and children, he added. The villages' fighting-age men had already fled into the forested hills, so the only males left were elderly, including a paralyzed man named Hetem Tahu, Rama said. They were split into two groups of about 60 each, in double lines, said survivor Sheremet Krasniqi, 70. One group was force-marched up the hill where the empty graves are today and the other toward a valley on the edge of Izbica, he said. "They asked, 'Where are your KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] boys to help now?' " Krasniqi said. Krasniqi said that he was in the group at the top of the hill and that around 11 a.m., a Serb with a machine gun opened fire from close range. He said he survived by placing his hands next to his head and acting dead. Sometime around June 5, when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was making moves to accept the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's conditions for an end to the war over Kosovo--a southern province of Serbia, the main republic in Yugoslavia--Serbian forces began to shell Izbica again. They forced already displaced villagers, and KLA fighters, deep into the woods to be sure there were no witnesses when they emptied the graves, villagers said here Tuesday after a Times reporter and photographer were the first foreigners to reach Izbica. Krasniqi said that when the security forces pulled back and local people returned to Izbica about a week after being forced out, the bodies of the buried dead had been removed. "For six days, they shelled the village in order to do it," Krasniqi said through a translator. "No one could even come close. We were in hiding. We didn't see anything." According to the rebel KLA, the graves at Izbica aren't the only ones that may frustrate investigators from the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in their search for evidence to convict Milosevic of crimes against humanity. Serbs also dug up the bodies of 70 to 80 alleged massacre victims buried in a single mass grave in the village of Razala, near the guerrillas' mountaintop headquarters at Likoc, a KLA fighter said. The grave was then filled with cows' bodies and covered with dirt again, he said. That claim could not be independently confirmed. During the 11 weeks of NATO's air war against Yugoslavia, Izbica came to symbolize the atrocities the alliance insisted it was fighting to stop. NATO provided fuzzy aerial photographs of the site early in the war, on April 17, as evidence of a mass grave in Izbica. Refugees arriving in Albania had already said that Serbs had lined up elderly men and killed them in the village. Those accounts were sometimes confused and contradictory, as is often the case when traumatized survivors recall horrifying details of killings they saw or heard from different angles. But war crimes investigators got more clues from a videotape smuggled out by an ethnic Albanian physician, Dr. Liri Losci, who said he had witnessed the victims' mass burial. Losci's tape was released May 19, the same day the State Department used it in a special briefing to back up aerial reconnaissance photos that showed before-and-after images of the grave site. A March 9 aerial photo showed no mounds of earth on the slope rising above Izbica, where a couple of hundred people used to live. On April 15, a reconnaissance picture showed three rows of about 150 graves in Izbica, the same number villagers said were dug up in a stretch of hillside about 100 yards long. Losci's videotape shows 127 men's bodies lying on the ground, fully clothed. Twelve younger men executed about a month later were also buried at Izbica, Rama said. That total of 139 bodies still falls short of the estimated 150 graves that can be counted in the aerial photo, a discrepancy that forensic experts may be able to check if they reach the site. In the village itself, a tractor wagon was piled high Tuesday with partially burned wooden grave markers mixed with scorched pieces of clothing and blankets. The burned wrecks of several other tractors and cars stood in the middle of the village, where fires also ruined houses. One grave marker leaning against the tractor wagon had the name Avdulla Murat Duraku written on it next to the birth date Aug. 28, 1953. The date of death was March 28, 1999. Another bore the name Sokol Lah Duraku but had no birth date. Both markers listed the home village of the deceased as Buroj, near Izbica. Neither name appears on the list of Izbica's dead included in the war crimes tribunal's May 27 indictment of Milosevic, three other senior officials and a commander. But the indictment's list does have a Dibran Duraku, age 65. Another wooden marker, at the grave site, is a closer match to a name in the indictment. It says Halit Ramaj, but the birth date is not clear. The indictment alleges that a Halit Rama, age 60, was among those massacred at Izbica. Tossed aside near the grave marker is one of several pairs of latex gloves and the plastic packet that contained them. Such debris also lies next to the graves. The brand name printed on the package is Micro-touch, made by Johnson & Johnson Medical Inc., suggesting that the gloves probably came from a hospital or morgue rather than a remote village such as Izbica. Reaching Izbica became possible for foreign journalists only Tuesday, as Serbian police and Yugoslav troops withdrew from the area.

Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times.


The Boston Globe July 20, 1999

Mass grave in Kosovo yields 19 bodies

By Colleen Barry, Associated Press

PODUJEVO, Yugoslavia, July 20 - At the edge of a cemetery overgrown with flowering weeds, local authorities exhumed 19 bodies yesterday from a mass grave - including that of an 80-year-old man who was missing months ago. Survivors say they were massacred by Serbs.

Though his face had been badly mutilated, Fariz Fazliu was immediately recognized when authorities lifted him from grave No. 7, a narrow pit swarming with flies in the northern Kosovo town of Podujevo.

The old man's embroidered black and white belt, part of a traditional costume from the region, was still cinched around the body.

Elsewhere in the province, US peacekeeping forces suffered their first deaths in Kosovo when an armored personnel carrier overturned Sunday, killing two soldiers and wounding three others, a spokesman confirmed yesterday.

Hours after war crimes investigators and British soldiers left the site in Podujevo to mourners, the old man's two sons and three nephews had a proper grave dug for him, yards from the crude row of graves hastily dug by the Serbs for their victims.

Fariz Fazliu disappeared after going to pray at the town mosque on March 28, the Muslim holy day of Bajram. On that day, his nephew Nimon said Serbs rounded up people and took them to the Bugujevci family home, where they massacred them in the garden.

The bodies included six members of the Bugujevci family and seven from the Duriqi family. Four of the dead were children.

The investigators from the international war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia, based in the Hague, added the site to evidence they are collecting for mass killings of thousands of ethnic Albanians during months of Serb terror in Kosovo. ___________________________________________________________________

The Washington Post July 19, 1999


Kosovo Death Chronicle Lengthens; More Mass Burial Sites Are Reported

Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Foreign Service

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, July 18 -- Almost every evening, reports filter into NATO's Kosovo headquarters about new discoveries of mass graves filled with bodies of ethnic Albanians killed by Yugoslav and Serbian security forces.

The reports, which have come from NATO troops, villagers and relief workers as they make their way systematically through Kosovo's battle-scarred landscape, are providing a fuller picture of the scope of mass killings disclosed in general terms by ethnic Albanian refugees during the 11-week war.

Already, the Western alliance has collected more than 390 reports of what it formally calls "mass burial sites," or sets of corpses--an average of more than 10 reports a day since the war ended on June 10. Sixty-nine reports have been confirmed by the U.N. war crimes tribunal, with the number of corpses involved in each of these said to range from a few to more than 100.

Western investigators say that if all the reports collected by NATO are eventually confirmed, the tally in human lives could be at least 5,500. But no official here expects the count to stop there, and many say it likely will climb to more than 10,000 as returning refugees and NATO troops venture farther into remote areas.

That judgment is borne out in part by the work of the Council for the Defense of Human Rights in Kosovo, an ethnic Albanian organization that is collecting names from each village of all residents killed in the war. An organization official said that a list of more than 4,000 names have already been compiled.

"It is generally accepted that the number of bodies is more than 4,900," said Lt. Col. Robin Clifford, a spokesman for Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, the British commander of NATO peacekeeping forces. "It is reasonable to assume it will be double that. There are multiple body sites still being found."

Clifford added, however, that he does not think "we are ever going to know" the real death toll. Some corpses were hidden, some were burned or removed from Kosovo, and some have been claimed by relatives from identifiable grave sites since the war.

Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor for the Hague-based tribunal, said "It is premature for the tribunal to lend credibility to any figure [of the number of dead] at this stage. It is not outside the realm of possibility that the figure [of 10,000] is in that range, but at this point, with the methods we're accustomed to using, we just don't know."

The NATO summaries of mass grave reports are written in military style, but nonetheless provide a glimpse of what residents and foreigners alike are encountering: A charred torso was found in the hall of a burned house, one report says. Two decapitated bodies were found in a ditch, said another. Others say some bodies were found in wells. A tractor cultivating a field pulled up body parts. There were 158 bodies confirmed in a mass grave, with four more in a nearby house and stream. A grave site was found with 51 people reportedly killed by a single Serbian gunman.

Western officials here say the war in Kosovo followed a pattern set during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, in which an estimated 200,000 people, mainly civilians, were killed. Those confirmed to have been summarily executed in Kosovo include infants, girls, mothers, the handicapped, grandmothers and grandfathers--even some in their eighties and nineties.

But war crimes investigators and local officials say middle-aged men and teenage boys make up the largest group of victims. Witnesses in many villages have said these two groups were separated from women and small children and ushered away to be shot. Arbour said there were "conglomerations of males of military age" at the grave sites.

Several thousand men were apparently slain on suspicion that they already were, or might one day become, members or supporters of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a rebel organization that fought for 16 months for Kosovo's independence from Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic. But officials here say Serb-led security forces killed a great many boys in an attempt to eradicate a new generation of separatist rebels.

Included in the group of victims were intellectuals, the wealthy and some local political figures, villagers said, but it is hard to assess whether each group was targeted deliberately. Western officials say it appears that some effort was made to target ethnic Albanians who had worked closely with Western organizations in Kosovo, including the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitored Yugoslav military forces before the war.

Several high-ranking OSCE officials have said that some Serbs hired by the group were later found to be agents of the Belgrade government who obtained a copy of its personnel and contract lists and that the information was later used to hunt down OSCE employees and target property owners who had rented space to the OSCE.

While most wartime accounts of massacres were provided without physical evidence and were denounced in Belgrade, virtually anyone who drives into a Kosovo village now can readily find someone to show him mounds of freshly turned earth and handwritten lists of victims.

Investigators say there is ample evidence that in the middle of the war--after the allies began to publicize war crimes allegations--Belgrade government forces tried to conceal what they had done. Some mass graves were excavated with bulldozers and the contents carted away in trucks, they say. Some remains may have been burned, while others were reburied elsewhere.

The task of specifying the number and identities of those killed has been complicated by the massive internal movements of people during the war--involving as many as 700,000 according to NATO satellite imagery. Some victims are known to have been killed far from home along with other refugees who cannot be identified.

Moreover, determining how many bodies are present at each site requires painstaking work. The tribunal suspects there are 2,150 bodies at the 69 confirmed mass burial sites. So far, tribunal investigators have found the remains of 869 people.

One of the largest surprises for war crimes investigators has been the amount of evidence left behind. Bone fragments have been found even at grave sites dug up by government troops so the bodies could be moved. Some villagers who stayed near their homes or hid in the hills kept meticulous diaries of what they saw, and in some cases made videotapes of mass grave sites. Residents of virtually every village are identifying the missing and recording accounts of atrocities.

The Kosovo human rights council estimates that more than 3,000 people are missing. As a result, many Kosovo residents say they have pinned their hopes of seeing their relatives again on reports that the Belgrade government is holding nearly 2,000 ethnic Albanians prisoners, including hundreds bused out of Kosovo in the final days of the war.

But the prisoner lists Belgrade gave to the Red Cross a week ago reportedly contain duplicated names as well as names of ethnic Albanians arrested before the war. So the number of missing people who may still be alive is unlikely to be as large as relatives hope.

/Correspondent Charles Trueheart in Dubrovnik, Croatia, contributed to this report./



Italian Troops Find 748 Bodies In Kosovo So Far

02:19 p.m Jul 15, 1999 Eastern

PRISTINA, Serbia (Reuters) - Italian peacekeeping troops have found a total of 748 bodies and 31 mass graves scattered through western Kosovo, their sector commander said Thursday.

Brigadier General Mauro Del Vecchio also said the west-northwest zone of Kosovo suffered the worst destruction at the hands of Serbian security forces before they ended a purge of ethnic Albanians and withdrew from the province in return for a halt to NATO air strikes.

``I think the degree of devastation was so high because the population in our area of operations was very homogeneous. So when the people were driven out, the destruction was systematic and organized,'' he told a news briefing.

About 75 percent of the overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian housing in a region with a 457,000 population before the conflict had been destroyed or damaged.

The NATO-dominated KFOR peace force entered the southern province of Serbia in mid-June. Italian, German, French, U.S. and British troops were assigned sectors and have taken the lead in uncovering mass graves and assessing conditions for U.N. authorities charged with rebuilding Kosovo.

Del Vecchio said his Multinational Brigade West, which includes Spanish and Portuguese units, had confirmed 31 of 43 mass grave sites reported by ethnic Albanians. A total of 748 bodies had been found, he said without clarifying whether all had been in mass graves.

Ethnic Albanian locals told Italian officers last week there were 350 bodies on one hill alone above the village of Ljubenic but Del Vecchio said a search had turned up only five so far.

Twenty other bodies were said by locals to have been removed by relatives. ``We haven't found the other 320 but this area is very rough and mountainous. So we are still searching and have neither positive nor negative conclusions.''

U.N. war crimes investigators have fanned throughout Kosovo in the wake of NATO troops. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and several top aides have been indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal. NATO believes tens of thousands of civilians may have been killed.

Del Vecchio said the Italian sector was virtually bereft of people when the Italians arrived in mid-June but 62 percent of the original population had since returned despite the widespread destruction.

Throughout Kosovo, around 606,000 of the almost one million ethnic Albanians driven from their homes over the past year had now come back, he said.

Meanwhile, around 75 percent of the estimated 200,000 Serb population, a 10 percent minority in Kosovo, had fled elsewhere in Serbia for fear of reprisals. Many of their vacated homes have been plundered and burned by embittered ethnic Albanians.

A complete artillery battalion is guarding one Serb enclave, Gorazdevac, around the clock, Del Vecchio said.

KFOR's presence has deterred some violence -- hundreds of perpetrators have been detained by peacekeepers. But anarchy persists in wide areas of Kosovo, especially at night, because of delays in recruiting armed international police who will operate under U.N. mandate.

Del Vecchio said there was only intermittent electricity in the Italian-run zone, garbage-collecting and firefighting equipment were out of order, food could be found only in small shops and phones functioned only in one town, Klina.

``In conclusion, I would say there is an urgent need to establish U.N. structures for temporary administration in the towns and villages, and for an international police force and judicial organization,'' he said.


United Press International September 16, 1999

FBI gathers more Kosovo evidence

WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 (UPI) -- Members of the FBI's Kosovo forensics team say they searched 21 war-crimes sites and recovered 124 bodies, some of them children, in that war-torn Serbian province before returning to the United States Monday. It was the second time an FBI team had deployed to Kosovo to gather evidence against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four of his top aides, all of whom have been indicted by an international tribunal for war crimes against ethnic Albanians. The FBI team has been one of about a dozen forensics teams from different countries operating in Kosovo.

In a news conference today that was at times emotionally charged, FBI Laboratory section chief Art Eberhart spoke of finding 23 members of the same family in a ravine where they had been herded by Serb forces. Most had been killed by gunshots to the head, while some had shrapnel wounds. The ages of the family members ranged from a 2-year-old boy to a 94-year-old woman. Twelve of those killed were females, Eberhart said, five of them under 17 years of age. The 2-year-old boy had been killed by a ''gun butt to the skull,'' said Bill Rodriguez of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

Several members of the institute accompanied the FBI team to provide pathology expertise. Eberhart said examining the site, in the British-controlled section of Kosovo, was different from examining a crime scene in the United States. In Kosovo, Eberhart said, ''family members were there. They would watch us dig up their loved ones.'' At the ravine where the 23 members of the same family perished, Eberhart said, ''I stared into the eyes of a 6-year-old boy, a (family) survivor, giving him a piece of candy.'' Eberhart said the boy stared back. ''He couldn't say a word. He was still scared.''

Dwight Adams, another FBI lab section chief, headed the part of the forensics team that operated near Pristina. Most of the bodies found ''were beyond recognition'' and had to be identified from their clothing by relatives at the scene.

When the first FBI forensics team entered Kosovo in June, not long after NATO bombing forced marauding Serb units from the Serbian province, the FBI agents operated in the Italian-controlled section of Kosovo. Members of FBI evidence recovery teams from Pittsburgh and Washington participated. Eberhart said it was ''a very hostile environment'' and the team operated from the safety of an Italian base while the sound of gunshots echoed in nearby villages and towns.

In the second deployment, from Aug. 28 to last Monday, the team examined sites in the British-controlled section, and hostilities were almost non-existent. The team, which included FBI recovery teams from Washington and Cleveland, also operated out of a base maintained by Canadian troops. But the terrain this time was very rugged and forested, Eberhart said, making it harder to find bodies.

Many ethnic Albanian men appeared to have been gunned down as they hid in brush while Serbian forces swept through the area. The bodies were then buried secretly in shallow graves by female family members who crept up into the forest at night. Most of the bodies were either reburied at the sites by relatives, or taken away by those relatives to be buried in family cemeteries, he said.

Officials of the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia were on hand at the sites and directly received evidence there, said FBI lab director Donald Kerr. Other evidence, and the FBI team's meticulous notes and photographs, are being analyzed in the FBI lab, he said, but all of it will be turned over to the tribunal to support the Milosevic indictment.


Reuters September 22, 1999


Thousands Of Bodies Exhumed From Kosovo Graves

By Andrew Gray

PRISTINA (Reuters) - War crimes investigators have exhumed thousands of bodies from more than 150 mass graves in Kosovo and have 350 potential sites still to examine, the U.N. tribunal for the former Yugoslavia said Wednesday.

The Hague-based international court also believed it would be able to bring charges of genocide for atrocities committed in the Serbian province and indict more war crimes suspects, spokeswoman Kelly Moore said.

Presenting a progress report on the tribunal's work in Kosovo, Moore urged Yugoslav authorities to hand over indicted war criminals such as President Slododan Milosevic.

Since international peacekeepers moved into the province in June after NATO bombing drove out Serb forces, about 300 experts from 14 countries have been combing the hillsides, valleys and graveyards of Kosovo in the hunt for war crimes evidence.

``It is clear that this investigation is far from over,'' said Moore, spokeswoman for the court's Kosovo operations.

``New sites are reported to the tribunal on virtually a daily basis. We anticipate just as big an effort next year as we have had this year,'' she said.

Tribunal officials have so far refused to put a figure on the number of bodies it has recovered as a result of its investigations but Moore said: ``We are talking about thousands.''

She said the tribunal did not want to get drawn into a ''numbers game'' as each crime committed was appalling in its own right. But it may offer a total for this year once winter sets in and no more remains can be exhumed until spring.

Moore's statement provided a sharp reminder of the campaign against ethnic Albanians by Serb army, police and paramilitary forces which is occasionally forgotten amid the myriad new problems the international community faces here.

``Thus far we have had about 500 potential sites reported to us. That's obviously an incredible number,'' she said. ``More than 150 have been investigated and excavations have been conducted.''

The tribunal indicted Milosevic and four associates -- including Serbian President Milan Milutinovic -- in May on charges of crimes against humanity committed this year.

``As the investigation continues and additional evidence is collected, we believe we will be able to expand upon the present charges to include events in 1998, to include additional individuals and to include additional charges such as genocide,'' Moore said.

She appealed to Yugoslav authorities to ``stand up for the rule of law'' and request that Milosevic and his associates give themselves up or to arrest them and deport them to the Hague.

She said the tribunal had not issued any further public indictments in connection with its Kosovo investigations. It has, however, made effective use recently of sealed indictments, which are kept secret to avoid the suspect being alerted.


U.N. says more than 2,000 bodies exhumed in Kosovo 07:51 p.m Nov 10, 1999 Eastern

By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 10 (Reuters) - U.N. investigators have exhumed more than 2,000 corpses in Kosovo to date, but the true number of ethnic Albanian victims may be much higher, the chief U.N. prosecutor Carla del Ponte said on Wednesday.

Giving the first concrete figures on deaths in Kosovo, Del Ponte told the U.N. Security Council that forensic experts had found the 2,108 bodies in a third of 529 grave sites that reports indicated might contain up to 4,256 bodies.

Many of the bodies had been burned and steps had been taken to hide the evidence, she told a press conference.

She said that a total of 11,334 deaths had been reported to her office from media and other sources but not verified. Forensic teams from the U.N. Hague-based war crimes tribunal entered the Yugoslav province with peacekeeping troops five months ago.

Thousands of ethnic Albanians were thought to have died during a Serb crackdown that ended in June when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic accepted a peace plan for Kosovo following weeks of NATO-led bombing.

So far the tribunal has issued public indictments against Milosevic and four associates. But Del Ponte indicated she also was considering charges against the Kosovo Liberation Army, which fought Yugoslav troops for independence.

``But I don't want to tell you more,'' she said.

Del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, cautioned that the figures she was giving for Kosovo did not necessarily reflect the number of actual victims.

``There were also a significant number of sites where the precise number of bodies cannot be counted. In these places steps were taken to hide the evidence. Many bodies have been burned,'' Del Ponte said.

``The figures themselves may therefore not tell the whole story, and we would not expect the forensic evidence in isolation to produce a definitive total,'' she said, adding that she hoped to complete the probe next year.

Del Ponte, a Swiss citizen, took over in mid-September as prosecutor for the Yugoslavia tribunal as well as a Tanzania-based tribunal investigating the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. She replaced Canadian Louise Arbour.

She noted that international troops in Bosnia had arrested 14 accused but emphasised that suspects ``at the highest levels'' had not been apprehended, a reference to Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic.

Del Ponte said that Croatia too had challenged the jurisdiction of the court and she was willing to talk to Zagreb about it. ``But the fact they deny my jurisdiction makes it even hard to engage in discussions,'' she said.

Most Security Council members praised the tribunal's work but Russian envoy Gennady Gatilov said detaining or arresting suspects should not be done without the consent of the state harbouring the accused.

He also objected to sealed indictments, which the tribunal has used in Bosnia to make sure suspects did not flee before arrest by NATO-led troops and said the court needed to investigate actions against Serbs also.

Gatilov said that the tribunal should consider its indictments in light of efforts to ``move the peace process forward'' both in the case of Milosevic and the sealed indictment of a Bosnian Serb general arrested in Vienna while attending an international seminar.

Del Ponte denied this was the case. ``I can assure you that my office deals with investigations where the perpetrators are not only Serbs. We have perpetrators that are Moslems and from the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army).''

But she said the prosecutor had to close its offices in Belgrade and had little access to victims there.

She said there were some 30 fugitives at large ``and I intend to use secret indictments.''


Kosovo Probers Exhume 2,108 Bodies

By Edith M. Lederer Associated Press Writer Thursday, Nov. 11, 1999; 1:21 a.m. EST

UNITED NATIONS –– In their first report on the extent of war crimes in Kosovo, U.N. investigators announced that they have exhumed the bodies of 2,108 people killed in the conflict – mostly ethnic Albanians.

U.N. chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte briefed the Security Council Wednesday on five months of digging and forensic investigation at 195 gravesites across Kosovo, and said she wants to complete the search of the remaining 334 common graves next year.

The results, she said, should give an indication of the magnitude of killings, primarily of ethnic Albanians but also of Serbs, during NATO's 78-day bombing campaign.

The U.N. war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia, which del Ponte heads, has received reports from witnesses and intelligence sources that 11,334 people were buried in 529 common graves in Kosovo.

Over the past five months, del Ponte said, forensic teams from 14 countries examined 195 of the gravesites where 4,266 bodies were reported to have been buried. The teams exhumed just 2,108 bodies, she said.

Del Ponte cautioned that the number of bodies exhumed doesn't necessarily reflect the number of actual victims because there was tampering at some graves, and bodies were burned or dismembered at "a significant number of sites."

The initial exhumations indicated, however, that the final death toll might be lower than NATO's estimate that 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed by Serbs during the conflict.

Most of those exhumed were ethnic Albanians killed by Serbs, but there were also a small number of graves containing Serb victims, deputy chief prosecutor Graham Blewitt told a news conference.

Del Ponte refused to speculate on final numbers or make any comparisons of the results so far with previous estimates of the number of victims, saying she was waiting for the exhumations to be completed.

Del Ponte stressed that the tribunal's primary task is to gather evidence relevant to criminal charges against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and other leaders and perpetrators of crimes against humanity – not to compile a census of the dead.

In her appearance before the Security Council and at a subsequent news conference, del Ponte urged the NATO-led forces in Bosnia and Kosovo to be "more proactive" in searching for, and arresting, more than 30 fugitives indicted for war crimes.

She said some are in Serbia, and urged NATO forces "to pay attention on the border" because many were crossing into Republika Srbska, the Serb-controlled entity in Bosnia.

In order to do her job, the chief prosecutor said she needed strong support from the council, especially in getting Yugoslavia and Croatia to surrender those indicted by the tribunal.

Most members gave her strong backing.

But Russia's deputy U.N. ambassador, Gennadi Gatilov, insisted that nobody should be detained without the consent of the state and accused the tribunal of acting politically in indicting Milosevic and focusing on crimes against ethnic Albanians.

"I absolutely refute that assertion. It's not true," del Ponte said, noting that her office was investigating Muslims and members of the Kosovo Liberation Army as well as Serbs.

The tribunal has had difficulty in investigating the cases of Serb victims because its investigators can't go to Serbia, she said. "We hope to get there, and we hope indictments will be issued next year," she said.

Kosovo's Serb population, originally around 200,000, has been fleeing attacks by ethnic Albanians seeking revenge for the earlier Serb crackdown on separatist rebels. The Serb population in Kosovo today is thought to number only in the tens of thousands.

While no recent census figures are available, the ethnic Albanian population was nearly 2 million in Kosovo before many were temporarily pushed out by the Serbs this spring. Most are believed to have returned.



British Team Suspends Kosovo Probe

By Caroline Byrne Associated Press Writer Thursday, Nov. 18, 1999; 3:03 p.m. EST

LONDON –– British war crimes investigators said Thursday they have suspended work in Kosovo for the winter after uncovering 508 bodies, most of them elderly ethnic Albanian men who had been shot in the head.

British investigators are among 14 forensic teams that have exhumed bodies at 195 sites in Kosovo since the end of the 78-day NATO bombing campaign in June.

In one exhumation in Velika Krusa, the British team found about 40 men who had been shot in a barn and burned under a pile of hay.

But the exact death toll will never be known, said John Bunn, head of Scotland Yard's forensic team, who recently returned from Kosovo.

"It's just a mess. It's unidentifiable," Bunn said. "All you can do is try to retrieve bones and match the bones up."

Evidence is to be turned over to the U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Last week, the United Nations said teams had exhumed 2,108 bodies so far. Intelligence reports and witnesses had indicated they should have found 4,266 bodies.

Despite speculation that the final death toll may be lower than NATO's initial estimate of 10,000, British officials said it could even be higher.

"We stand by at least 10,000," said Catherine Nettleton, Britain's war crimes coordinator.

Recovery has been slow because most of the dead have been exhumed from smaller burial sites, unlike the mass graves of 200 or more bodies discovered after the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, Nettleton said.

Many of the dead also have been disposed of in rivers, buried in existing graveyards or destroyed beyond recognition, making a count difficult, she added.

Of the bodies exhumed by the British team, there were 260 males, 29 females, 20 children and 199 that could not be categorized. Most died from multiple gunshot wounds.

The British team is expected to resume its work in April, once the ground in Kosovo has thawed.