When people ask me about the condition of the barrels on the Yugo kits…I have to explain that the Serbian militias that those rifles came from were too busy raping and slaughtering their neighbors to run a bore brush down their barrels…
By JOVANA GEC, Associated Press Writer
1 hr 4 mins ago
BELGRADE, Serbia – Acting on tips from witnesses, Serbian war crimes prosecutors have discovered a mass grave believed to contain the bodies of 250 Albanians who were killed in Kosovo during the 1998-99 war there, then transported to Serbia and secretly buried to hide the atrocities, officials said Monday.
The burial site — hidden beneath a small building and a newly built parking lot — is the fourth mass grave of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo that has been found in Serbia since 2001. Two others were discovered in Kosovo. In each case, most of the bodies were those of civilians, including women and children.
The latest discovery is another example of the mass atrocities that were committed during the bloody Serb crackdown on the Kosovo separatists that killed at least 10,000 people and left nearly a million displaced.
Hundreds of bodies of slain ethnic Albanians have been exhumed in Serbia and returned to Kosovo since Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was ousted from power in a popular revolt in 2000. The previously discovered mass graves in Serbia represented the bulk of genocide charges filed against Milosevic at a U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Netherlands, where he died of a heart attack during his trial in 2006.
Serbia has since tried to deal with its wartime past as it seeks European Union membership, which requires the prosecution of those who committed atrocities during the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s. Milosevic’s policies still have strong support among ultranationalists in Serbia.
“According to witness testimonies, there are 250 bodies of Kosovo Albanians inside” the newly discovered grave, Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said at a news conference Monday in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital.
He said exhumations would begin soon at the site, which was discovered based on witness accounts and in cooperation with a European Union mission in Kosovo.
Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor’s office said the grave is located in a hilly, rural area of Rudnica, near the town of Raska, 180 kilometers (108 miles) south of Belgrade.
Aerial photos of the site showed a house and a small parking lot near a road nestled between the hills. Vukcevic’s deputy, Bruno Vekaric, said the mass grave is believed to be located beneath the building and the parking lot.
Officials did not say when the grave was discovered.
During the Kosovo war, the bodies of Kosovo victims were brought to Serbia by Milosevic’s regime in an attempt to cover up the atrocities against civilians.
Some 1,860 ethnic Albanians are still missing from the Kosovo war, many believed to have been buried by Serb forces in similar mass graves in Serbia.
“Serbia has the democratic capacity to face what happened,” Vukcevic said. “It is our obligation to the victims who have the right to bury the dead.”
The brutality of Serbia’s crackdown in Kosovo prompted NATO to bomb the country in 1999, forcing Milosevic to pull out his troops. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. Belgrade refuses to recognize it.
In Kosovo on Monday, officials urged Serbia to face up to its past and overcome its troubled relations with Kosovo Albanians.
Kosovo deputy Prime Minister, Rame Manaj, claimed the discovery was a result of pressure from the EU.
“This comes too late, but this pressure from the international community is welcome as it is the only force that can move things from point zero,” Manaj said of the discovery of the bodies.
“It is painful news,” said Xhavit Beqiri, the spokesman for Kosovo’s president.
“We suspect there are more Kosovo victims in other such mass graves around Serbia which Belgrade has always known about, but has selectively unearthed them to reduce the scope of the crimes committed in Kosovo,” Beqiri said.
Vukcevic urged Kosovo’s authorities to investigate the fate of about 500 Kosovo Serbs who he said remain unaccounted for since the 1998-99 war after revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians.
Associated Press writers Dusan Stojanovic in Belgrade and Nebi Qena in Pristina contributed to this report.
Eds: CORRECTS that 4 of the mass graves were found in Serbia, 2 in Kosovo.
All too true. I scratch my head every time some egghead anti says something along the lines of “it could never happen here”, wrt to civil unrest or some other form of societal breakdown. The Balkans are/were a great example.
Both sides did things like this. I don’t know why the Serbs don’t just stay in Serbia, and the Albanians don’t just stay in Albania. 98% of problems would be eliminated.
Point taken, but I was talking about people who insist that this sort of degenerate behavior couldn’t come into play in a modern western society. It can. It has.
They were discovering mass graves on nearly a weekly basis when I was in BiH 12 years ago. They’ll be finding more of them as more folks come forward over the years, or are discovered by chance.
But I wonder if they will report on the graves that hold Serbians
All sides in this conflict had blood on their hands, the issue I have is that the media chose to selectively report on atrocities. I guess it is just that Clinton had to sell the conflict as good versus bad, but the reality on the ground was a lot different.
Kosovo today is pretty much ethnically pure, very few Serbs exist in the land that was once theirs (I wonder how we will react if the Mexican cartels or La Raza start ambushing police in Arizona as the KLA did to Yugoslavian police in the 1990s?). It certainly doesn’t excuse the crimes that the Milosovic government committed there, but also doesn’t help those who lost their homes and loved ones while under “NATO protection.” I have many friends who lost there homes and lived for years as refugees because they were “ethnically cleansed” from their homes in Bosnia and Croatia, but oddly their stories are never told in the Western media.
The civil war in the Former Yugoslavia was far more complex than any US new media reported. I know I know that Christiana Amanpour said the Serbs were the only ones doing bad things in Kosovo, but since when do you guys listen to her? I guess I figured that guys at m4 would have a better appreciation of the situation.
FWIW I think many/most people here know that. Personally, my point was that a polite society is often a thin veneer covering latent (and often very old and deep-seated) resentments and hostility.
I dont know if its possible to say who drew first blood, but both sides were guilty here. Most of us only heard one side of it. In Eastern Europe the reports were opposite. News agencies in Russia and Ukraine reported about the blood on hands of the ethnic Albanians and the killing of their fellow Slavs. Clinton decided to help one side, and we only heard one side of the story.
Who knows how many Serbs are resting in similar mass graves in Kosavo…
Absolutely! In 1984, the Olympic games were being held in Sarajevo and Yugoslavia was the poster child for a wonderful multi-cultural socialist society. Ten years later, snipers were picking off school girls from blown up buildings as they made their way to school.
What happened in the Former Yugoslavia is a true tragedy as well as a stark warning. One just has to look at the situation along the boarder in the US to draw some eerie parallels.
Oh, definitely not, but they were certainly the most dominant power in the Balkan Wars, controlled both the Serbian militias and the Yugoslav Army after the break up, and it would not surprise me in the least that the vast majority of mass graves were the result of the Serbian militias and Army.
One of the best movies about that time was one that Dennis Quaid starred in called Savior. It did a pretty good job showing all sides.
Two others are No Man’s Land and Shot Through the Heart.
Both of those movies are about the earlier breakup of Yugoslavia, not the Kosovar War.
I had a buddy I used to shoot with who’s father was Croatian and mother was Bosnian, who went over in the early 90’s to fight. Never heard from him again.
I was also going to suggest Savior and No Man’s Land.
When I lived in Iowa, my church sponsored some Bosnian-Serb refugees who had made it to America. This man was a T-55 tanker with the Serbian militias, who other than his wife and kids, had lost everything and everyone. My Wife’s uncle is a monk at one of the monasteries in Serbia, many of the monks there are former militia fighters who after witnessing (and no doubt participating in) the violence of the war, could not exist in society and turned to God as the only way to find sanity.
The sad reality is though, that in many ways they did share common cultures and blood. Apart from the radical nationalists on each side, most former Yugoslavians had friends, wives, and husbands who were of different ethnicity. They enjoyed each others music, food, and lived among one another and yet in a short matter of years, it all changed violently. Kosovo on the other hand is a whole different matter.
