Trial Hears of KLA Terror Tactics

The trial of three former Kosovo Liberation Army members this week heard from a former British military attaché to Belgrade, who spoke about the extent of fighting in Kosovo in 1998 and how the KLA dealt with suspected “collaborators”.

Fatmir Limaj, Isak Musliu and Haradin Bala are accused of running a prison camp in the village of Lapusnik from May to July 1998, in which Serbs and suspected Albanian collaborators were held captive, beaten and often murdered.

For the charges in question to be legally valid, prosecutors must prove that an armed conflict existed in Kosovo during the period in question - an assumption challenged by the defence.

According to tribunal jurisprudence, to show the existence of an armed conflict in Kosovo in 1998 it is necessary to prove that the KLA was an “organised armed group” at the time.

The issue of the organisation of the KLA is made doubly important by the fact that Limaj and Musliu are both being prosecuted for certain crimes on grounds of command responsibility – the idea that a commander can be held responsible for acts carried out by men under his command, even if he didn’t directly order them.

Prosecutors can obviously only use this tactic if they first prove that Limaj and Musliu held positions of responsibility in some kind of organised structure.

Former attaché Colonel John Crosland – whose face was hidden from public view by screens and image distortion, just as it was when he testified against Slobodan Milosevic in July 2002 – told judges on Thursday that clashes between the fledgling KLA and Serbian forces began well before the Lapusnik camp is alleged to have opened, and intensified through the course of 1998.

He also said the KLA regularly kidnapped ethnic Serbs in an effort to terrorise the population, and attacked Albanians it suspected of collaboration.

But while he spoke of training programmes, supply routes and regional headquarters, he expressed some scepticism about the extent to which the KLA had an organised command structure at the time.

Crosland’s testimony was largely made up of comments on a series of “diplomatic telegrams” presented to him by the prosecution. The bulk of these documents are still under seal, and two legal advisors of the British government were present in the courtroom throughout his testimony to ensure this measure was respected.

With reference to the events described in these reports, Crosland told judges that even as early as March and April 1998, clashes between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanian rebels in the Drenica Valley – a KLA heartland - were spreading to the area around the border with Albania, where the KLA was bringing in munitions and men along traditional smuggling routes.

According to the diplomatic reports, by the second half of April, western journalists were saying that the KLA virtually controlled areas just over the border in Albania.

There were also indications that the KLA was operating training camps in the Albanian towns of Tropoja, Bajram Curri and Kukes.

According to the witness, heavily equipped and well-trained Serbian special forces units were present in Kosovo from early 1998. He also said the Yugoslav army, whose primary role was to protect Yugoslavia’s borders, took an increasingly active role in affairs deeper inside Kosovo.

Crosland confirmed that by March of that year he had seen movement of heavy weapons such as anti-aircraft systems and armoured personnel carriers. Later, he said, he saw an artillery position made up of six guns near Decani.

Many of the reports presented by the prosecution detailed violent clashes between Serb forces and the KLA. They also outlined the Serb tactic of emptying the civilian population from large areas to create “free fire zones”, creating massive refugee flows in the process.

Crosland described the situation in 1998 as “fluid”, with the KLA and Serb and Yugoslav forces pushing backwards and forwards into different areas of territory.

By June, Crosland said, the KLA controlled some 35 per cent of Kosovo and was in fact able to launch operations in some 65 per cent of the territory, including an attack on the Belacevac mine just ten kilometres from the regional capital Pristina.

Prosecutor Andrew Cayley presented Crosland with a report signed by General Pavkovic, commander of the Pristina Corps of the Yugoslav army, in which he claimed the KLA had mobilised somewhere between 3,500 and 4,500 men and were increasingly “taking on the attributes of a military organisation”.

But Crosland questioned the figures given by Pavkovic, estimating himself that there were in fact only between 400 and 500 “hardcore KLA” in Kosovo at the time, although he conceded that Pavkovic’s figures might not be too “far fetched” if they included the number of men said to be training across the border in Albania.

The witness also said that the five or six KLA headquarters he had seen were not as organised as Pavkovic indicated. There was a basic system of command, he said, but he stressed that this was only basic – there might for instance be an area delineated by a road or a river, within which a head man would have “token authority”.

But Cayley has argued that it is not necessary to show that the KLA was equivalent at the time to a modern, sophisticated army in order to show the existence of an armed conflict and to use the concept of command responsibility.

Crosland also described a July 1998 visit to Malisevo, where the local KLA headquarters was, he judged, probably responsible for the village of Lapusnik.

There, he said, there was a bit more discipline and formality than at other headquarters he had seen, and those present had a “more soldierly-like way of behaving”.

At one stage during the meeting at the headquarters, he said, the discussion became quite heated when some KLA men threatened to take him and his party hostage. But a man who appeared to be a senior figure restored some sense to the conversation, he said. Asked for this man’s name, Crosland said he couldn’t remember for certain. “The name ‘Celiku’ has come up,” he said. “I’m not completely convinced if that was him or not.”

“Celiku” is the nickname allegedly used by Limaj during his time in the KLA. Prosecutors say Limaj was a regional KLA commander, whose area of responsibility included Lapusnik.

Against the background of mounting violence, Crosland confirmed the KLA had a practice of kidnapping ethnic Serbs.

“In order to increase the fear among Serbs, they were being kidnapped on a relatively regular basis,” he told the court.

One diplomatic report presented by the prosecution noted that kidnappings of Serbs had reached such a point that Serbs were beginning to avoid travel around Kosovo.

“In October we estimated something like 200 Serbs were missing, presumed having been kidnapped by Albanian elements,” Crosland told the judges.

The witness also discussed media reports that the KLA had carried out grenade attacks on businesses and restaurants in Pec belonging to Albanians who were suspected of collaborating with the Serbs.

“These attacks... were similar to what went on throughout this campaign, where Albanians who were seen to be siding with the Serb administration were taken out and their businesses either bombed and they themselves murdered,” Crosland told judges.

Crosland is a very credible witness. Had dozens of visits to Kosovo in 1998-99, to include spending days at a time with the KLA.

He spent two days on the stand (July 10th and July 15th)testifying against Milosevic in 2002 as to the Serb operations aimed against the civilian population in Kosovo and the wanton destruction of Kosovar villages & farms & livestock, etc. Most damaging to Milosevic, Crosland also testified that the chain of command went directly from Milosevic to the 3d Army Commander (responsible for Kosovo) and avoided the VJ high command.

Interestingly, given how this subject is treated by some FReepers, Crosland spoke of seeing widespread destruction to include a village literally bulldozed to the ground in Kosovo, but when he returned to Belgrade, Serbs would insist such things were not taking place.

Besides testifying as to what he saw, Crosland takes advantage of his time on the stand to rip Serb tactics in Kosovo; i.e. over-reliance on heavy caliber firepower caused lots of damage to civilians, but little to the KLA; attacked villages where perhaps some KLA might have been while actual KLA checkpoints on roads were left alone; forced expulsion of civilian population into the hills and heavy damage to villages & civilian infrastructure alienated the people and drove up recruitment for the KLA.

Straight from the horse's mouth! Here is a British diplomat openly describing the KLA as a terrorist organization systematically targeting both Serbs and ethnic Albanians:

' “In order to increase the fear among Serbs, they were being kidnapped on a relatively regular basis,” he told the court. '
(of course most of the abductees were never seen again).

' “These attacks... were similar to what went on throughout this campaign, where Albanians who were seen to be siding with the Serb administration were taken out and their businesses either bombed and they themselves murdered,” Crosland told judges. '

And how did Blair, Albright and Clinton tried to stop these terrorists? By joining in their war effort!

KLA apologists consider the Serb response to these terrorists disproportionate. But the good Mr. Crosland shuts them up too:

' By June, Crosland said, the KLA controlled some 35 per cent of Kosovo and was in fact able to launch operations in some 65 per cent of the territory, '

Wow! To anyone with common sense (and honesty), this sounds like by June 1998 these terrorists had become a formidable and quite effective military force poised for a complete takeover of Kosovo (and whatever this would imply for the remaining Serb population and ethnic Albanian loyalists). How would any state respond if not by a military campaign that will inevitably lead to civilian cadualties, as the U.S. has learnt the hard way in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq? If we lighheartedly hold the whole Serbian leadership responsible for "command responsibility" in civilian casualties in Kosovo, how can we honestly avoid holding the whole U.S. leadership for unquestionably higher civilian casualties and destruction in Iraq?

If we lighheartedly hold the whole Serbian leadership responsible for "command responsibility" in civilian casualties in Kosovo, how can we honestly avoid holding the whole U.S. leadership for unquestionably higher civilian casualties and destruction in Iraq?

No comparison. In Kosovo, the Serbs deliberately targeted the civilian population. In Iraq, it is the policy and practice of the United States to avoid civilian casualties. If you read post 3 above, the links lead to Crosland's earlier testimony at the Milosevic trial. He describes in detail the Serbian attacks against civilians.

Just like U.S. forces in Fallujah and everywhere in Iraq, Serb forces in Kosovo knew very well that insurgents deliberately mix with the civilian population, often wearing civilian clothes themselves and often sheltering in mosques, snipe at the army and then cry foul (making excellent propaganda points) when troops get scared and angry for the deaths of their colleagues and start shooting indiscriminately against anything that moves.

Both the Serbian and the U.S. military in Kosovo and Iraq respectively have had explicit orders to avoid civilian casualties. The notion that their political or military leadership gave orders or implicit encouragement for the shooting of civilians makes no sense (and therefore reeks of hypocrisy), because, if for no other reason, such orders would be politically and militarily extremely stupid. More than 200 Yugoslav army troops were court martialed for war crimes in Kosovo. In Iraq, despite the higher number of civilian casualties, fewer troops are publicly known to have been disciplined.

He says the Albanians were using terror tactics to cause ethnic cleansing of Serbs almost a year before the NATO airstrikes, so Crosland is confirming the evidence that the "poor, innocent Albanians" (as they were sold on TV) were long-running ethnic terrorists before the war:

Against the background of mounting violence, Crosland confirmed the KLA had a practice of kidnapping ethnic Serbs.
“In order to increase the fear among Serbs, they were being kidnapped on a relatively regular basis,” he told the court.

Many of those kidnapped were later found tortured and/or killed.

So, Pythagorean, the Serbs in Kosovo are the moral equivalent to the Americans in Iraq. Sounds like somebody’s been busy reading their Chomsky again! Well, let's break it down. In Kosovo, when the Serbs went in [a]pproximately 863,000 civilians sought or were forced into refuge outside Kosovo and an additional 590,000 were internally displaced" making 1,453,000 or close to 90% of the Kosovar-Albanian population driven from their homes out of a pre-war population of about 1.7 million. In Iraq, with a population of 25,000,000; when the Americans went in, the refugees going out never materialized and instead, most of the 200,000 Iraqi refugees Hussein previously drove into Iran have now returned. So its real easy for you, here's the comparison: Serbs in Kosovo= refugees out, Americans in Iraq = refugees return.

Since YOU brought this up, lets take a look at some other comparisons, like what was left of the schools in Kosovo after the Serbs were done: UNICEF survey finds half of Kosovo's primary schools destroyed or severely damaged. versus Iraq where we find "the U.S. military reconstructing 2,000 schools". Another simple comparison: Serbs in Kosovo = destroyed schools, Americans in Iraq = new schools.

Then there are the 700,000 Kosovar Albanians whose homes were damaged or destroyed, to include 50,000 beyond repair in the Serbs ethnic cleansing campaign. And as Colonel Crosland testified earlier: “…the very small hamlet of Prilep on the Decani-Djakovica road was probably 40 to 50 centimetres high; all the houses been bulldozed flat. That is the level of destruction we're talking about, and that was throughout.” Let’s compare that to Fallujah, the worst damaged town in Iraq, a place where an actual battle was fought: ”Residents who fled the city will be allowed to re-enter their neighborhoods after security is complete, rubble and sewage are cleared and humanitarian aid is available, Maj. M. Naomi Hawkins of the U.S. 4th Civil Affairs Group said. Restoration will take place in a section-by-section process, with the first areas re-opening within two weeks, she said. Civilians will be paid $2,500 per home for damage repair, she said, and Marines have allotted $40 million for death claims and reconstruction. The U.S. government has set aside $89.12 million for 99 specific U.S.-sponsored projects scheduled to begin in Falluja…” So, Serbs in Kosovo = deliberately destroyed villages. Americans in Iraq = Millions to rebuild battle-damaged towns.

As for civilian casualties, I’ll go with 6,000 in Kosovo, but I’m open if you want to adjust that up or down some. Given the respective populations of Kosovo and Iraq, that’s the equivalent of about 83,000 Iraqis. But first, Pythagorean, why don’t you tell me how many civilians the United States has killed in Iraq so we can make a comparison?

Nobody knows for sure how many Iraqi civilians have been killed. The U.S. army does not keep track, or at least does not want the public to know. A recent report from Johns Hopkins published in Lancet estimates 100,000 civilian deaths caused by the war. Nevertheless, taking a cue from the politically manipulated and now discredited laughable "studies" claiming "more than 200,000 dead in Bosnia", "10,000 dead" or "900,000 displaced" in Kosovo, I might be willing to accept that the Hopkins study is probably not worth the paper it is written on.

Concerning the destroyed schools in Kosovo, why would the Serbian state destroy schools that it itself built by subsidies from Belgrade? In fact many of these schools were bombed by NATO, ostensibly because they might be used by Yugoslav forces, but in reality because NATO, being incompetent in locating tanks and other moving targets, was busy destroying the civilian infrastructure not only in Kosovo but throughout Serbia. This was, as you know, a war crime for which, if international law was taken seriously, the whole NATO leadership, starting with Wesley Clark and Bill Clinton, would now be in jail and billions of dollars would be paid to Serbia for compensation. Not to mention the more than 500 dead civilians in Serbia proper, another achievement of NATO's brave, 25,000-feet high flying bomber pilots.

Nobody knows for sure how many Iraqi civilians have been killed.

Right at last. Which also directly undermines your previous assertions concerning the higher number of civilian casualties in Iraq versus Kosovo. You don't know. We can make some reasonable approximations, but as for the 100,000 Lancet figure that you eagerly trotted out and now "might be willing" to ignore, the margin of error in that study was 9,000 to 194,000, the author admitted he was opposed to the war and U.S. imperialism, and a "clarification" has since been issued which in essence debunks the study for invalid assumptions, cherry-picking data, and small sample size.

Another anti-war source, iraqbodycount.com which counts every single casualty of war, Iraq Army & insurgent & terrorist & policeman & civilian alike regardless of who inflicted the casualty, currently runs a range from 15,635 to 17,582 total casualties since the U.S. invasion. Even bin Laden has weighed in; in his pre-election video he said "over 15,000 of our people have been killed." So your choice of citing the Lancet's 100,000 casualties in Iraq (180 killed every day of the war--yeah, right) over-states what even bin Laden says by a factor of seven.

I can only surmise that you chose to cite the Lancet's 100,000 in an attempt to bolster your contention of moral equivalence between the operations of U.S. troops in Iraq with those of the Serb forces deliberately murdering thousands of noncombatants, looting houses, burning villages, blowing up mosques, and expelling well over a million Kosovars from their homes in Kosovo. What utter B.S. I've spent a career in the U.S. military and I know how we operate. I've also seen what the Serbs deliberately did in Kosovo. There's no comparison.

Your ideas about Kosovo appear to rely a bit too much on people like KLA-attached translator/propagandists, professional spies / liars like William Walker and second hand hearsay outlets with obvious political connections to NATO. Cliché rhetoric such as "deliberately murdering thousands of noncombatants, looting houses, burning villages, blowing up mosques... ", rich in emotion and poor in convincing detail, sounds more like an Al Jazeera commentary or rantings of a Sorosian mouthpiece.

Why don't you share some details of your alleged personal Kosovo experiences instead of continuously citing these unreliable sources? Did you see mosques burning? Can you testify that KLA insurgents were not holed inside, sniping at Serbian forces? Did you care to notice any burnt churches by any chance? Can you tell how many of the burnt houses belonged to Roma, Serbs or anti-KLA Albanians? How many schools were destroyed by NATO bombing? How many of the civilians were expelled by scum like commander Remi?

Even Blair's military attaché, himself obviously a spy and a de facto ally of the KLA at the time, had so much to say incriminating the KLA. One has to wonder why a U.S. military veteran has so much venom against "the Serbs".

Pythag - why is it that when I read your posts I'm always underwhelmed by the effort you put into verifying your information?

You claimed that over 200 Yugoslav army troops were court martialed for war crimes in Kosovo when as of October 2002, there had been only 4 soldiers brought up on war crime charges, and I haven't seen any reporting of further prosecutions by the military.

Perhaps you were just confusing the VJ's prosecution of deserters and those who failed to report for duty with prosecutions for war crimes:

Reports of the arrest, prosecution, sentencing and imprisonment of conscientious objectors, draft evaders and deserters continue to be received by Amnesty International -even though the "state of war" in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has officially been ended. Estimates of the number of such cases currently before military courts in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia begin at 4,000 and extend as high as 30,000. A former head of the Legal Department of the Yugoslav Army Supreme Command put the number of cases at 23,000, according to information received by Amnesty International in July. The Montenegrin Helsinki Committee has estimated that proceedings have been brought against 14,000 individuals in that republic alone. According to a press report from July, Colonel Ratko Korlat, President of the Belgrade Military Court, has stated that his court is dealing with 2,400 cases - with an additional 1,900 cases under investigation. source

Considering that not a single prosecution has been mounted in response to any of the mass graves uncovered in Serbia since 2001, your attempt to equate Serbian efforts at policing themselves with ours can only be described as a rather lame attempt at humor on your part.

Quit wasting your time defending the indefensible.

Your purpose is to throw a smokescreen up around Serbian war crimes - unfortunately for you, pythag, that smokescreen is easily pierced, and I figure Mark is in the same state I am when confronted with your BS: decidedly underwhelmed.

Face it - you're just not propaganda savvy enough to carry out your chosen mission on these threads, and the only alternative, being honest, is counterproductive to your cause.

Which is why you're reduced to either facile dismissals of anything contrary to the views you're trying to push, as in the case of the number of Kosovar Albanian refugees brought up by Mark, or simple avoidance, as in the case of me calling you on your claim as to the VJ prosecuting it's members for war crimes committed in Kosovo.

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