Trial Hears of KLA Terror Tactics

IWPR ^ | 14-Jan-05 | Michael Farquhar

[Jane_N]

"Former military attaché tells of kidnapped Serbs and of how paramilitaries treated Albanians believed to be loyal to the Serb administration."

[GarySpFc]

Ping

[mark502inf]

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.

[pythagorean]

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?

[jb6]

bump

[jb6]

Oh, we didn't forget you too, Hoplite, someone has to defend the KLA.

[FormerLib]

The KLA terrorists have their fans here on Free Republic.

[Hoplite]

Unlike our resident Serb war crimes deniers, jb6, those of us on the other side of the aisle are more of the "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime" frame of mind, so this trial poses no particular moral dilemma for us.

[mark502inf]

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.

[DTA]

>>>> In Kosovo, the Serbs deliberately targeted the civilian population<<<<

Your belief does not constitute firm evidence nor fact. Especially when you compare two different conflicts (Kosovo and Iraq)

But your use of term "the Serbs" documents your racist attitude against Serbs as a people.

[Hoplite]

Hey, I know - why don't you go back in time and post #3 to counter DTA's #10.

LOL.

[pythagorean]

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.

[joan]

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.

[mark502inf]

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?

[pythagorean]

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.

[mark502inf]

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.

[pythagorean]

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".

[Hoplite]

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.

[pythagorean]

My purpose was not to write comprehensive essays to overwhelm you, but to highlight some important points addressed in the thread, whose subject is the well designed, propaganda-savvy terrorist activity of the KLA. I may have digressed a bit by noting some similarirties in the tactics of KLA terrorists with terrorists in Iraq, but let open-minded readers of the forum decide on the merits of this comparison.

[Hoplite]

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.