Posted on 04/23/2005 3:05:19 PM PDT by mark502inf
New eyewitnesses are helping to piece together a crime that still awaits justice.
By IWPR reporters in Surdulica and Belgrade
Eyewitness accounts obtained by IWPR contain dramatic new evidence of how police working for Slobodan Milosevic burned truckloads of ethnic Albanian corpses in a factory in southern Serbia during the 1999 NATO conflict.
Natasa Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Centre, HLC, first revealed the grisly secrets of the Mackatica aluminum complex, near Surdulica, in the Pcinj district of southern Serbia, last December.
In an article in daily Danas newspaper on December 24, 2004, she said the factory's blast furnaces were used to burn the bodies of Albanians killed in Kosovo on May 16 and May 24, 1999 - during the NATO conflict.
An IWPR source - a shift worker in the factory - says the whole affair started with the unexpected arrival at night of a number of unknown trucks.
"Trucks with mysterious freight kept entering the factory with their lights off. Third-shift workers, like myself, were sent home at the factory entrance," the source said.
The IWPR source confirmed seeing the bodies arrive on two separate occasions, "at the middle and end of May" in 1999.
"No one told us what was being transported and none of the workers had access [to the place of burning]," he told IWPR. "But I know many people who took part in it and saw some of it myself.
"Direct participants confirmed to me what I had seen. Bodies were brought to the factory and burned there. I was not the only one who watched it.
"I was not present at the very act of the burning of the bodies but I could see the trucks being unloaded.”
A second IWPR source, whose status and occupation we cannot disclose, confirmed the shift worker's version of events, saying he also witnessed the bodies being unloaded. This source added that the bodies were transported from western Kosovo, mainly from Prizren, Djakovica and Pec, and surrounding villages.
"When the trucks left [after the burning] so-called 'cleaners' took over and checked whether any body parts or their personal belongings had fallen onto the tarmac by the entrance to the plant,” he said.
"For days afterwards, you could smell burned flesh in Surdulica. I know what this smell is like, as I have been on all the battlefronts in [the former] Yugoslavia."
This second source said Mackatica was chosen as a site because it was close to Kosovo, only around 170 kilometres from Prizren, and was relatively anonymous - few people few people outside the factory even knew it had blast furnaces.
Kandic’s Danas article said both incinerations took place around midnight under tight security provided by the police's Special Operations Unit, JSO, then based at Bele Vode, near Vranje, in southern Serbia.
It said the then JSO commander, Milorad “Legija” Ulemek, now the prime suspect for the 2003 murder of Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic, escorted one convoy of bodies to the site and was present as they were burned in "furnaces numbers four and five".
According to the HLC, top police officials - some of whom are still at their posts - organised the burnings, while other trusted Milosevic officials organised the subsequent "cleansing of the terrain".
NEW INFORMATION ON ROLE OF MILOSEVIC’S POLICE IN THE CRIME
A third IWPR source, a former inspector in Milosevic's secret police, was active at the time of the events at Mackatica, and has assured IWPR that the police possess "precise and systematised information" on how the bodies were burned at Mackatica.
"There is clear data on this in local police archives, marked 'strictly confidential'," this source said, referring to the two burnings.
"The people who participated in the whole action were staying at the Theranda Hotel in Prizren. Such a job had been prepared for a long time and could not be completed in a day or two.
"The local public and secret police know everything but this is being concealed also because current as well as former police officials and ordinary operatives were involved.
"Everything is contained in the police documentation - from the code name of the action to the list of people who stayed at the Theranda Hotel and worked on the 'sanitation of the terrain', to those who loaded the trucks and drove them to the Mackatica factory, where Legija and his team took over the whole thing.
"It is also known exactly who drove and who escorted the trucks with the bodies, who was in charge of covering up the action at the factory itself and who directly handled the furnaces during the burning."
"The names of those who were later in charge of eliminating the traces at the factory and those whose job it was to conceal the truth from the local public are also known. Finally, there is a list of politicians who were familiar with all of this, when the action was being planned."
The former police officer claimed he knew most of these names himself but was fearful of divulging them publicly.
Along with all those who possessed direct knowledge of the burnings, he had encountered strong pressure to keep quiet.
"All those in any way connected to the events at Mackatica in May 1999 are being exposed to threats, pressures and blackmail," he said.
"I fear for my safety and for that of my family," he said. "The participants in the crime in Mackatica would know it was me who revealed the secrets, which they are doing their utmost to hide."
IWPR's first source, the shift worker at Mackatica, says several other witnesses who saw the trucks with bodies entering the factory are still out there.
"Other people know what was done, although everything was done for the operation to be carried out in the utmost secrecy," he said.
They were all subject to threats and blackmail, he added, to prevent the story from getting further out. In spite of that, this source said he was ready to testify in public. IWPR has also spoken to a fourth direct source on the events at Mackatica. This source did not want either his residence or job divulged but insisted he was present at both burnings in May 1999.
"Everything took place after midnight, but I remember there was a clear sky and moonlight," he said. "I saw, for a few minutes and from a distance of about ten metres, bodies being unloaded from a truck and transported in a large factory push-cart to the part of the factory where the furnaces are located."
This source said he "knew for sure" that some of the bodies were or women and children. He insisted he did not participate in the burning.
None of IWPR's sources was able to estimate the exact number of bodies unloaded and burned at Mackatica, though one said they had been transported in "more than ten trucks," which suggests a large number.
THE LIST OF NAMES BEHIND THE BURNINGS
In her article in Danas, Kandic cited several of Milosevic's most trusted associates as key figures behind the operation. She named ex-police minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic; a former deputy prime minister Nikola Sainovic; the then head of the public and state security Vlastimir “Rodja” Djordjevic, and Radomir Markovic, former chief of secret police.
Sainovic, charged by the Hague war crimes tribunal for crimes committed in Kosovo in 1999, voluntarily surrendered to the authorities in spring 2003. He was released in mid-April 2005 pending trial.
Markovic is currently in jail in Belgrade's central prison, facing criminal proceedings. Stojiljkovic, also on The Hague's list of persons indicted for crimes in Kosovo, committed suicide on April 11, 2002.
Among all the names Kandic mentioned, the most interesting was that of Djordjevic. One of four generals wanted by the Hague tribunal for war crimes in Kosovo in 1999, he was born in Koznica, only miles from Mackatica.
Djordjevic is known to have been a key figure in the area whose word was virtually law. He kept all the local power structures, especially the police, under his control.
After the Milosevic regime fell on October 5, 2000, Djordjevic reportedly fled the country and is believed to be hiding in Russia.
THE SPECIAL PROSECUTOR STARTS TO INVESTIGATE
For several months, after the publication of the groundbreaking article in Danas, neither the authorities nor the courts in Serbia reacted publicly to any of the grave claims that it revealed.
However, in mid-April 2005, Vladimir Vukcevic, the special state prosecutor for war crimes, visited Surdulica.
Acting on Vukcevic's request, the investigating judge of the district court in Vranje, the deputy special prosecutor and a team of specially trained court experts also visited Mackatica.
Vukcevic told B-92 radio he had talked to witnesses, but stressed that most things were still in the stage of "complete secrecy, owing to the serious nature of the procedure". The prosecution was awaiting the result of forensic reports, he said.
Detailing the extent of the investigation thus far, he added, "The blast furnaces at the Mackatica complex were inspected, as were the places where waste is deposited." He underlined that only experts' findings would confirm whether traces of human remains were in the waste.
Vukcevic did not conceal the fact that his decision to personally oversee the process implied a lack of confidence in the ability and willingness of the local police to investigate the case.
He also said he regretted that a special police unit had not yet been set up to investigate such war crimes and help the prosecution team.
An IWPR source close to the police in the Pcinj district confirmed that the special war crimes prosecutor's initial field work in Mackatica had upset members of the local police force.
"The police of the Pcinj district still operates according to the same principles and mostly with the same people as it did in 1999," this source said.
IWPR has also learned that the case would never have come to light at all if one former and one active operative from the Security and Information Agency, BIA - successor to the State Security, DB - had not sent Kandic the evidence.
Zoran Stosic, head of the regional DB at the time of the Mackatica case, was dismissed just over a month ago as general inspector of police in Pcinj district and replaced by Vujica Velickovic, also a key figure in the regional police over the past decade. IWPR's third source, the former secret police inspector, reiterated that local police records contained exact data on the entire affair. "All it takes is political will for it to be disclosed," he said.
A WALL OF SILENCE IN SURDULICA
Surdulica is a small town of around 10,000 people, some ten km from the motorway that runs from Belgrade to Skopje. It is less than an hour's drive either to Bulgaria, or to Macedonia and Kosovo.
People in Surdulica whom IWPR interviewed either did not want to speak about the body burnings, or defended them. No one denies something happened, but in the town itself, where the hard-line nationalist Serbian Radical Party is in power, there is a conspiracy of silence.
In the cafe in the centre of town, a large piece of graffiti proclaims "Serbia for the Serbs".
"So what if they did burn Shiptars [a derogatory name for Albanians]?” one man said. "They deserved nothing better. Why don't you write about the crimes against Serbs in Kosmet [a Serb nationalist expression for Kosovo] today?"
A shop saleswoman was more conciliatory. "Hardly anyone dares to speak publicly about it," was all that she would say on the grim events in the nearby factory.
But the arrival in Surdulica of the special state prosecutor for war crimes suggests that however much the local population wants to a draw a veil over the affair, the judicial authorities are determined to confront this painful issue.
Whether justice will ever be done for what happened at Mackatica remains to be seen.
Bruno Vekaric, spokesperson for the war crimes prosecutor, said it would not be easy. The facts that the crimes were committed long ago and that the police and justice ministry were far from cooperative were just some of the obstacles they faced, he told IWPR.
If I remember correctly, it was a Democrat President who bombed civlian sites in the Balkans.
Christianity must pull together and fight a common foe. Killing civlians is indefensible on either side, but a continued Islamic presence in the Balkans is as much of a walking time bomb as Islamic invaders in western Europe.
Untrue. The Former Republic of Yugoslavia Ministry of Foreign Affairs publication "NATO Crimes in Yugoslavia" came up with 495 deaths. The decidedly unfriendly-to-America Human Rights Watch did a study and came up with 488-527 bombing deaths; closely corresponding to Belgrade's 495. Go to para 53.
Of note, about half of those approximately 500 civilian casualties were in Kosovo, most of whom were the Kosovar Albanian refugees attacked by mistake in the Korisa Woods and in the Djakovica road incidents.
As to how we "destroyed Serbia", give me a break. If we wanted to destroy Serbia in 1999, it'd of been destroyed like Tokyo or Dresden or Hamburg was. Instead, Ceka was shaking her assets in concerts and Milosevic was sending around his flying squads of propagandists to every NATO strike just hoping that he'd find dead Serbs so he could broadcast it to the world. Unfortunately for him and fortunately for most of Serbia, our Air Force, Marine, and Navy pilots who flew 14,000 strike sorties were careful in target selection and precise in their aim.
It is a shame about the 500 civilians that died, but blame Slobo--not the United States Air Force. Milosevic built his career on the vicitimization of Serbs, both real and imagined. Unfortunately, much of the imagined part continues to live on in the posts of you and your propagandized fellow travelers.
BTTT
Soros told him so....!!!!
And probably.... PAID him as well!!! He is a willing and silly little tool of georgie $oro$!!
LOL!!
Jane, based on the following: The article was written in Belgrade and Surdulica, Serbia. It says the reporters are part of the Balkans Investigative Reporting Network; described by IWPR on their website as "a pool of investigative and analytical journalists throughout Serbia ... our recently-founded local organisation ... " and it later describes them as from different regions in Serbia: south Serbia, the Sandzak, east Serbia, and Vojvodina; and later again as "local journalists". And here's who they list as their Belgrade staff: Dragana Nikolic Solomon, Vesna Bjekic, Tatjana Kovacevic, Tatjana Matic.
You asked a legitimate question. I cannot help but note with amusement, however, that all that info is in the story or a couple clicks away on the IWPR web-site and I was challenged; yet when montag made the preposterous assertion that the story came from the KLA, our little group of Balkans buddies just let that slide by.
Soros, having failed in this attempts to buy the American elections, turns his attentions once again to his bought-and-paid for "nation", the stolen republic of Kosovo. He must maintain the villainization of the Serbs lest they retake the land that is theirs.
But peace and the Serb Army will return to Kosovo despite his efforts. It would be fitting if he were alive to see it.
It is certainly difficult to explain the world as you see it without resorting to conspiracies and bribes, but I am not part of that imaginary network of nefarious hidden forces. Sadly, Lion, a brief review of my financial situation clearly reflects a lack of bribes. I can barely get enough money from my wife to buy beer as I watch the Pistons trounce their opponents in the play-offs. In fact, I have never been able to purchase sufficient beer to last through "Darko Time" at a Pistons game; i.e. when the game is so definitively won or lost that Darko Milicic is summoned from his perch at the end of the pine and sent forth onto the hardwood floor of The Palace at Auburn Hills to do battle with the visiting hoopsters.
Also sadly, Darko doesn't seem to battle very hard or even move very fast. I'm not sure if George Soros has bribed the coach to make Serbian basketball players look bad or whether KLA jihadists under the tutelage of U.S. Department of Defense-financed MPRI advisers based in the Halliburton-built Albanian base camp in Detroit have been sneaking valium into Darko's gatorade.
Although, using the principle of Occam's Razor (Hint: you don't shave with this one), it is more likely that as a 19 year-old multi-milllionaire who has a bevy of buxom blonde American teenagettes rubbing up against him every time he walks through the Southfield Mall, Darko may have lost his motivation. Or maybe Joe Dumars just mis-judged his talent.
Anyways, enough about Serb players on the Pistons. Go back to watching your favorite movie. I can recognize you, but which is DJ_Animal and which one is montag?
I find it quite amusing that he quotes from a Soros owned and operated "news" service and then denies a Soros connection! Geez, this guy should have worked for Bill Clinton!
Mark, can you argue with my statement above. It is the truth, and you know it.
It's not the first time, Soros-Boy Mark, is quoting from Soros owned and operated "news" sources...
Zulu, I agree with you, but can you get the born again President to agree with you too?
C-lib, such self-evident nonsense is not worth an argument. But I do enjoy dragging this on so people can continue to see what our Milosevic supporters really think.
I doubt as much as we enjoy seeing what the Islamonazis and Soros puppies really think!
Why would I refute it when I agree with it?
Now you are my friend, why didn't you say so.
This story was exposed as a hoax by Daniel Pearl on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, 31 December 1999.
You guys just never stop! It's in your blood! The lies, the propaganda!
Furthermore, Natasha Kandic has absolutely no credibility at all.
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