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DER SPIEGEL (GERMANY) translation from German into English by S. Lazovic, KDN News (German text available at the end of page)

September 21, 2002

KOSOVO

The Cruelest Cleansings

The UN police get tougher with Albanian war criminals in Kosovo. New unrest possible, because for many these criminals are still heroes

A strange grave lies in the midst of a large meadow in the village of Crni Luk. There are no names on the four gravestones, and the inhabitants of village of 3,000 react with distrust to questions about the dead. "This is where we buried the charred remains of the Krasniqi clan," says a young Albanian man and adds immediately with a wave of his hand: "But I do not know more than that."

Twenty-four Albanians were shot, among them 13 children, and their houses were burned down. But the victims are not buried in the heroes’ cemetery at the end of the village, where under a sea of Albanian flags rest its former inhabitants killed in clashes with the Serbs. They are not buried there because, according to protected testimony by eyewitnesses, the Krasniqis were apparently executed by their compatriots only after the arrival of KFOR international peacekeeping forces in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo.

The four Krasniqi brothers were considered "loyalists to the Serbian regime" and worked in Serbian companies; one of them was even as a journalist for the Serbian language newspaper "Jedinstvo". Under the Milosevic regime they enjoyed privileges; afterwards, this was their death sentence.

The extermination of this family, like other Albanian crimes, could have been quickly hushed up. For since the United Nations made the Kosovo their protectorate in July 1999, they had proceeded against presumed war criminals from the numbers of the Kosovo Albanians only with velvet gloves. But now, more than three years after the NATO takeover, the international community finally dares to also confront its recent allies. Its investigators have even arrested some leaders of the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) who are suspected of committing murder.

Bodies of victims killed by KLA (UCK) and thrown into the Radonjic Lake canal

"Everyone in Kosovo knows but none dares to speak about it," says the former prime minister of the exiled Kosovars and current chairman of the New Party for Kosovo, Bujar Bukoshi. "After the war the cruelest cleansings took place among the Albanians. Under the pretext that they were ‘Serbian collaborators’, the leaders of the KLA liquidated their political opponents; old blood feuds were settled, and Albanian civilians were executed by the Albanians themselves."

The number of the victims is estimated to be more than a thousand. The perpetrators or instigators were usually former senior KLA leaders; after the war they were integrated nearly without exception into the KLA successor organization, the civilian Kosovo Protection Corps.

Allegedly a former KLA commander and two of his fellow soldiers, according to their indictment, instigated a war criminal to kill the former KLA commander Ekrem Rexha known as "Drini". This moderate Albanian had announced the publication of a book on war crimes in Kosovo, including those committed by the KLA. A few hours after Drini’s death KLA deputies visited his widow in order to get “the computer with records on the announced book". However the international police responsible for postwar crimes was faster.

Also awaiting trial since not long ago are once legendary KLA commanders Sami Lushtaki and Rustem Mustafa ("Remi"). The latter is accused, along with three other KLA officers, of having raped Albanian women and killed at least five civilians in private prison camps during and after the war.

Daut Haradinaj, the notorious brother of the former KLA commander Ramush Haradinaj (who in the meanwhile became head of the third largest political party, the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo), is accused with five other members of the Kosovo Liberation Army of the murder of four members of the Liberal Party (LDK) of Kosovo president Ibrahim Rugova.

After arresting an influential KLA commander near the town of Dragas, the police stated that at the same time bomb attacks in the region stopped.

Recently another senior KLA member from Prizren was brought before the investigating judge. He is accused not only of having committed criminal activities but also of being the top agent of the Albanian secret service. The hard disk of his computer in the meanwhile has become a treasure trove of information on war crimes, extortion and Albanian secret service plans.

"We are slowly moving forward," says German Christian Lindmeier, a spokesman for the UN administration in Kosovo (UNMIK). Unnoticed by the public the Hague tribunal has also opened an office in Pristina. Rumors according to which the list of the Hague investigators, in addition to Serb war criminals, also includes three former KLA leaders and now influential politicians – Hashim Thaci, Agim Cheku and Ramush Haradinaj – have been neither confirmed nor denied by the spokesmen of the tribunal. According to Hague tribunal chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte, in any case indictments against some Kosovo Albanians will be filed before the end of the year.

Deeply involved in serious KLA crimes and minority attcks, the war-time KLA leader Hashim Thaci, summer 1999, Pristina

Shortly before the end of the war Thaci was sentenced in absentia by a Serbian court in Pristina to ten years’ imprisonment. Belgrade presented the chief prosecutor in The Hague with a disk with 27,000 pages on the alleged war crimes committed by the top KLA triumvirate. The extradition of at least one of the former KLA leaders would be welcome for many Serbs to explain the Serbian war crimes in the Kosovo as defense of the state and population.

“We know a lot,” says UNMIK spokesman Lindmeier, "but our problem is witnesses. They have a gun pointed at their head. Many withdraw their original statements after threats by their former KLA fellow fighters".

The heroic elite which ended up in jail is guarded by about twenty prison wardens from Germany flown in by plane to do the job. Albanian guards received death threats if they attempted to prevent escape attempts.

For many Albanians the imprisoned KLA leaders are still war heroes. Every Friday demonstrators lay flowers in front of the prison in Pristina. They accuse UNMIK of developing "Milosevic tendencies". The chairman of the journalist federation, Milan Zeka, has even called on his colleagues to fight against the "police dictatorship" of UNMIK chief Michael Steiner. The German, they say, is insulting a whole generation of Albanians.

But this will not discourage Steiner from further arrests and extradition of Albanians to the Hague tribunal despite rumors in Kosovo of a huge revolt by the Albanians. He will carry out every warrant for arrest of the Hague tribunal: "During my mandate we will adhere to law and order in Kosovo."

"Just wrong - the Serbs not only won the civilian bodycount sweepstakes in all their lost wars, but courtesy of their campaign against Croat Catholic churches, they won the title for Church destructions, and debased any subsequent claims as to their being "Christian" victims.

Seriously Cicero, who do you think you're going to fool with your revisionist garbage, other than fools?"

**** you forget, I was in Kosovo from 99-2004. Even as of this month, Albania extremist have been murdering Serbs.....starting in 99 all the way to 2004. Even the bus attack with the 250 pound bomb under the road.

Florim Ejupi was the criminal who did it, found by the Germans, after a cigarette but was found at his look out point.....they traced his DNA and proved that he was the one....The Brits arrested him and turned him over to Bondsteel..where he escaped with "wire cutters"...He was a member of SHIK, and SHIK was very close to CIA operations. This is a fact.....

A BUS WITH SERB CIVILIANS BLOWN UP BY ALBANIAN TERRORISTS
February 17, 2001 Ten Serb civilians (including a child) have died and 40 wounded

LATEST DISCOVERIES BY WASHINGTON POST AND THE SUNDAY TIMES, July 29 2001

The man against whom police had developed the best case, Florim Ejupi, escaped in May from a U.S. military prison in Kosovo, using a wire cutter allegedly passed to him in a spinach pie baked by his family. And charges against the three other suspects will be dropped if new evidence is not produced within the next month, U.N. officials say. A three-judge international panel has already called for their release on grounds of insufficient evidence.
Ties to Organized Crime Alleged
Officials say the bus case underlines one of the fundamental problems of building a stable, law-abiding society in Kosovo: frequent criminal activity by members of the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC). The group, made up of former fighters in the Kosovo Liberation Army, is officially a civil emergency service, but is widely seen among people here as the nucleus for the future army of an independent Kosovo.

According to classified NATO reports, informers claim that KPC members not only attack Serbs but are also involved in illegal trade in prostitutes, cigarettes, fuel, weapons and appliances. "Many KPC members, in some cases high-ranking KPC officials, have ties with criminal organizations," said one classified NATO report prepared late last year.

The informants have alleged that commanders in the 5,000-member KPC have profited personally, for example, by forcibly seizing vacant apartments and reselling them or by extorting money from private companies, according to Western intelligence officials.

Muharrem Mahmutaj, a spokesman for the KPC, said the group was unaware of wrongdoing but welcomed investigation. He noted, moreover, that the KPC itself "is not being accused."

The United States has become the protection corps' most important foreign patron, providing at least $13 million in State Department and Pentagon aid in the past two years, covering more than a third of the group's total expenses. In May, when three officials of the KPC were arrested on charges of killing another KPC official -- who was allegedly cooperating with NATO to fight corruption -- the U.S. mission in Kosovo released a statement saying that "these arrests do not in any way reflect badly on the KPC and its important role in Kosovo."

NATO forces, including helicopters, were mobilized to arrest Lushtaku after a witness came forward, but at the last moment the arrest was halted at the insistence of high-ranking U.N. and NATO officials, according to three sources with knowledge of the incident.

Jock Covey, a U.S. diplomat serving as deputy head of the U.N. mission in Kosovo, was instrumental in blocking Lushtaku's arrest on at least two occasions, the sources said. He told colleagues that if Lushtaku, who is popular in Kosovo, were jailed, it could destabilize the province on the eve of municipal elections and bolster hard-liners in Serbian parliamentary elections in December. Covey, who has left the United Nations for private industry, declined to comment.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe cited the example in a report last month -- without identifying Lushtaku -- alleging "unequal treatment" of those accused of criminal activity.

Karphammar, the former U.N. judge, said NATO and U.N. officials also intervened in February 2000 to force the release of more than a dozen former members of the rebel army, including a man who was wanted by Interpol. The ethnic Albanians had been detained by French forces for organizing a riot in the northern city of Mitrovica. But French intelligence officers refused to give a local court information they collected in interviews. All the suspects were released "before the real court investigation started, because of a threat by rebel leaders that if they were not released, KFOR soldiers would come under threat," Karphammar said.

Tensions between police and NATO often surface in criminal investigations, sources say. Several police officers have reported being shooed away from crime scenes by NATO intelligence officers who insist on conducting the first interviews with key witnesses and then withhold the results.