Posted on 08/26/2002 5:49:50 AM PDT by Ranger
THE HAGUE, Aug. 25 — As he told his ghastly story, Bosko Radojkovic came across as a kind and methodical man. For 25 years he was a police detective, mostly working in a small riverside town in Serbia. His job was always to unravel crimes, from cattle theft to murder.
But he was now describing his own role in a gruesome cover-up, so perturbing that he ended up sick in the hospital.
In the witness chair at the United Nations war crimes tribunal, the police detective avoided looking at Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslavia's former president, now in the dock.
Mr. Radojkovic was the first to open a freezer truck from Kosovo, found in the Danube River in 1999. It held 86 bludgeoned and mangled bodies, presumed to be of Kosovo Albanians.
The event was kept secret until last year, when Belgrade suddenly disclosed details of that and other mass killings in the Albanian-populated province of Kosovo in southern Serbia. Belgrade was apparently paving the way for sending Mr. Milosevic to face war crimes charges in The Hague.
Now prosecutors say that Mr. Radojkovic's testimony about the truck, presented in late July just before the tribunal took a short summer break, is central to their case that war crimes were committed in Kosovo and that Mr. Milosevic ordered the evidence removed. Mr. Milosevic's trial, which began in February, resumes Aug. 26.
The story of the truck and its cover-up also offers a glimpse of how a small-town policeman was caught up in the mad schemes of killing and deception in the Balkan conflict.
It is all the more unusual because until now, most Serbs who have appeared as witnesses or accused have discounted or denied their responsibility. Mr. Radojkovic, 46, who is still on active duty, is not charged with any crime.
The detective, a short, graying figure, spoke with precision. On the morning of April 5, 1999, a fisherman alerted the police at Kladovo that the tip of a white truck was visible in the Danube. Mr. Radojkovic went to the scene.
He sent in a diver, who reported that the freezer truck was from a Kosovo meat packing plant. Its front window was missing, its cabin empty. But one of the back doors, although closed with a chain, was slightly open, and some human limbs were sticking out.
The police borrowed a crane from a nearby power plant. It took several hours to pull up the heavy truck. As it rose onto the riverbank, Mr. Radojkovic saw "two human legs and an arm" protruding from the back. He took pictures, as he always did at a crime scene. Then he "pushed the limbs back inside and closed the door with nuts and bolts," because the scene was "disturbing" for the crane workers and the watching villagers.
Next, "we informed an investigating judge, the coroner and the public prosecutor," Mr. Radojkovic said. Once they arrived, he said, he broke the padlock and opened the back doors of the truck. "I saw a heap of corpses," he said.
"How many?" the investigating judge asked.
"I said there were a lot," he said he replied.
The judge backed away. He said such a big case was not within his jurisdiction.
As a result, Mr. Radojkovic and a colleague sent a message to the district police at Bor, and the cover-up began. Orders came to remove the names lettered on the cabin doors, which included Prizren, a town in Kosovo. In the dark, Mr. Radojkovic said, he spray-painted over the words.
The truck had no license plates. Mr. Radojkovic brought some from the police station, damaged them and smeared them with mud to make them look used and affixed them to the truck. He patched the hole in the back door. At each stage he took photographs, which were projected in the courtroom.
Asked why he disguised the truck, the detective replied that the Romanian border was less than a mile away and Romania supported NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia because of the Kosovo situation. There were Romanian patrol boats on the Danube. "They could think all sorts of things," the detective said.
The next day, the district police chief arrived and took over. "He told me to take no further photographs," Mr. Radojkovic said. The truck was to be treated as a state secret and the bodies were to be removed.
At night four civilians and a dozen policemen began the horrendous task. "I was inside the truck, with a colleague, taking out corpses," Mr. Radojkovic said.
Other men wrapped them. In the faint light they saw that the dead were adults, except for two children, all in civilian clothes.
"How long had the people been dead?" asked Dirk Ryneveld, the prosecutor.
"On the basis of my experience I think two or three days," the detective said. "The water was cold. The weather was cold."
Most bodies had visible wounds, inflicted with something blunt or something with a sharp edge, he said. One young man had a bullet wound in his chest and his hands tied behind his back.
At 3 a.m. the men stopped. "Everyone was exhausted," the detective continued. A truck took away the first 30 bodies. The next night, they pulled out the rest. They counted 83 bodies plus the heads and some body parts of three more victims.
The next day, on April 8, the district chief ordered the freezer truck to be towed away and burned. Mr. Radojkovic said he and a colleague had poured gasoline over the vehicle and set it on fire. But its metal structure remained. After checking with the police chief, he blew it up. "We used industrial explosives," the detective said.
For his final question, the prosecutor asked, "How do you feel about the way you were instructed to carry out your investigation?"
"As for my feelings, I had none at the time," the detective replied. "There was a war going on. I did what had to be done." Once the job was finished, he said, he had to check into hospital, overwrought.
Some of the bodies from the truck are believed to be among the bodies found in a secret grave at a police training camp in a Belgrade suburb. More than 1,000 bodies of Kosovo residents have been found in Serbian mass graves, and many people are still missing.
Mr. Milosevic, almost friendly, cross-examined the detective for close to two hours but was unable to dent his story. Supporters of Mr. Milosevic have said Belgrade fabricated the truck story to speed up the former president's surrender to the tribunal.
What did the witness know about the identity of the dead? "In a few cases we looked into their pockets," Mr. Radojkovic replied, and he went on: "The little girl who was 7 or 8 had a small backpack." They found a Unicef notebook and crayons. "In the notebook was only a drawing of a little house and a flower. Nothing else."
"All right," replied Mr. Milosevic, putting away his list of questions. "Enough about this phantom freezer truck."
Now it turns out that Clinton's pals in the area, the KLA were nothing more than murderous Jihadists.
Since GWB took over virtually the entire officer corps of the KLA has been arrested mainly for killing their fellow Albanians.
GWB's White House has also officially called for the UN Tribunal to be shut down asap.
Effectively, these actions tell us that Milosevic was correct and Clinton fought on the wrong side. The lamestream media can spin and spin all they want, but they can not hide the fact that under GWB's leadership Clinton's pals the KLA has been put into prison where they always belonged.
I clearly remeber from one report that there were knocking sound coming from the freezer when Serbian James Bond jumped to the rescue.
You're being simplistic in the extreme. The KLA are a bunch of bloodthirsty thugs (though not, by any means, Islamic fundies). But many Serbs are too. And just because the KLA are bad doesn't give the Serbs the right to come in and massacre Kosovar civilians. Milosevic committed war crimes, and is justly being tried for them. I would also hope that the Kosovar criminals are also brought to justice.
I know its natural to try to view these situations in black and white, but the truth is that both sides were wrong.
For someone who criticizes about being black and white, you seem to be doing a pretty good job yourself. This statement is utter horseshit, now please go back and read the numerous articles pertaining to the Balkans and you might find it rather interesting that your callous statement above is ridiculous amd holds about as much water as leaky thimble.
If you're denying that the Serbs, under Milosevic's direction committed a vast number of war crimes, both in Bosnia and in Kosovo, you're living in a fantasy land. What's also true is that Bosnian Muslims, Kosovar Albanians, and, especialy, Croats committed acts of similar barbarism, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. But barbarism does not excuse barbarism. And Milosevic and his cronies need to be punished, for the genocide, mass-rape, systematic looting and ethnic cleansing that they repeatedly orchestrated.
Facts are facts, but we wouldn't want that to get in the way of objective journalism now would we?
Yet you insist that there were no deliberate Serb masacres?
You're just wrong about that. But I'll grant you that the KLA killed many innocent people. So what? Does that give Milosevic the right to do the same? Both sides were barbaric, and both deserve to be punished.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.