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."
sure enough your "eyewitnesses" are all KLA. The fact of the matter the village was a loyalist-moderate village which apparently refused to support KLA. One can infer that the menfolk ran afoul of KLA press gang. Recall that at Racak the KLA gang pressed some 60 elderly men into "fighting".
stop getting your information from liberal sources and perhaps you start seeing the full picture.
Not at all. Three of them were ordinary villagers shot by the Serbs who managed, nonetheless, to survive. And Serbs responsible have confessed to the crime. Do you really want me to post photos of the bodies, or of Serb police standing triumphantly in front of the burning buildings?
stop getting your information from liberal sources and perhaps you start seeing the full picture
Liberal sources? This isn't a liberal-conservative issue. And btw, I'm normally very much pro-Serb when it comes to the Balkans.
Oh, and I'm waiting for your attempt to portray hardline Communist Slobodan Milosevic as a conservative hero.
It may have been possible to remain deluded about the KLA and Bosnian Jihadists prior to 9-11, but ever since then it is impossible to fathom why anyone would continue defending the likes of Agim Ceku and Rustem Mustafa.........why do you continue to defend the KLA after all the post 9/11 evidence about them ?
when will you accept as had Kfor that it was the KLA which did the killing in Kosovo ?
Have you read any of my posts on this thread? I seriously doubt it, since if you had, you'd know that I have consistently attacked the KLA.
Milosevic is guilty of trying to protect his nation and people from barbarians and that's about it. The genesis of the most recent problems in Kosovo was Milosevic's rescinding of the autonomy of the region in 89. He had no options; every other ethnic group in Kosovo was being brutalized by the albanians.
European forensics teams walked out of Kosovo in disgust after finding a few corpses which appeared to have died natural deaths in places where the clintonistas had claimed hundreds of billions of genocide victims would be found.
I have no problem with his actions to fight the Croats and the KLA. But massacring civilians? Unacceptable.
European forensics teams walked out of Kosovo in disgust after finding a few corpses which appeared to have died natural deaths in places where the clintonistas had claimed hundreds of billions of genocide victims would be found
What are you talking about?
If I can add, perhaps about this
Every single NATO lie will haunt those who lied through the teeth about "genocide".
One attack on U.S. personnel with casualties and all those who suppoerted and still support KLA will become accesories to the crime. Think about it.
If this happened in any country the government would react probably more aggressively than Milosevic did. Imagine if it happened in America!? The only reason that the KLA has been glamorised is that it served Nato's purpose at the time. The Nato govts before that point were very clear about the KLA and what it was. It is now running most of the drug, people and gun-running routes through Europe (via Kosovo which is no longer multi-ethnic or safe to live for anyone now).
As for posting tales like the one above, some may have been true but most were not. The KLA was acting as Nato's land army and the propaganda was massive. You haven't even provided a link to your specific 'case'. If it's just from the media or hearsay testimony then it means nothing.
One attack on U.S. personnel with casualties and all those who suppoerted and still support KLA will become accesories to the crime.
If you say so. I never supported the KLA.
Agreed. And the Serbs were justified in cracking down on the KLA. But they weren't justified in going into villages, lining up all the men and boys against brick walls, and shooting them. Nor were they justified in forcing 800,000 people, mostly civilians, out of their homes and into exile.
The KLA was acting as Nato's land army and the propaganda was massive
Nato and the KLA cooperated, but only because of the old maxim, "my enemy's enemy is my friend." You cannot justly blaim the US for the crimes of the KLA, any more than you can the US for the crimes of Abdulrashid Dostum.
I have many links from the media. What kind of evidence would be acceptable? I've already offered to post photos, but I'm worried that they might be too graphic. If you want them anyway, I'll post them or send them in freepmail. Anyway, for a good, if excessively conservative, summary of Milosevic's crimes in Kosovo, read this brief.
The last thing, and I mean the very last thing I ever want my tax dollars being used for is to bomb some innocent Christian nation into the stone age for the benefit of narco-terrorists, white trash, and barbarians, which is precisely what the clintonistas did in Kosovo.
Ted, that's patently absurd. But then again, what do you expect from a man who still claims that the Earth once orbited Saturn?The Stratfor article on the essential nature of the charges against Milosevic and the Serbs is totally reliable; other sources for the same information are not hard to find.
The Stratfor article is three years old. Many, many graves have been uncovered since then. And it doesn't even begin to deal with the well-documented crimes committed in Bosnia.
The last thing, and I mean the very last thing I ever want my tax dollars being used for is to bomb some innocent Christian nation into the stone age for the benefit of narco-terrorists, white trash, and barbarians, which is precisely what the clintonistas did in Kosovo.
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war... Bwahahahaha.
It get's back to that black and white thing you were referring to earlier.
These threads are more instructive on the mindset of Milosevic supporters and his foreign auxiliaries than they are on the recent history of the Balkans.
At least that's what my 2 years worth of experience tells me.
All 41 of those listed as having been killed in Cuska were age 19 or above (except one of unknown age) - where are the killed boys you mention?
Also, according to http://www.americanradioworks.org/features/kosovo/cuska/frame_body-part3.html , Cuska had no KLA activity :
Human rights investigators contend massacres like the one in Cuska, in which Serbian forces murdered unarmed civilians who offered no resistance, are textbook examples of war crimes. Yes, Cuska is the home village for the KLA's top commander, Agim Ceku. And Ceku's father was murdered on May 14, but several Serbian fighters say his killing was not the primary aim of the attack. "There's no evidence to suggest that Cuska had any KLA activity whatsoever," says Abrahams. "All of the villagers said that while some of them had been members of the KLA and fought in other areas, Cuska during the war remained quiet."
However, it appears there was reported terrorist activity from the village before the war.
359. In village Cuska, Pec municipality, on February 5th at 8.25PM, Albanian terrorists opened fire on the policemen.
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