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."
I'll take your word for it. Who would have thought that support for a hard-line Communist like Milosevic would be so pronounced on a supposedly conservative news forum like FR?
Name a boy who was killed. Were 41 men (19 and older) "every male in the town". You said boys where killed, but there are none mentioned as being killed. Even the other two towns, there is none under 19.
Your source is wrong.
A small sampling of identified remains of boys:
Shpendw BOGUJEVCI Male 12 years
Shpetm BOGUJEVCI Male 10 years
Arber DURIQI Male 8 years
Albion DURIQI Male 2 years
Fevzi KOSUMI Male 16 years
Source: Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)
I think the only true hard line ideology Milo subscribed to was "Milosevism" - everything else was merely a means to his end.
Droll, n'est pas?
Whatever - enjoy it while it lasts, and learn who you can ignore early, your time is an asset and there are those upon whom it is merely squandered.
Of course, you're right. But the same was true of most hardline East-European and Soviet "Communists." From Brezhnev on, ideology played virtually no role in the Soviet bloc. While Yugoslavia was never really in the bloc, Milosevic followed late Soviet standards of governance pretty closely.
I agree that 'massacring civilians' is unacceptable, but apart from individual atrocities (which should be answered for) there is no evidence of any massacres as painted by Nato. Firstly, what the hell do you call bombing civilians for 78 days and killing and maiming thousands? It was state terrorism which massacred civilians in front of the whole world. Most of the massacre stories in Kosovo were fake, but the deaths caused by Nato can all be accounted for (as will be seen in the future).
Secondly, fighting the 'Croats and the KLA' can hardly be lumped together. One was a war, the other was an action against separatists. Next you will be rolling Bosnia and Kosovo into the same category.
As medved said and DTA illustrated: "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."
This is a fact and happened very early on following the occupation, as did refusals by some Nato pilots who had a conscience about bombing civilians and civilian infrastructure. After all, that is a war crime, or hadn't you heard?
You like for me to tell you about the destruction of a "muslim village" the Serbs did commit? I can do my best to recall the name, you want to know why the Serbs destroyed this village, hotshot?
How many of those may have been phantom names such as the "dead" Srebrenican muslim men and boys...The same ones who died over the years. These names above most likely were killed by the KLA to clear their story of not being responsible for the grisly murders they committed... Hotshot, come up with your sources to who you tend to recieve your info from...
You people are incredible. My source is, as previously stated, the OSCE. And Srebrenica is not, the last time I checked, anywhere in the immediate vicinity of Kosova.
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