Posted on 07/16/2003 12:14:44 PM PDT by joan
U.N. War Crimes Court Convicts Four Senior Ethnic Albanian Rebels and Sentences Them to Prison
PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro July 16 —
A court convicted four senior ethnic Albanian rebels and sentenced them to prison Wednesday for atrocities committed during their 1998-1999 war against Yugoslav forces in the province of Kosovo.
It was the first time that the United Nations-administered court had convicted anyone of war crimes from the rebel side in the Kosovo conflict.
The three judges sentenced Rrustem Mustafa and three of his associates to prison terms ranging from five to 17 years for ordering the killings, illegal arrests and torture of fellow ethnic Albanians suspected of collaborating with the Serb regime of Slobodan Milosevic.
"In the case of each accused, these acts are qualified as the offense of war crimes," said presiding judge Timothy Clayson of Britain. "No man is above the law."
An attorney for the men said they would appeal.
Kosovo is a part of Serbia-Montenegro, the successor to Yugoslavia, but has been administered by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO air bombing forced an end to a Serb crackdown on separatist ethnic Albanians.
The four senior rebels, using headphones to hear a translation of the judge's words, listened in silence, but their families sobbed upon hearing the verdicts.
Mustafa, one of the most senior commanders of the now-defunct Kosovo Liberation Army, received a 17-year sentence for ordering the killings of five Albanians, failing to prevent illegal detention and failing to punish rebel soldiers responsible for abuses.
Mustafa commanded the rebels in northern part of Kosovo, a region known as Llap. The three associates served under his command in that zone.
Nazif Mehmeti, the head of the rebels' police unit, was sentenced to 13 years for conveying orders to kill civilians and making unlawful arrests. The rebels' intelligence chief, Latif Gashi, was sentenced to 10 years for illegal detention and torture. Naim Kadriu, who headed the rebels' detention center, received a five-year sentence.
Relatives of the men sobbed as the sentences were announced. Mustafa tried to calm them as he was being escorted out of the temporary court room by heavily armed guards.
"We fought for ourselves, not for them," he said, referring to the U.N. mission now in charge of administering the province.
He waved with handcuffed hands as he was driven away in an armored car
Gashi's sister, Nafije, clutching a handkerchief, said the trial was unfair.
"They fought for their own people, for their own country and we will always be proud of what they did," she said.
While the Clinton administration bombed the Serbs.
Wasn't Podujevo were the massacre took place that four of the five surviving children are testifying about? More on the recent news:
The accused included one of the Kosovo Liberation Army's top former commanders, Rustem Mustafa, and his chief of intelligence, Latif Gashi.The court found them and two others guilty of imprisoning at least 13 men in a tiny shack and torturing them between August 1998 and May 1999.
Five of the men were later found nearby in graves with bullet wounds to the heart and head.
Notice that the tiny torture shack was operating as the war was going on - until May 1999. This Podujevo sounds like an area of very active KLA activity with extreme intimidation against Albanians. Why was it, that in the late March massacre, the fathers had left and hid before the gunmen arrived?
Serb police doctor sending massacre survivors to Serb hospital start to make sense
Massacre could be Komandir Remi's handiwork. Involvement of Natasa Kandic in the story is a telltale sign.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/740046/posts
KLA Comnmander Remi Expels 220,000 Albanian Civilians
Columbia U. | Nov 1999 | Max Sinclair
Posted on 08/27/2002 8:23 AM PDT by vooch
Commander Remi began expelling Albanians from the Llap region once the international monitors pulled out. The sole intent of this strategy seems to have been to provoke a refugee crisis. Evidently, the KLA knew it could only rise to power through the maximum suffering of the very people it purported to be defending.
Chris Bird of the Guardian filed a story on Saturday March 20, 1999 which described how the KLA knocked on people's doors in Srbica telling them they had to "leave immediately, at one in the morning" as the UCK spread land mines throughout the village. The villagers then had to walk miles through a wind swept snowy night.
The tide of KLA induced refugees grew until it reached 160,000 as described by Lirak Qelaj. Qelaj acted in part as an information officer for Commander Remi and one of his jobs was to film the plight of displaced Albanian civilians with a video camera. Qelaj " disclosed that it was KLA advice, rather than Serbian deportations, which led some of the hundreds of thousands of Albanians to leave Kosovo" as reported by Jonathan Steele of the Guardian on June 30th.
In one episode, around 160,000 displaced people were stranded near the village of Kolic on the east side of the Pristina-Podujevo road. Qelaj said the UCK " urged the people to go on to the main road and start walking to Pristina." note: what Qelaj forgot to mention to Jonathan Steele was the trilfing fact that Remi's men had to shoot 80 civilians who refused to be expelled. This was reported in a BBC TV report aired in March 2000.
Sometime in late April, in the north of the Llap region, the KLA urged another crowd hiding from the bombing and numbering almost 60,000 to leave for Macedonia and Albania according to Qelaj.
In Remi's zone of operations alone, the KLA expelled 220,000 Albanians. This is keeping with the pattern Remi established prior to the bombing. Albanians were only worthy of decent treatment if they were actively supporting the KLA. Those who stood on the sidelines were to be used for propaganda purposes or worse.
| 12:24 -> 19:30 | Beta, Reuters
PRISTINA -- Wednesday – A court in Kosovo has jailed a top former ethnic Albanian guerrilla and three co-accused for war crimes committed during the conflict in the province.
In Kosovo’s first war crimes trial against former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a panel of three international judges sentenced Rustem Mustafa – otherwise known as “Commander Remi” – to 17 years imprisonment.
The four were charged with torturing ethnic Albanians suspected of collaborating with Serb officials during the war. Remi and two of the others were also accused of murdering civilians.
Thousands protest KLA verdict
Following today's verdict, several thousand Kosovo-Albanians took to the streets of central Podujevo, around 20 miles from Pristina, in protest.
The demonstrators insisted that the decision of the international panel of judges to impose lengthy prison sentences against the four former KLA leaders would not prevent Albanian Kosovo from striving for freedom and independence.
The protestors have vowed to continue their Podujevo protest until the four are released.
Remi murdered dozens of Albanians. He was perhaps the most active murderer of Albanians that existed. Ever since he was arrested, the murder rate in Kosovo & Metohija finally went down to pre-wear levels.
It essentially confirms everything the Yugoslav government was saying. In addition, it confirms that Clinton lied us into the Kosovo War.
any news on how the Ramush trial is going ?
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