April 2, 1999
CRISIS IN THE BALKANS: ATROCITIES
Report Finds Shared Guilt Inside Kosovo
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By ELIZABETH OLSON
ENEVA -- A report to the U.N. Human Rights Commission on
Thursday accused both Yugoslav and Albanian forces of committing
numerous killings and other atrocities in Kosovo before NATO began
its airstrikes.
Jiri Dienstbier, a former foreign minister of Czechoslovakia,
gave the U.N. group, which is holding its annual meeting here, a
report on Kosovo that strongly criticized Yugoslav forces, noting
that he was alarmed at "consistent disregard by Serbian state
security forces of both domestic and international standards
pertaining to police conduct and treatment of detainees." Kosovo
is a province of Serbia, which with neighboring Montenegro forms
Yugoslavia.
Dienstbier said, however, that human rights violations by both
the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians were common. "It happened in
Kosovo many times for both sides," Dienstbier said, citing
abductions, murders and arbitrary arrests. He has been
investigating human rights in Yugoslavia, Croatia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina since March 1998.
Last fall, he said, "concentrations of corpses and evidence of
massacres, including massacres of civilians," were discovered. The
badly mutilated bodies of 14 Kosovo Albanians, including six women,
six children and two elderly men, were found in a forest in the
Drenica region, he said.
The Kosovo Liberation Army, on the other hand, which is fighting
for independence for the ethnic Albanian majority in the province,
conducted paramilitary tribunals and was believed to be responsible
for the abduction and execution of civilians and police officers,
he said. In two locations, Klecka and Glodjane, there were more
than 40 bodies that Yugoslav authorities said were Serb civilians
who had been kidnapped and killed by the KLA soldiers.
And all over Serbia, he said, "persons are arbitrarily detained
by the police for questioning or held in pretrial detention longer
than the period mandated by law." Such detainees are routinely
denied access to lawyers, Dienstbier said, and also to personal
doctors, a practice that he said is significant because
state-employed physicians do not report injuries sustained during
police questioning and also do not provide sufficient medical
treatment.
In response, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia gave the
commission what it called "information on terrorist activities and
provocations by the Albanian separatists in Kosovo."
Branko Brankovic, a representative of the Yugoslav government,
said that between Oct. 13, 1998, and Feb. 21, 1999, there had been
827 attacks and provocations in Kosovo, including 290 against
civilians and 537 against officials. These attacks, he said, killed
99 people, including 80 civilians.
Since the Rambouillet peace talks, he said, people have been
killed and wounded daily except for the period from Feb. 11 to Feb.
17, 1999.
In light of the fighting and brutality in Kosovo in the past
weeks, Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, said
Thursday that a special investigation would begin next week to
assess the reports of ethnic cleansing.
Ms. Robinson said she would send Dienstbier to investigate
"reports of a vicious and systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing
conducted by Serbian military and paramilitary forces in Kosovo."
"The gravity of these reports underlines the need for impartial
verification of the allegations," Ms. Robinson said.
Human rights monitors are also being reassigned and sent
immediately to interview refugees to evaluate the human rights
situation in the battered province, she added.
