BosNet Article:At Least 5000 Murdered in Kosovo
Steve Albert
B o s N e t -May 7, 1999
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From Times of London, 5/7/99
Serbs have murdered at least 5,000
BY MICHAEL BINYON, CHARLES BREMNER, STEPHEN
FARRELL AND ANTHONY LOYD
AS WESTERN nations step up efforts to secure a
diplomatic solution in Kosovo, The Times has learnt that
President Milosevic's police and paramilitary forces have
massacred at least 5,000 Kosovan Albanians and perhaps
as many as 10,000.
Nato announced yesterday that at least 4,000 people
have been summarily killed and a further 100,000 men of
military age have disappeared. But human rights monitors
say, after interviews with at least 600 refugees, that many
more have been killed. They say the full tally may never be
known as many of the bodies have been burnt.
According to fleeing refugees, almost all the killings have
been carried out not by the Yugoslav Army but by police
and paramilitaries, the very forces that Mr Milosevic
insists must remain in Kosovo under any peace
agreement.
Nato believes that there have been mass murders in at
least 65 villages. It says that many of the missing men may
have been killed, imprisoned or are being used as forced
labour and human shields.
No accurate total of those killed can be given until human
rights monitors gain access to Kosovo. But the Pentagon
said last week it had evidence of 43 suspected mass
graves, identified from sources including refugee reports
and aerial photography.
Two weeks after the airstrikes began the State
Department said that it had reports of 3,200 killings and
up to 100,000 Kosovans missing. The Foreign Office,
which has also appointed a special investigator, says that
deaths ran "probably to tens of thousands".
The International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague is
collecting all the evidence available, but insists that it still
has no clear picture. "We are trying to build up a central
database . . . in a form that could be used to bring
charges," a spokesman said.
The Serbs deny that any massacres have taken place, but
say that 1,200 people have been killed in Kosovo and
5,000 injured by Nato airstrikes. But estimates based on
Nato figures show that at least 500 Serbs have been killed
in attacks on tanks and armoured vehicles alone.
Humanitarian groups said their exclusion from Kosovo
meant that they had to rely more on hearsay than hard
information. But painstaking attempts to collate reports of
killings are being made by several groups, including
Human Rights Watch, which has sent monitors to refugee
centres in Macedonia and Albania.
Refugee claims suggest that for every ten villages whose
inhabitants have been driven out of eastern Kosovo, two
or three report massacres, usually of between four and
twenty people. In western Kosovo, the main base of the
Kosovo Liberation Army, the figure is likely to be higher.
The notorious Serb leader, Arkan, and his Tigers have
featured prominently among refugees' accounts of the
most savage ethnic cleansing near the towns of Ferizaj and
Pristina.
Louis Gentile, a London-based human rights lawyer, said:
"I have received 25 to 35 credible accounts of multiple
murders."
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