Burning Secrets from the Balkans
Serbia still has a lot to answer for
By Robert Leonard Rope and Albinot Maloku
April 13, 2011
Months before
controversial Swiss politician Dick Marty’s “groundbreaking,” unabashedly
anti-Albanian report came to dominate the latest round of Balkan media frenzies,
my long-term work partner and I set out to investigate one specific set of
allegations from the Serbian-led genocides of the 1990s – namely, that the
bodies of hundreds, perhaps thousands of ethnic Albanians were systematically
burned and disposed of in industrial furnaces by Serbian forces during the
waning days of Slobodan Milošević’s reign of terror in Kosovo.
(Where Are Our Missing? photo by Albinot Maloku, Pristina, 2008)
The following is our report detailing and analyzing the
documentation and evidence from these macabre operations. We offer this in the
hopes of igniting a rigorous and long-needed war crimes investigation. All
serious war crime allegations must be investigated. All victims and their
surviving loved ones, regardless of ethnicity, have the right to justice, and
ultimately, the hope of closure. – RLR
Trepca
Trepca’s mines will live alongside Belsen and Auschwitz in the memories of
those whose loved ones met with a horrific end. War crimes investigators fear as
many as 1,000 bodies of innocent victims were burnt in what has now been dubbed
“Death Valley.” (1)
The point was not to hide the bodies in graves but to totally destroy them. It
would be as though these people never existed… (2)
After an intensive, wide-ranging 18-month-long investigation, the intricate web
of a notorious cover-up can at last be revealed. Spring 1999 was the climax of
Serbia’s genocidal campaign against Kosovar Albanians. In the midst of NATO’s
78-day bombing campaign, and under the ominous threat of an international war
crimes investigation, Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević ordered his henchmen
to instigate a massive cover-up.
Suddenly, and with little formal preparation, a diverse collection of police,
soldiers, paramilitaries and special service operatives was enlisted in a
top-secret plan to conceal yet another round of Balkan war crimes.
Serbia’s game plan? A surreal hodgepodge of refrigerator
trucks, mass graves and – most shockingly – the diabolical use of towering
industrial furnaces. The industrial sites included Kosovo’s sprawling Trepca
mine complex, as well as at least one factory complex in the south of Serbia
proper, specifically “Mackatica.”
Like Adolf Hitler a generation ago, the arguably psychopathic Milošević ordered
the widespread burning of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Albanian civilian
corpses. The remains of men, women and children, of babies and the elderly, of
healthy young men and the severely disabled – all going up in smoke, all turned
to cinders. Burn the bodies, burn the evidence.
That was Serbia’s double-whammy: mass murder and destruction of evidence. Not
just the de rigueur Balkan mass graves, although there were and still are no
shortage of those particular horrors throughout former Yugoslavia, some as yet
unopened. No, in this case we are talking about rushed, hastily organized
transports followed by the frenetic dumping of corpses into massive industrial
furnaces. All mortal remains transformed to ash, with the push of a button. All
traces, even down to the DNA, gone with the wind.
As if those human beings never even existed.
As Susanne Ringgaard, who once coordinated victim identification in Kosovo for
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) candidly
acknowledged, "The Serbs learned their lesson from Bosnia – destroy the
evidence.” (3)
Tragically, Milošević’s nefarious scheme has, until now, succeeded.
Having read about and listened in stunned awe to these chilling anecdotes over
the last decade, we decided to meticulously retrace the original allegations and
evidence, and determine, once and for all, the veracity of these long-running
“rumors.” And what we discovered was both appalling and compelling. Not only are
the original allegations based on potent evidence and extensive witness
testimony, but we were gradually able to piece together yet an additional layer
of falsification and subterfuge: a cover-up of the cover-up. And piece by piece,
layer by layer, the whole sordid picture has gradually emerged, unfolded, like a
shaky Balkan house of cards.
Even at the height of war, as early as the end of May 1999, horrifying reports
began to circulate involving the systematic burning of Kosovar bodies. A report
from UK FCO (Britain’s Foreign Office) cites accounts from Kosovo’s well
respected daily Koha Ditore of
explicit claims by a driver from Vojvodina (Serbia) that since the beginning of
February, 1999, he had personally, and
on a regular basis, transported
the bodies of Kosovar civilians in a military refrigerated van to a foundry at
an undisclosed location in Serbia.
On arrival, he reported, the bodies were cremated. (4)
A week later, on the 6th of June, 1999 London’s highly respected Observer ran
an article titled “Serbs burning bodies in rush to hide war crimes evidence.”
According to prominent British journalists John Sweeney and Patrick Wintour,
Serb forces allegedly burned the bodies of their victims to destroy evidence of
atrocities in Kosovo, in advance of the arrival of war crimes investigators. Several
witnesses independently told Sweeney and Wintour that they had seen smoke rising
from the Trepca mine as Serb death squads burned hundreds of corpses:
Three separate sources identified the Trepca mine – controlled by financiers
close to Slobodan Milošević – as the site where the Serbs have been burning
bodies at a reported rate of at least 100 a day for the past two months. The
bodies arrive in lorries, are incinerated in the smelter or a makeshift charnel
house and the ashes are dumped in disused shafts.
One of the witnesses reported that 700 bodies had been burnt in the past few
days. The dead – mainly men and boys regarded as being of “military age” in Serb
eyes – had come from exhumed mass graves in the Drenica valley and newly killed
ethnic Albanian prisoners at the Smrekovnica jail, the personal killing ground
of a Serb police chief known and feared by the refugees as “Vukcina” or “Wolfman.”
Claims of attempts to destroy evidence of war crimes came amid warnings from the
war crimes tribunal in the Hague that they had feared the Serbs would “start
destroying evidence at crime sites as we speak.”
One source added: “This is a matter of extreme urgency. On every other occasion
–Srebrenica, and elsewhere – the Serbs have wasted no time in tampering with
evidence, disposing of bodies and moving mass graves. There is no reason to
suppose that it will be any different this time.”
According to the article, the Serbs were reportedly anxious to keep Trepca in
the zone to be controlled by Russian troops, which would mean that the Serbs
would be able to keep the riches of the mine and hide all evidence of massacre:
“Faton,” a 38-year-old man who has lost 20 kilograms hiding from Serb death
squads in the mountains above Trepca, said his father is still trapped inside
Pristina. In late March, a few days after the first NATO strikes, he met a group
of men of “killable age” who first told him the Serbs were taking the bodies of
the dead to Trepca to burn and dumping the remains in mineshafts. (5)
In mid-April, the Serb deaths squads came to his village of Dumnica and Faton
fled to the mountains above Trepca, where he met a constant stream of refugees
from the town of Kosovska Mitrovica. These refugees, in different groups,
arriving on different days, told the same story: that the bodies were being
burnt in the mine. “They must have burnt thousands there,” he told The
Observer.
According to Sweeney and Wintour, Faton reported that some of the dead had been
prisoners at the Smrekovnica jail and were victims of a sadistic Serb police
chief known to him as “Vukcina.” He described him as a huge man with an ugly
scar to his right temple.
The second source was close to the command of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)
in Macedonia. He explained: “Last Thursday, our people saw four or five lorries
arrive at the mine. We were able to watch through binoculars. We saw men take
the bodies from the lorries, and then we saw the smoke come from the furnace.”
At a conservative estimate of 25 bodies to each lorry, 100 corpses a day were
being burnt.
The third source was an elderly Albanian man, who was able to talk to his
daughter, a refugee in Tetova (Macedonia), for three minutes via a satellite
phone inside Kosovo. The man reported that some of their neighbors had been
killed. “The Serbs have burnt 700 bodies in the last few days,” he told her. (6)
Four days later, Jonathan S. Landay of the prestigious Christian
Science Monitor (CSM) wrote that
NATO and the UN war crimes tribunal were planning to cooperate closely in “what
would be the most intensive investigative effort of its kind since the end of
World War 2.”
The planning for collecting war crimes evidence in Kosovo, continues Landay, was
being driven by concerns that Belgrade was pursuing massive destruction of
evidence:
US officials have credible reports that since Belgrade’s acceptance last week
of a NATO-backed peace plan, Serbian troops have intensified the effort,
unearthing mass graves and incinerating bodies at Kosovo’s Trepca mine and in
central Serbia.
“There has been a real effort to clean up… over the last week and a half,” says
a US official. “There is a very real issue of tampering.”
Adds Landay, “Should NATO really pursue war crimes in Kosovo, it would be a sea
change from Bosnia… It would be the most intensive war crimes effort since the
Nuremberg prosecutions of the Nazi German leaders. (7)
Eight days later, exactly one week after Milošević began – under extreme duress
– to pull his forces out of Kosovo, an obscure article ran in the Scotland Daily
Record. It was titled “1000
Bodies in Valley of Death,” by veteran writer Don Mackay:
“Yesterday,” writes Mackay, “as Foreign Secretary Robin Cook claimed 10,000
murdered Kosovars had been dumped in mass graves, photographer Mike Fresco and I
visited the places where Serb death squads tried to hide the evidence of their
vile crimes.”
Here, in the dead of night, lorries loaded with bodies poured through the
rusting gates. The crossed-hammer emblem of Trepca – believed to be owned by
Slobodan Milošević himself – could easily be mistaken for a Swastika left over
from the last time fear on this scale stalked central Europe. (8)
Continues Mackay, with morbid irony, “As the Serb tyrant prevaricated over
peace, his underlings drove convoys of freshly dug-up corpses to Trepca’s
disused gold mines.”
The furnaces were fired up once again to burn the bodies of the men and boys
the Serbs had feared would take up arms against them. Smoke billowing up from
the red and white chimney stack signaled their desperate bid to escape justice
for war crimes, and the ashes were dumped down the maze of mineshafts and
tunnels. (9)
By then, Mackay adds, “spy-in-the-sky drones and reconnaissance planes had
spotted the grisly operation.”
The second part of the article, which initially appears peripheral, offers, in
hindsight, some key clues to the success of the operation’s cover-up. According
to Mackay, French NATO troops, notoriously sympathetic to Serbia, had already
arrived at nearby Mitrovica, but had “stopped short of entering Trepca.”
Milošević’s heavily armed forces continued to rule the roost at Trepca,
steadfastly refusing Mackay and his photographer entrance into the disputed
site, while admitting to Mackay’s Serbian-speaking translator that “they were
scared of what would happen once NATO arrived.”
The visit clearly left Mackay unsettled and disturbed, though powerless to
personally investigate Trepca. He left the site severely troubled by the
admonition of one local ethnic Albanian: “No one goes near Trepca. It has the
smell of death. But everyone knows what went on during the nights.” (10)
Barely two weeks later, an article in the New
York Times sent out shock waves.
It was penned by the consistently outspoken Chris Hegdes (later let go from the Times Times
for his principled opposition to the war in Iraq) and was hauntingly titled:
“Acid and Smelting Vats Evoke Fear of Grisly Burials by Serbs.”
Hedges picks up Mackay’s main themes, clarifying and updating certain aspects
while adding significant and disturbing detail:
“Some NATO officials and local residents,” Hedges begins, “say the mile-deep
shafts, the steaming smelting vats and the tanks of hydrochloric acid at the
Trepca mine here were used as a vast disposal site for the bodies of ethnic
Albanians killed by Serbian forces.”
Kosovar Albanians who live near the state-owned mine say bodies were brought
in covered trucks escorted by Serbian jeeps and troop carriers. The first day
they reported seeing the trucks was September 17, 1998, the day Serbs began one
of several major attacks to wipe out the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army
(KLA). (11)
The trucks, they insisted, continued to enter the mine frequently until a few
days before NATO troops arrived in June.
Just as in Mackay’s earlier report, the stench of burning flesh features as a
prominent part of the ghoulish, Auschwitz-like landscape:
Residents on the perimeter of the mine report that an unusual pungent,
bittersweet smell, which they assumed to be burning bodies, frequently wafted up
day and night from the chimneys that ventilate the huge, bowl-shaped smelting
vats. No such smell, they say, had ever come from the chimneys before last
September (1998). (12)
One of the most revealing aspects of the Times article centers on the French
NATO troops, the very same ones who “had stopped short” of entering Trepca as of
June 18, 1999. Sometime between that date and the following two weeks, the
French had indeed entered the mining complex, and what they witnessed left an
indelible impression, offering another critical piece of the puzzle.
According to Hedges, heavily armed NATO peacekeepers from France did, in fact,
search the mine when they secured the area – which had been assigned to the
French forces – despite what they said were Serbian attempts to keep them out:
French soldiers reported to the Hague tribunal that they had uncovered piles
of ethnic Albanian’s clothes, shoes, family photos and identity documents
(seizing ethnic Albanian identification documents was standard procedure) in the
smelting area and near the mine shafts, according to officers who read the
report.
The French also reported that the vats had been thoroughly cleaned before
Serbian troops stationed in the complex left. The cleaned vats stood in stark
contrast with the filth that characterizes the other parts of the mine.
There were several large ash heaps, the French report said, and French troops
found numerous empty bottles of hydrochloric acid. (13)
The French military documentation is incredibly powerful and profoundly
damaging. Why would the French, typically so sympathetic to the Serbian cause,
create such details from whole cloth?
Some of the French soldiers speculated that bodies may have been submerged deep
in the shafts. Aziz Abrashi, an ethnic Albanian who had been Trepca’s general
director in the 1980s, explained to Hedges that because the mine’s water pumps
had continued to operate, the mine shafts had not flooded.
“If corpses were trucked into the mines,” added Burhan Kavaja, an ethnic
Albanian who was once director of the smelting operations, “they could easily
have been disposed of in the vats of hydrochloric acid or burned in the smelting
plants. The living could simply have been pushed into tunnels and had the air
supply cut off. “Mines,” added Buran cryptically, “are ideal places to carry out
genocide.”
Halid Barani, the local representative for the Kosovo Council for The Defense of
Freedom and Human Rights, kept a daily tally of the trucks that entered the
mine. By the end of January, he explained, every Albanian inhabitant in the
Serbian-dominated part of Mitrovica, which surrounds the mine, was expelled, and
it became a great deal harder to monitor activities there:
The Serb-held part of the city became a killing zone. After January,
Albanians who were taken by Serbs into this part of Mitrovica were murdered.
During these first post-war weeks, Albanian leaders implored the French to
provide armed escort to visit the mine and take samples from the ash heaps in
order to perform a chemical analysis. But French commanders stubbornly refused,
claiming that such a visit could lead to violence in a city so bitterly split
between Serbs and Albanians. “We are here to keep the peace,” claimed French
officials, “not investigate war crimes.” (14)
Hedges’s valiant attempt to reach two different sites inside the mine where
French troops had reported those stacks of clothing and documents was bluntly
thwarted by “two nervous-looking men in track suits” brandishing AK-47 assault
rifles.” (15)
Clearly, it was never the Serbs’ intention to highlight such blatantly
incriminating evidence to the outside world.
Some 18 months later, American National Public Radio (NPR) broadcast a
groundbreaking and intensely disturbing program by the award-winning
investigative team American
RadioWorks (ARW) called “Burning
the Evidence.” Using extensive evidence from an exhaustive, months-long
investigation, ARW journalists
elaborate on the Trepca mass burning allegations, offering detailed and damning
confidential witness testimony, backed up by repeated visits to the mine complex
itself.
Members of the Serbian police, army and intelligence services independently
admitted to ARW that they took part in a massive effort to hide war crimes
evidence by digging up corpses from mass graves and burning them in a lead
refinery in northern Kosovo. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity,
said the operation was coordinated by an elite unit of the Serbian security
service, under orders from close associates of former leader Slobodan Milošević.
“The point was not to hide the bodies in graves but to totally destroy them,”
commented one Serbian fighter, identified in the documentary only as Branko:
It would be as if those people never existed. I think our people understood
that sooner or later some of these Western organizations like the Hague
Tribunal… might come into Kosovo. We needed a good way to destroy evidence. (16)
The Serbian soldiers describe, in detail, how they transported the bodies from
graves and massacre sites in refrigerated, civilian trucks to a lead refinery in
northern Kosovo.
“Those furnaces burned at thousands of degrees,” added another fighter called
Milan. “I was told that it was enough heat to destroy everything. Every trace of
the stuff they call DNA… I didn’t even know what DNA was…” In fact, according to
UN expert
Nick Boreham, the Trepca furnaces, in order to draw out impurities from the lead
ore, burn at temperatures hundreds of degrees higher than crematoria. (17)
In an extensive tour of the Trepca complex by the ARW team, details of the
layout and operations closely matched the descriptions from the Serbian fighters
who said they helped incinerate the Albanian bodies. By this point, there were
no longer visible signs of human remains outside the lead refinery’s blast
furnace – the spot where the Serbian fighters reported the bodies were
destroyed.
But nearby, the ARW journalists noticed discarded civilian clothing, including
men’s and women’s dress shoes. In other words, less than 18 months after the end
of hostilities, remnants of the Albanian civilian attire were still visible,
albeit in greatly reduced numbers due to the extensive, ongoing cover-up of the
intervening months.
Soon after the Kosovo war, war crimes investigators had purportedly searched
Trepca’s mines amid reports that Serb forces had dumped hundreds of bodies down
the facility’s deep shafts; reportedly, they found no remains. But the Serbian
fighters told ARW that the investigators looked in the wrong place. (18)
Milan, for example, provided a detailed, coolly matter-of-fact description of
the process, even sketching diagrams of how the bodies got hauled from the
trucks to the furnace:
Here’s the tall smokestack. Here are the conveyers. Over here was the coke.
Do you know what coke is? The workers at Trepca told me it was a kind of heavy,
dense coal. So on the conveyor you have the coke and the ore, and it all burns
at a high temperature in the furnace. That’s where we put the bodies. (19)
Yet another Serbian fighter interviewed, “Branko,” worked in a special police
unit, tasked with destroying evidence. As a driver, Branko reported making more
than a dozen trips to Trepca delivering truckloads of corpses.
The blast furnace was high up, maybe 15 meters high or more. As I recall,
only one of the furnaces was operating. But there were one or two others they
burned at extremely high heat. And that’s where the bodies got destroyed. (20)
The ARW team toured the Trepca plant twice during the autumn of 2000. As they
explored the site, details of the facility’s layout and operations closely
matched the descriptions of the Serbian informants. But there were discrepancies
– especially with the conveyor system used to lift fuel and ore to the blast
furnace. It appeared at several points that the tracks tapered to a width too
narrow for a body to pass.
The skeptical journalists proceeded to re-interview some of their witnesses. And
without any prompting or pause, Milan readily explained how they solved the
problem of moving bodies to the furnaces:
At first we tried using tracks that lead directly to the furnace. But it
didn’t work. At least for the bodies that were intact. Most of these bodies were
too big to ride on the conveyor. But when ore is being prepared for processing,
it has to be ground up and sort of cooked, something like that. So if you put
the bodies into the grinder, it’s easy. (21)
The Serbian fighters admitted that many of the bodies were those of women,
children and the elderly. Branko, for example, claimed that the sight of
half-decomposed bodies being piled into industrial conveyors disgusted many of
his fellow fighters:
These are scenes that stick with you because you can’t believe it happened.
Especially in such numbers. Maybe you can imagine destroying a few bodies here
or there. But this was a horrible scene because there were so many – like a
factory assembly line – but with bodies. (22)
Some 1,200 to 1,500 bodies were destroyed at Trepca, according to the Serbian
fighters who worked there – and also according to a well-placed Serbian
intelligence officer. That figure represents close to half the number of
Albanians officially registered as missing during the war. The corpses came from
gravesites and villages across Kosovo. (23)
Logistics of the operations were tricky and never without an element of risk,
but the ever resourceful Serbian military did its very best, as Branko patiently
describes:
It was organized using refrigerator trucks, the smaller ones used for milk
and ice cream. You had to be mindful of being photographed by NATO, so we did it
at night even if it meant working more slowly. (24)
The men who drove in the convoys explained that some of the trucks had the Red
Cross symbol painted on top to protect them from NATO attack. Serbian army and
police sources said that many of the trucks came from private firms in Kosovo
and Serbia. To make sure the civilian trucks passed smoothly through military
and police checkpoints, an elite, heavily armed secret-police division called
Unit for Special Operations escorted the deliveries. Dusko, who took part in
several of these transports, recalls:
There were checkpoints and roadblocks everywhere, but when our jeeps came
along, no one would dare stop us and check what was in the trucks. That was
important so we could move quickly and so ordinary Serbs, and regular soldiers,
wouldn’t find out. (25)
Occasionally units from the Yugoslav army stood guard at Trepca, apparently even
assisting in the unloading of bodies. But it was the Special Operations Unit
that controlled most of the cleanup in the field and the destruction of bodies
in the blast furnace. Explains Dusko:
You can’t expect a regular soldier 18 or 19 year old to do this kind of work.
It’s a stressful thing to do. You wouldn’t want regular army guys exposed to
this kind of thing.
“You didn’t want them going home after the war,” Dusko emphasizes, and blabbing
to their mothers or friends about what they did in Kosovo.” (26)
Interestingly, one recurring problem mentioned by the Serbian sources was a
general lack of enthusiasm. Not only was hauling and burning bodies often
considered “revolting”; it wasn’t a terribly profitable business. Serbian
fighters were often paid thousands of dollars in bonuses for combat operations
in addition to a generous share of stolen Albanian property. Getting rid of
bodies was, as one member of the Special Operation Unit admitted, a lot less
lucrative than killing. (27)
Most of the Serbian fighters interviewed by ARW expressed little regret,
comfortably echoing racist stereotypes of Albanians deeply steeped in Serbian
culture. But Dusko remains particularly remorseless, openly wishing that he
could have wreaked even more damage, and predicting the violence to come:
Had it not been for the NATO bombing, I guarantee you we would have driven
out all 2 million Albanians from Kosovo… You gotta know, Albanians are stupid.
They’re a dirty people. And this hatred has been around for 600 years. It will
never go away. In 30 years, or whenever these NATO troops and these human rights
monitors leave, we’ll start fighting again. (28)
The ARW interviewees were clearly not prepared to testify at The Hague tribunal.
A senior Western official, who wished to remain anonymous, assured an
investigative team from the highly respected Institute
for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) that
the court had evidence incriminating Serb forces in the removal of all evidence
of mass burning from the Trepca mine in Kosovo. But, he added, "those who know
about it do not wish to come forward and testify." (29)
As part of the cover-up, a total of six Serbian fighters independently divulged
to ARW how they burned the bodies of hundreds of ethnic Albanians in the blast
furnace of the lead refinery at Kosovo’s Trepca industrial complex. The fighters
each detailed how the operation was conducted at Trepca and described the
unusual lengths they went to destroy all traces of the bodies.
One reservist in the same secret police unit, a man who asked to be called Petar,
claims he escorted trucks to a mass grave near Belgrade and to two other sites
in western Serbia. Petar says many of the victims were collected directly from
villages near the Kosovo towns of Suva Reka and Prizren. He describes how the
bodies were then unloaded:
The ground was already prepared. The truck backed up close to the pit and the
bodies were dumped in. We would then burn them and close the pit with dynamite.
These people were civilians, (but they were) stubborn people who refused to
leave their homes after we ordered them out. (30)
ARW verified many details provided by Dusan, Petar, and other former fighters
and secret police operatives with Serbian and western war crimes investigators.
For example, the location of secret facilities operated by the security forces,
the sources for some of the trucks, and dates when bodies were believed to have
been removed. All of this corresponded with details gathered by investigators. Serbian
investigators claimed they could not confirm reports that bodies were
incinerated. But western government officials who spoke off the record said they
had strong evidence that industrial facilities were used:
These sources say some of this evidence came from secret communications with
Serbian informants during the 1999 NATO air war. According to the same western
government sources, the Serbian informants told officials from NATO governments,
including the United States, that bodies of ethnic Albanians were being trucked
to industrial sites in Serbia, including the Bor copper smelter. (31)
One informant was a Serbian army reservist and truck driver who was assigned the
code name "Nicholas" by western investigators. According to the ARW team, Milos
Vasic, a senior journalist with the Belgrade magazine Vreme, has
seen transcripts of Nicholas' testimony to war crimes investigators. In them,
Nicholas said he was ordered to drive refrigerator trucks from a police base in
Kosovo to eastern Serbia.
"He (Nicholas) would be given a loaded and padlocked truck in an army and police
base (located in eastern Kosovo), drive it to the Bor complex, leave it at the
security check on the entrance and an empty truck would be returned by a police
officer," Vasic says. According to
Vasic, Nicholas was not told what his truck was carrying, but soon became
suspicious. With the help of friends he took a look:
When they opened the truck, they found it full of bodies. They took
photographs—Polaroids—of the operation, including the license plates of the
Yugoslav Army truck.
Shocked by his discovery, Nicholas managed to flee Serbia and eventually took
his story and photographs to the United States embassy in Croatia, according to
the transcript. Vasic says Nicholas became a protected witness for war crimes
trials. (32)
Nicholas was not the only Serbian fighter disturbed by the body disposals.
Several others, including Dusan, say they were disgusted with the operation and
infuriated at their own commanders for ordering them to handle corpses.
"Maybe you've never seen a decomposing body," Dusan says. "I'm talking about an
arm here, a leg there ... like gelatin. The smell sticks to you and you can't
get rid of it for days." (33)
At about the same time the French forces first searched Trepca, a separate team
of investigators from the U.N. war crimes tribunal (ICTY) inspected the
industrial complex and lead refinery, but as of June 2001 the ICTY had
reportedly conducted no forensic tests at the site, according to one ICTY
investigator. An ICTY spokesman described the ARW report as "plausible" but
difficult to confirm.
A spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in
Kosovo, Claire Trevena, told ARW in 2001 that the OSCE "can't say yes or no to
whether or not there was burning of bodies" at the Trepca industrial complex.
(34)
Mackatica
In Surdulica, everybody knows that, in the said factory, during NATO
bombardment, corpses from Kosovo were incinerated. However, nobody dares speak
about it in public because all those who took part in it are still in power.
(35)
Nearly four years after the ARW report came to light, in December of 2004 the
next bombshell hit, chockfull of more grisly Balkan secrets.
In the popular Serbian daily newspaper Danas, later
reprinted in what was then progressive B-92 online, prominent
Belgrade-based human rights advocate Natasa Kandic, head of the prestigious
Humanitarian Law Center (HLC), publicly accused Serbian forces of transporting
the corpses of murdered Albanians into Serbia on two specific dates in spring,
1999, and burning them, en masse, in industrial furnaces – then covering up the
whole sordid affair.
In order to prevent the eyewitnesses from speaking in public, asserted the
unflappable Kandic, the local chiefs of the State Security had forced them to
sign special statements wherein they had allegedly declared that "they feel no
psychological pressure to speak about what had happened" in the Mackatica
industrial complex in May 1999:
While the eyewitnesses are in fear for the lives of their children and for
their own lives, the union of those who had issued orders for, and those who had
taken part in the cover-up of the crimes, is still, without hindrance, engaged
in its basic activity – the plunder of Serbia and its citizens, the activity
they had been engaged in even prior to the incineration of the corpses.
In every other country, Kandic pointed out, “they would have been under the
scrutiny of the organs of investigation and of the courts, except for Serbia,
where the criminal activities of the groups and individuals inside institutions
are known as patriotism and the fight for the Serbian people.” (36)
According to information received by the HLC from a number of independent
sources, the incineration of the bodies in the Mackatica factory occurred twice,
on both May 16 and 24, 1999, each time after midnight. Security for the ghoulish
proceedings was provided by the notorious Red
Berets, who, at the time, had a
base in the village of Bele Vode, near Vranje.
According to sources, Milorad Luković Legija (now imprisoned for the
assassination of former Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic), the then
commander of the Red Berets, had personally accompanied a load of corpses and
was present at the incineration. The Albanian bodies were incinerated in the
"field furnaces" Nos. 4 and 5. Judging by the comments in the State Security in
Surdulica there had been children among the victims.
A number of eyewitnesses, according to Kandic, were later forced to sign the
"peace of mind" statements. Individuals who had learned of these actions quickly
contacted the members of the police they had trust in, hoping that an energetic
inquiry would illuminate the ghastly events. Instead, they were warned never to
do that again. (37)
According to Amnesty International (AI), on 16 January 2005 the HLC reported
that, following the publication of the Mackatica allegations, members of the
police and the Serbian State Security Agency (BIA) implicated in the report had
threatened a number of people with the aim of intimidating them. Customs
officer, Anita Nikolić from Vladičin Han, in contact with the HLC on an
unrelated matter, was repeatedly threatened by security officials who suspected
her of being an informant.
On 30 December 2004, Bratislav Milenković, local head of the BIA, allegedly
approached her in a café in Vladičin Han, and in the presence of witnesses,
said: “I’m now identifying the enemy; I have already identified some of them.
And my enemies end up three meters under the ground.”
Although Inspector-General Vladimir Božović of the Ministry for Internal Affairs
subsequently announced that an investigation was underway, on 3 February, 2005
the HLC pointed out that a named senior police officer implicated in the affair
had been initially suspended but then re-assigned and promoted to the position
of an intelligence officer in the Gendarmarie. (38)
The impromptu decision on the use of the Mackatica factory as ad hoc crematorium
was apparently prompted by the discovery of the refrigerator truck full of
corpses near Kladovo, in April of 1999. Those charged with the "restoration of
the terrain” then revoked the original order to bury the bodies transported from
Kosovo via Bujanovac in some inaccessible locations, and introduced a new and
desperate technique: destroying the evidence by fire. (39)
According to the HLC, the Mackatica plant had four large electric furnaces,
designated Nos. 1, 3, 4 and 5, and several smaller ones, for melting down scrap
iron. The large furnaces developed temperatures of up to 1,700 degrees Celsius.
After each batch of scrap iron had been melted, the furnace would be cleaned and
the dross then deposited into a dump some 50 meters away.
Though the plant was technically not in operation during the NATO bombing, its
workers came every day to sign in and then returned home. Dragan Lakicević, the
director of the plant at the time, set up three posts manned by watchmen on
12-hour shifts. When the bodies arrived, the shift manager on duty, Dragan
Stanković, met the watchmen at the gate and told them they were not needed and
to report for work the next day. According to the HLC's information, the
smelting plant manager remained inside the plant.
Some workers later noticed traces of blood near the furnace but were unaware of
what was going on and where the blood had come from. When the bombing concluded
and the plant resumed operating, stories began circulating that bodies of Kosovo
Albanians had been burned there, as well as at the Bor mining complex and the
Grot mine near Vranjska Banja. (40)
Kandic’s initial revelations about Mackatica were followed up and buttressed,
eight months later, with an independent investigation by the well respected International
War and Peace Reportng (IWPR). In
a pioneering article entitled “More Mackatica Body Burning Revelations,” IWPR
published the results of its own findings, backing up and expanding on Kandic’s
original allegations. The article brought forth dramatic new evidence of how
police working for Slobodan Milošević burned truckloads of ethnic Albanian
corpses in a factory in southern Serbia during the 1999 NATO conflict. IWPR
sources present fresh testimony on the chronology of the crime, the way it
unfolded and the key role played by the police in both the burnings and the
cover-up that followed. According to
IWPR’s first source – a shift worker in the factory – the whole affair started
with the unexpected arrival at night of a number of unknown trucks:
Trucks with mysterious freight kept entering the factory with their lights
off. Third-shift workers, like myself, were sent home at the factory entrance.
The source confirmed seeing the bodies arrive on two separate occasions, "at the
middle and end of May" in 1999:
No one told us what was being transported and none of the workers had access
to the place of burning. But I know many people who took part in it and saw some
of it myself… Direct participants confirmed to me what I had seen. Bodies were
brought to the factory and burned there. I was not the only one who watched it.
I was not present at the very act of the burning of the bodies but I could see
the trucks being unloaded. (41)
A second IWPR source confirmed the shift worker's version of events, saying he
also witnessed the bodies being unloaded. He explained that the bodies were
originally transported from western Kosovo, mainly from Prizren, Djakovica and
Pec, and surrounding villages where massacres by Serbian forces had taken place:
When the trucks left (after the burning) so-called “cleaners” took over and
checked whether any body parts or their personal belongings had fallen onto the
tarmac by the entrance to the plant… For days afterwards, you could smell burned
flesh in Surdulica. I know what this smell is like, as I have been on all the
battlefronts in the former Yugoslavia.
This second source asserted that Mackatica was chosen as a site because it was
close to Kosovo, only about 170 kilometres (105 miles) from Prizren, and was
relatively anonymous – few people outside the factory even knew it had blast
furnaces. (42)
According to the HLC, top police officials – some of whom were still at their
posts at least as late as 2005! – organized the burnings, while other trusted
Milošević officials organized the subsequent "cleansing of the terrain."
The third IWPR source was a former inspector in Milošević's secret police,
active at the time of the events at Mackatica. He assured IWPR that the police
possess "precise and systematized information" on how the bodies were burned
there:
There is clear data on this in local police archives, marked “Strictly
Confidential”… The people who participated in the whole action were staying at
the Theranda Hotel in Prizren. Such a job had been prepared for a long time and
could not be completed in a day or two. The local public and secret police know
everything but this is being concealed also because current as well as former
police officials and ordinary operatives were involved. (43)
"Everything is contained in the police documentation,” claims this source, “from
the code name of the action to the list of people who stayed at the Theranda
Hotel and worked on the “sanitation of the terrain” to those who loaded the
trucks and drove them to the Mackatica factory, where Legija and his team took
over the whole thing.”
It is also known exactly who drove and who escorted the trucks with the
bodies, who was in charge of covering up the action at the factory itself and
who directly handled the furnaces during the burning. The names of those who
were later in charge of eliminating the traces at the factory and those whose
job it was to conceal the truth from the local public are also known. Finally,
there is a list of politicians who were familiar with all of this, when the
action was being planned. (44)
The former police officer claimed he knew most of these names personally but was
fearful of divulging them publicly. Along with all others who possessed direct
knowledge of the burnings, he had encountered strong pressure to keep quiet. "All
those in any way connected to the events at Mackatica in May 1999 are being
exposed to threats, pressures and blackmail," he emphasized. "I fear for my
safety and for that of my family. The participants in the crime in Mackatica
would know it was me who revealed the secrets, which they are doing their utmost
to hide." (45)
IWPR's first source, the shift worker at Mackatica, claimed that several other
witnesses who saw the trucks with bodies entering the factory were still out
there. "Other people know what was done, although everything was done for the
operation to be carried out in the utmost secrecy," he said. They were all
subject to threats and blackmail, he added, to prevent the story from becoming
more public. In spite of that, this source said he was ready to testify in
public. (46)
IWPR also spoke to a fourth direct source on the events at
Mackatica. This source wanted neither his residence nor job divulged but
insisted he was present at both burnings in May 1999:
Everything took place after midnight, but I remember there was a clear sky
and moonlight. I saw, for a few minutes and from a distance of about ten meters
(33 feet), bodies being unloaded from a truck and transported in a large factory
push-cart to the part of the factory where the furnaces are located. (47)
This source said he "knew for sure" that some of the bodies were of women and
children. He insisted he did not participate in the burning.
None of IWPR's sources were able to estimate the exact
number of bodies unloaded and burned at Mackatica, though one said they had been
transported in "more than ten trucks," which suggests a sizable number indeed.
(48)
In her article in Danas, Kandic cited several of Milošević's most trusted
associates as key figures behind the operation. She named ex-police minister
Vlajko Stojiljković; a former deputy prime minister Nikola Sainović; the
then-head of the public and state security Vlastimir “Rodja” Djordjević, and
Radomir Marković, a former chief of secret police. (49)
On 24 May 1999, Stojiljković was charged with crimes against humanity and
violations of the laws or customs of war. He shot himself on the steps of
Parliament in 2002.
Sainović, charged by the Hague war crimes tribunal for crimes committed in
Kosovo in 1999, voluntarily surrendered to the authorities in spring 2003. On 26
February 2009, the ICTY sentenced him to 22 years in prison, following a
conviction for crimes against humanity and war crimes, including deportations
and forcible transfers, murders and other persecutions.
In 2008, Marković was convicted by Serbia’s Supreme Court
for orchestrating a 1999 attack on Serbian opposition politician Vuk Drasković,
and was sentenced to the maximum 40 years' imprisonment. (50)
Among all the names Kandic mentioned, one of the most interesting is that of
Djordjević. One of several generals arrested for war crimes in Kosovo in 1999,
he was born in Koznica, only miles from Mackatica.
Djordjević is known to have been a key figure in the area whose word was
virtually law.
According to Kandic, he kept all the local power structures, especially the
police, under his absolute control. (51)
In February, 2011, the U.N. court sentenced Police Commander Vlastimir
Djordjević to 27 years in prison after pronouncing him guilty of murdering at
least 724 Kosovo Albanians to crimes against humanity, specifically: committing
inhumane acts, persecution and deportations.
Presiding Judge Kevin Parker ruled that Serbian forces, often police explicitly
controlled by Djordjević, expelled at least 200,000 Kosovo Albanians from Kosovo
and murdered civilian women, children and the disabled. Prosecutors say about
800,000 Albanians were forcibly ejected from Kosovo during the conflict.
Serbian forces were no stranger to burning Albanians. In
one massacre alone, on March 26, 1999, Serb forces herded 114 men and boys into
a barn, including a disabled man whose wheelchair was used to block one of the
exits, according to the judgment. The Serbs then riddled the barn with bullets
from automatic weapons before pouring incendiary liquid over the bodies, then
torching the barn and all those inside.
In another mass murder, 45 members of the same family were killed, including 32
women and children who hid in a cafe. "Police threw hand grenades inside the
cafe and then opened fire on them," Parker said.
Parker also said Djordjević played a "key role" in trying
to cover up more than 800 killings by secretly having bodies removed from
Kosovo, sometimes in refrigerated trucks, and buried in mass graves in Serbia.
(52)
Most of the men and women in living in Surdulica whom IWPR interviewed refused
to speak with journalists about the body burnings, or stubbornly defended them.
None bothered to deny that “something” had happened, but in the town itself,
where the hard-line nationalist Serbian Radical Party ruled the waves, there
maintained a virtual conspiracy of silence.
In a cafe in the town center, graffiti proudly proclaimed: "Serbia for the
Serbs". "So what if they did burn
Shiptars (a derogatory name for Albanians),” one resident indignantly declared
to the IWPR journalists. "They deserved nothing better. Why don't you write
about the crimes against Serbs in Kosmet (a Serb nationalist expression for
Kosovo) today?" One shop saleswoman
was a bit more conciliatory. "Hardly anyone dares to speak publicly
about it," was all that she would say on the grim events in the nearby factory.
(53)
Late in 2010, Natasa Kandic once again confirmed the Mackatica allegations:
“Yes,” she declared, “I stand behind the revelations of the Mackatica body
burning accusations, and the subsequent cover-up. The authorities here claimed
there was no record of a power supply to the Mackatica complex at that time
(May, 1999)…
I don’t believe them… I stand behind my statements.” (54) Sonia Biserko,
president of the Serbian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, and one of the
preeminent international human rights advocates, stands by this report in its
entirety. She supports a tough and all-encompassing investigation into the
body-burning charges. (55) We demand
a proper and thorough investigation of both the Trepca and Mackatica atrocities
and their subsequent cover-ups, which were never appropriately followed up by
the Hague tribunal. In the case of Trepca, we insist that EULEX (European Union
Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo) officials open a full-fledged investigation in
conjunction with relevant Serbian and Kosovar authorities.
In the case of Mackatica, we demand that present-day Serbian authorities
initiate an honest and open investigation into both the crimes of Mackatica and
subsequent cover-up. Furthermore, we believe that this is meaningful only within
the context of full international pressure and close supervision.
In addition, we demand that all suspected mass grave sites be promptly examined
and, when appropriate, exhumed. This is particularly the case at the Raska site
in southern Serbia, which was publicly acknowledged in May, 2010. This is the
sixth mass grave site, inside Serbia, identified since 2000.
The most stunning of such revelations occurred back in 2001, when the bodies of
some 870 Kosovar Albanians – in a variety of grisly and degraded conditions –
were discovered and exhumed, all in quick succession in and around Serbian
police training grounds. The Raska
site is reportedly based on various witness statements, together with an
analysis of aerial photographs, all supplied to Serbian authorities by EULEX
officials. A building and parking lot were reportedly constructed directly over
the site, in order to cover up the incriminating evidence.
The day of the initial revelations, Vladimir Vukcević, Serbia’s war crimes
prosecutor, dramatically declared: “This is more proof that Serbia does not shy
away from its dark past and is ready to bring to justice all those who have
committed crimes.” (56) Nearly one year later, the Raska site remains untouched.
According to Serbian experts, nearby soil tests proved “inconclusive.”
Between ten and twelve thousand Kosovar Albanians were
killed – murdered – from 1998 to 1999. Over 1,800 men, women and children remain
missing from the war, among them at least 1,000 Albanians, nearly 500 Serbs, and
hundreds of members of other ethnicities. All with family members who anxiously
await some news of their loved ones. Repatriation of missing family members
continues to be a distant dream for too many people in former Yugoslavia. A
proper and respectful burial remains a fundamental guiding principle for
cultures throughout the world.
Without a full and upfront examination into the myriad horrors of the past, the
ongoing pretense of “peace, stability and regional progress” remains just so
much empty, hollow rhetoric. Serbia,
in particular, must learn to take its place as a civilized nation. It must be
willing to honestly and courageously face up to its legacy of war crimes;
otherwise, it will simply continue to serve as a blind haven for notorious
international fugitives from justice, and the massive criminal cover-ups that
keep any meaningful justice at bay.
The international community has a clear and distinct responsibility to dig up
the truth, inconvenient as it might sometimes prove. “The truth is
incontrovertible,” asserted Sir Winston Churchill. “Malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.”