Following the trail to Milosevic
Chicago Tribune (09/06/99)

 
Following the trail to Milosevic

By Charles M. Madigan  and Colin McMahon
Tribune Staff Writers
September 6, 1999

NEW YORK -- Only a few days after Joanne Mariner rushed to Albania to collect war crimes accounts from Kosovo refugees, she heard about the Serbian massacre at Bela Crkva.
     Serbian forces identified as police killed at least 64 residents of the village on March 25. The bodies were left to decay by a stream bank or incinerated in burning houses.
     After she had collected enough information to be certain about what happened, Mariner issued one of Human Rights Watch's "flash" Internet announcements on April 13, at the same time passing all the information she collected to the international criminal tribunal in The Hague, which was building a case against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
     As one of five Human Rights Watch researchers who worked on the Kosovo war, Mariner collected testimony from refugees in Albania who had fled the violence of the Serbian campaign in western Kosovo.
     She still pauses as she recalls the stories related by refugees who had been forced from their homes on both sides of the war.
     She sat and listened as an 88-year-old Serb man wept, telling her of the death of his 77-year-old wife. She was decapitated by Albanian raiders.
     The litany was a lot longer, as troubling and as difficult on the other side, when Mariner began talking to Albanian refugees.
     "I hardly interviewed any Albanians who had not been robbed," she said, gazing into a big cappuccino at a coffee shop near her home in New York's " Little Italy" neighborhood, a world away from the torments of the Balkans. "They were stopped at checkpoints and told to give 200 Deutsche marks or 1,000 Deutsche marks, or anything that they had.
     "Dozens of dozens of Albanians I interviewed no longer had their wedding rings. They had actually stooped to taking the wedding rings off of old women, which I just could not believe. Everyone talked about the pillaging of houses. When I went into Kosovo and went into these houses, everything of value had been stripped.
     "You know, these paramilitaries, they left Kosovo much richer than when they had entered."
     A Yale-trained lawyer who joined the human-rights group in 1994 after working with the American Civil Liberties Union and serving an African internship and clerkship, Mariner, 36, collected testimony from survivors of Belgrade's campaign to force ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo. She also gathered evidence of Albanian assaults on Serbs.
     Working in the refugee camps, she looked for patterns and for descriptions as she was collecting her notes.
     "I always asked about uniform. . . . Some people were unclear as to who had committed abuses. But generally, I found the most serious abuses were committed by the paramilitaries. They wore bandannas around their heads. They had long hair or shaved heads.
     "They were flamboyant looking, people told me. They wore lots of jewelry, often gold chains they had presumably stolen from women. . . . They acted like scum. A professional army doesn't pillage. But you could see a real financial motive to what these guys were doing."
     Mariner shifted from interviewing survivors in the refugee camps to investigating massacres sites in Kosovo after the NATO bombing campaign ended June 10.
     "What was most startling to me was the extent of the destruction I found in Kosovo," she said.
     "It was house after house after house in some villages. Each one they had to set fire to individually. They pillaged. They smashed all the windows. There was graffiti everywhere. . . . It just gave you a sense of the level of hatred."
     She picked up stories that indicated patterns of behavior in the Serb attack.
     Djakovica, for example, was a hotbed of Kosovo Liberation Army and Albanian intellectual ferment, while Prizren was a comparatively quiet place politically.
     "Prizren was relatively untouched except for one neighborhood where a policeman had been killed," she said. "Djakovica was just devastated. . . . It was just incredible retribution. . . . Hundreds of people were killed in Djakovica."
     Soon after her arrival, she pursued the incident at Bela Crkva.
     "It was my third day in Kosovo. I went to the hospital, a good place to find people who had been injured," she said.
     "I started interviewing a guy from the village of Zrze. He told me what had happened to him, then he said I should go to interview a friend of his because he had survived the massacre at Bela Crkva."
     The man she referred to had left Bela Crkva about 4 a.m. on March 25, two hours before the Serbian tanks, in a routine familiar to observers of the Balkan wars, encircled the village and began shelling.
     He brought members of his family to Mariner, who told her the story, including a young man who was at the massacre site and managed to flee by disguising himself as a woman.
     Her witnesses remembered the names of the victims.
     Most had the Popaj or Junici family names, both very common in Bela Crkva.
     The youngest victim was a 4-year-old boy whose first name was not known. The oldest were two 77-year-old men, Hazer Popaj and Qamil Junici. They would become "Persons Known by Name Killed at Bela Crkva" in the Milosevic indictment.

Testimony about the massacre

"Bela Crkva was the first massacre I documented," she said.
     "The massacre site is actually a fair distance from Bela Crkva. There is a railroad track that crosses a stream. When I was there they had not yet exhumed the bodies. There were clumps of dirt and still some clothing scattered about.
     "You can see this trampled earth and you can see where the men went down and were shot. When I went to the site I interviewed a member of the Popaj family. He said the stream was full of blood and you could see where the men had stood and had been shot and fallen into the water."
     Everyone told the same stories of the flight to the creekbed, of the attacks by the police, the killing of the village doctor and the slayings near the railroad bridge.
     What did they tell her? With a lawyer's precision, she recounts the story.
     "The women were taken away. The first person killed after a group of 12 was the town doctor, Nisim Popaj. He was considered the most educated man in the village. He had studied at Belgrade. He was sort of the village spokesman. He tried to say, 'Look, we are not terrorists.' The Serbs were calling them all terrorists. He said they were peaceful villagers and all they wanted to do was work. They killed him. Then they killed his nephew. He was shot by automatic weapons fire by the commander himself."
     She said some of the village men returned soon after the slayings to bury the bodies.
     They gave them what amounted to hasty Muslim burials. The shoes of the dead were still near the graves when Mariner arrived. Fortunately, she said, the Serbs never returned to raid the new graves and take away the evidence, which gave tribunal investigators the remains they need to show how the victims died.
     The tribunal's own investigators were zeroing in on the same information, adding it to a growing body of testimony about a handful of other massacres that were clearly connected to the Serbian campaign.
     To date, the tribunal estimates 11,000 people were killed, many of them buried in mass graves or incinerated in house fires or factory ovens, as the Serbs swept through Kosovo in their bid to push the ethnic Albanians out of the country.

Formulating a legal document

At The Hague, the prosecutors translated the testimony of the survivors of Bela Crkva into the dry legalese of an indictment. Bela Crkva would become subparagraph "b" in the case against Milosevic and the key military and police leaders that the tribunal charges were responsible in Kosovo.
     "On or about 25 March 1999, forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia attacked the village of Bela Crkva (Orahovac/Rahovec municipality). Many of the residents of Bela Crkva fled into a streambed outside the village and sought shelter under a railroad bridge. As additional villagers approached the bridge, a Serbian police patrol opened fire on them, killing 12 persons, including 10 women and children. The police then ordered the remaining villagers out of the streambed, at which time the men were separated from the women and small children. The police ordered the men to strip and then systematically robbed them of all valuables. The women and children were ordered to leave. The village doctor attempted to speak with the police commander but he was shot and killed, as was his nephew. The other men were then ordered back into the streambed. After they complied, the police opened fire on the men, killing approximately 65 Kosovo Albanians . . ."
     The indictment also cites six other massacres either in individual villages or collections of villages, including several that Mariner had heard of while questioning refugees and survivors of the war:
     In and around Racak on Jan. 15, 1999, the indictment said, 70 people were killed by police after army tanks surrounded towns and began shelling.
     At Velika Krusa, Mali Krusa and Krushe e Vogel on March 25, 105 men and boys were killed, their bodies covered with straw and burned.
     At Djakovica on March 26, six men were shot to death in a home.
     On March 27, 20 were killed at Crkolez.
     Again on March 27, 130 men were shot to death by soldiers at Izbica.
     On April 2, 19 women and children and one man were killed in the Qerim district of Djakovica.
     At the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Graham Blewitt, deputy chief prosecutor, said his attorneys and investigators scrutinized the witness accounts they were receiving as Kosovo was under assault and hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians were on the run.
     "We were comfortable with the consistent stories we were getting from the various victims and eyewitnesses that we had encountered to that point in time," said Blewitt, a softspoken but intense man who has been wrestling with the challenges of war crimes prosecution since the tribunal was established by the United Nations in 1993.
     It was important to have the names of the victims, he said, because it gave the prosecutors the specificity they needed to draft the charge against Milosevic and his aides. That was why Bela Crkva was added to the indictment.
     Since the end of the hostilities, tribunal investigators have been interviewing the Bela Crkva witnesses and collecting forensic evidence to show cause of death. Those elements -- how people died, what witnesses saw and reconstruction of chain of command -- will be crucial if Milosevic is ever brought to trial. The Yugoslav leader has not responded to the charges.

Justice and reconciliation

But the tribunal is not likely to ever pursue prosecution of the individual killers.
     They are not the targets of the probe and they may never be adequately identified by the survivors because no one recognized them as anything other than anonymous police.
     Whether the Bela Crkva victims ultimately get their justice, the tribunal authorities say, depends on how well Kosovo establishes its own system of justice, and whether it is ever able to identify the police who pulled the trigger.
     At the very least, they concede, this could take decades.
     At worst, it is a day that will never come.
     "If we can bring those leaders to justice, then I think there is a greater opportunity for reconciliation to start occurring," Blewitt said.
     "Now, what is going to achieve that reconciliation is hard to say. . . . This is all very philosophical and it will probably never be achieved, but I think by doing the work the tribunal is doing, we are creating the environment for these things to happen."
     Milosevic's Kosovo indictment was returned May 27. He and four key aides were charged with crimes against humanity, murder and deportation, murder as a violation of the laws or customs of war and persecutions based on political, racial or religious grounds.
     Also charged in the indictment were Serbian President Milan Milutinovic; Nikola Sainovic, deputy prime minister of Yugoslavia; Col. Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, chief of the general staff of the Yugoslav Army, and Vlajko Stojiljkovic, Serbian minister of internal affairs. All face life sentences if tried and convicted.
     But the May indictment for the events in Kosovo is only one part of the tribunal's investigation of the Yugoslav leader.
     Prosecutors at The Hague also are working on a second indictment of Milosevic, one aimed at drawing a clear picture of responsibility and setting the blame for numerous Balkan atrocities directly at Milosevic's feet.
     Milosevic has always pinned responsibility for atrocities on the paramilitaries, thugs beholden to local warlords who operate beyond his control. They are guilty of the catalog of massacres in the Balkans, he has said, not Serbian soldiers and politicians.
     But a key ruling in the tribunal's court a month ago has made it easier to connect Milosevic to atrocities dating back to 1992, when the war raged in Bosnia. In that case, which involved an appeal by a low-level killer during the Bosnia war, the court ruled Bosnia was an international conflict, a requirement for filing certain levels of charges.
     The ruling gave prosecutors a legal basis to construct a second indictment that will make Milosevic's role in the collapse of Yugoslavia from 1991 onward crystal clear.
     Blewitt said the second indictment will call Milosevic and a different collection of aides and Serbian associates to account for what happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, when tens of thousands of lives were claimed by an "ethnic cleansing" campaign that was aimed at clearing non-Serbs from that part of the former Yugoslavia.
     "It is likely to make it easier for us to bring the indictment against Milosevic in terms of his responsibility for crimes committed in Bosnia," Blewitt said. "It is our intention to do that. It won't be an expansion of the existing (Kosovo) indictment. It will be a separate indictment. There will be different people charged."
     But the circumstances will be so similar, he said, "I kind of imagine you could have a joint trial" that includes the Kosovo and Bosnia allegations.
     The tribunal has already constructed the framework for its case.
     It is not likely to resemble anything anyone would see on an American courtroom drama on television.
     The case will, of necessity, stretch back into Milosevic's political history, showing the role he played in unleashing ethnic hatreds across Yugoslavia and then carefully establishing his rise to power, particularly after 1991, when warfare broke out as Yugoslavia collapsed.
     It involves as much political science and history as it involves detective work.

Tracking Milosevic's rise

Investigators have collected well-documented instances of Serbian atrocities stretching back a decade, events that occurred as Milosevic's political career developed:

- In April 1987, Milosevic, then chairman of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia, visited Kosovo and boldly embraced a Serb nationalism, a force that had been held in check since the end of World War II.
- Within the next few years, Kosovo was stripped of its autonomy; local political figures were replaced with Milosevic cronies; ethnic Albanian doctors, teachers, professors, workers, police and other civil servants lost jobs and influence; local courts were abolished; police violence increased.
- Milosevic rode to power astride a war machine that fought in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, all proving grounds for a brand of ethnic cleansing that had become a common Serbian military tactic.

Even though Milosevic was president of Serbia at the time, the prosecutors say, he also had de facto control of the federal Yugoslav government.
     By the time of the trouble in Kosovo, Milosevic had cemented his hold on power and was now president of Yugoslavia, which gave him not only the de facto control he had over Serbian forces in Bosnia but also de jure legal control of, and responsibility for, all Yugoslav forces.
     Blewitt said presenting evidence of those two levels of control -- the de facto control of a political leader who pulls all the strings and the de jure control of a leader whose authority comes from a constitution or form of government -- are crucial elements in the Milosevic prosecution.
     "Once you have got both of those in place and if you can prove that the accused had both de jure and de facto responsibility for what happened, then that is when the indictment will come," he said.
     "In that exercise, you establish the line of authority between the acts of the high level accused and those within the chain of authority down to the actual perpetrator. It is necessary to maintain that link all the way, because if there is a break, then it can be said that somebody else is responsible."

Establishing patterns

Bela Crkva's role in that prosecution could well be crucial, he said, even though the objective will not be to indict and convict the actual killers. In a typical organized-crime case in America, prosecutors would work to turn low-level criminals into informants against their superiors.
     In the Milosevic case, a different dynamic is at play.
     It is not so much a matter of rolling up a network of criminals as it is proving where the real levers of power existed from 1991 onward, who had access to them, and who pulled them to set violence in motion.
     "You need to work it up in terms of the crimes that were committed. From the bottom, you need to establish that crimes were committed, who committed them and then look at who is responsible for those who actually committed them," Blewitt said.
     If the tribunal's investigators cannot identify the specific police who killed the victims, he said, then it can point to patterns that were clearly established, not only in Kosovo, but also in the behavior of Serbian forces in Bosnia.
     "They do have witnesses," said Human Rights Watch's Mariner.
     "There are people who were finished off. They can examine the skulls and see they were finished off at a close range, not in a battle. They can see that there were summary executions. And they can see that the victims are 60-year-old men, 75-year-old men, non-combatants, children."
     The court ultimately will be asked to make inferences about Serbian behavior, Blewitt said. The cases in the indictment present circumstances so similar, for example, that it is clear the incidents were not merely haphazard or coincidental.
     Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour, now leaving her tribunal job to take a seat on Canada's Supreme Court, said the tribunal had to present detailed evidence to tribunal Judge David Hunt to win approval of the Milosevic Kosovo indictment.
     The tribunal has no grand jury. Instead, it presents evidence of a case and specific charges to judges, who then approve indictments and arrest orders.
     "If all I had needed to indict Milosevic was kind of, 'Well, everybody knows . . .' or, 'This is a country where bad things are happening and you are the leader of the country and therefore you are responsible,' we could have done it a long time ago, but I believe we would have lost that case in court," she said.
     "I don't know how many times sitting around this table someone has said in sheer desperation, 'Why the hell is it so hard to prove what everybody knows?' Well, that captures so much of what we do here. Someone advances a proposition that would be considered perfectly trite within all journalistic circles, but then we say, 'Well, where is the evidence of that? Who will stand up in court and say it.' "
     Arbour said the tribunal has collected the evidence it needs to prove every step in the Kosovo indictment.
     "We have confirming materials. There has to be a piece of evidence, a statement, a document, something that shows every factual allegation. Of course the supporting material is not public," she said. "But Judge Hunt had access to all the supporting materials. He confirmed the indictment and said, in his opinion, that the supporting materials, if unchallenged, would be sufficient to convict. It is good enough."

A systematic campaign

The tribunal's evidence depicts strong signs of a coordinated campaign all across Kosovo, including the middle-of-the night tactics at Bela Crkva. It bears a strong degree of similarity to what happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
     In Washington, David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues, watched the progress of the Kosovo war on battle maps in his State Department office. Later, he went to Kosovo with a team to interview war crimes victims.
     "They have developed the art of atrocity to a level that would impress the most evil-minded mass killer," Scheffer said.
     "Kosovo has a distinctive character to it because it is so transparently planned, systematic and concentrated. It is an intensive assault on a civilian population over a short period of time, with such an intensity that it is kind of a remarkable killing machine," he said.
     He watched the ethnic cleansing campaign proceed with military precision.
     "We would just sit here during the war and look at the maps that would show the pincers movements that were going on, and the next day we would ask what happened to this pincers movement," he said.
     "They would tell us, 'Well, they just swept back this way to take care of three more little villages,' " he said.
     Making the gesture in the air of a big crab claw, he said, "You saw all of this, like this, and then this, it was just so damn systematic."
     At The Hague, prosecutors want to use virtually the same tactic on Milosevic. They have constructed evidence all around him, clear lines that point to the role he has played in the devastation of Yugoslavia since 1991.
     But will they ever be able to get him to court?
     The tribunal has no arresting powers, although police agencies everywhere are required to respond quickly to indictments and arrest orders from The Hague. Arbour has made note of the fact that, by extension, she has cops just about everywhere.
     But they aren't always willing or aggressive cops.
     Some high-level indicted war criminals from the Bosnia-Herzegovina campaign have been free for years, although the tribunal's arrest rate has picked up recently, and its boldness is creating its own legend.
     One suspect was lured to The Hague with the promise he would be compensated for land that had been snatched during the Bosnia-Herzegovina war. He was arrested and put in prison when he showed up. Only last month, Arbour released an arrest warrant based on a secret indictment that allowed Austrian police to pick up a Serbian general while he attended a conference in Vienna.
     He was shipped to The Hague and imprisoned on charges that could lead to a life sentence.
     But that kind of creativity means nothing in Serbia, where Milosevic is still in power, along with the four top government, military and police leaders indicted with him. Should he leave the country, he becomes a target for arrest almost everywhere. The U.S. has put a $5 million reward on his head. His assets in foreign banks have been frozen.
     But for now, he is beyond reach.

'The blame is collective'

In Bela Crkva, there are those who want Milosevic called to account, and those who say they will be satisfied only when the actual killers are brought to justice.
     "See how much proof they already have, from Bosnia, from Croatia and now from Kosovo," said Skender Popaj. "If they don't punish him (Milosevic), how will they stop there being another war, maybe in Macedonia, maybe in Montenegro?"
     Kedrie Fetoshi says it's not enough to accuse just Milosevic.
     "They need to accuse all the Serbs here because they were always against us. When I say all the Serbs, I mean all those speaking with one voice about us. The blame is collective."
     Defrem Junici reflected the bitterness that lingers with the memories of the massacre.
     "I think they know who is guilty for what happened here," Junici said.
     "When I was talking to investigators, I told them, 'This is like a game to you. If you wanted to, you could go out and get those responsible. . . . There were so many reasons to bring people to court before this happened in Kosovo. This war did not start months ago, but in 1991. First we want to see punished the people, the forces who were involved in the killings here. After that, the regime that was giving the instructions--that means Milosevic."'
     Mariner reflects quietly on her weeks in Albania and then Kosovo and speaks of her sadness at the losses of the families and individuals she met during her assignment.
     She wants the prosecution of Milosevic to succeed and believes the tribunal's efforts represent an important step forward in the interest of human rights. She wants NATO to provide all the evidence it can in supporting the prosecution.
     And she has a final hope.
     "I would like to find out who pulled the trigger," she said.
     "It is unrealistic to expect total justice, but as much justice as is possible."

Next: The tribunal. Where the victims of Bela Crkva must turn for justice.

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