| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|  |
 Serbians massacre dozens of civilians in Kosovo
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
January 16, 1999
Web posted at: 7:26 p.m. EST (0026 GMT)
RACAK, Yugoslavia (CNN) -- International monitors found the shot or mutilated bodies of 45 ethnic Albanians Saturday, scattered on a Kosovo hillside or heaped together in a muddy gully.
U.N., NATO and U.S. officials condemned the grisly massacre, the worst killing spree in a nearly yearlong conflict between Serbians and Kosovo separatists.
Eyes were gouged. Heads were smashed. One man lay decapitated in his courtyard. The victims included a young woman and a 12-year-old boy. Many were older men, including one 70-year-old.
Many had been shot at close range. Residents of Racak said Serb forces had rounded up the men, driven them up the hill and shot them. Twenty-eight bodies lay heaped together at the bottom of a muddy gully.
All the victims were dressed in civilian clothing, despite Serb police insistence that most of the "terrorists" wore uniforms of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
His voice shaking after visiting the killing site, the U.S. head of the Kosovo monitoring mission called it "an unspeakable atrocity" and "a crime very much against humanity."
"Nor do I hesitate to accuse the government security forces of responsibility," William Walker said. He urged prosecutors from the International War Crimes Tribunal to investigate immediately, with or without permission from Yugoslav authorities.
A spokesman for the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, said prosecutors were demanding immediate access to the site. U.N. chief war crimes prosecutor Louise Arbour will head a mission to Kosovo to investigate the massacre, sources told CNN.
The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, set up in 1993, has indicted more than 50 war crimes suspects and has more than 20 in custody.
Ethnic Albanian political leader Ibrahim Rugova renewed his call for NATO intervention after the "cruel attack."
NATO's chief expressed revulsion and outrage at the "deliberate and senseless killing of ordinary civilians."
Secretary-General Javier Solana in Brussels warned that NATO "will not tolerate a return to all-out fighting and a policy of repression in Kosovo."
In Washington, U.S. President Bill Clinton condemned the killings "in the strongest possible terms" and called the atrocity "a clear violation" of the Serbs' cease-fire agreement with NATO.
"This was a deliberate and indiscriminate act of murder designed to sow fear among the people of Kosovo," Clinton said Saturday.
Verifiers and journalists came across the carnage Saturday morning in Racak, 25 kilometers (15 miles) south of the provincial capital, Pristina.
On Friday, Serb police and Yugoslav army units attacked ethnic Albanian villages in the vicinity and prevented observers from reaching the area.
As many as 2,000 people, mostly ethnic Albanians, have been killed since Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic began last February to try to crush separatist militants and reinforce government control over the Albanian- majority province in Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.
This week's killings represent the highest single death toll since an October truce, brokered by U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke, largely halted more than seven months of combat in Kosovo.
Police, who were backed by Yugoslav army tanks in Friday's assault on Racak and neighboring Petrovo, said they had killed "tens of terrorists" in the action. They said they fought back after coming under mortar and automatic weapons fire while trying to arrest guerrilla suspects for the murder of a policeman.
But villagers said Serb police had separated men from their families and led them toward the local police station. They later turned and herded them up the hill, where they killed them, the residents said.
An ethnic Albanian man who gave his name only as Raim said he was told Serb police had barged into his family compound while he was away and attacked and killed his father and two brothers.
"They entered the village with infantry. Half of the people they arrested and beat up. The rest you can see here," he said, pointing to the heap of bodies.
"We don't know what we are going to do," he said, holding on his knees a rifle marked with the initials "UCK" -- the Albanian-language acronym for the KLA.
In a report of another outbreak of fighting Saturday that couldn't be confirmed immediately, the ethnic Albanians' Kosovo Information Center said government forces were using heavy artillery and tanks against three rebel-held villages in the west.
The report said rebels were fighting back south of Decani, where a British verifier and his Serb translator were each shot in the arm Friday in the first incident to injure a monitor.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
| Back to the top © 2000 Cable News Network. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Read our privacy guidelines. |
RELATED VIDEO