Socialist Action /July 2001
Mass Graves of Kosovar Graves
The evidence of the Milosevic government's attempt
to dispose of the bodies of the victims of its mass terror in Kosovo is
steadily, if slowly coming to light. It has made enough of an impact on
the Serbian media that supporters of Milosevic protesting their hero's extradition
to the Hague court shouted that Serbs "plant bodies in their flower
pots," in a mostly ineffectual attempt to deride the reports of Milosevic's
crimes.
According to the London Times of July 1,
investigators in the rump Yugoslavia have already found about seven mass
graves, four or five near the headquarters of the "antiterrorist"
police unit in the village of Bajanica and two near the village of Petrovo
Selo, near Kladovo, a town on the eastern border of Serbia, where a refrigerated
truck full of bodies was dumped into the Danube.
Serbian authorities, including the minister of
the interior, now say that they expect to find about a thousand bodies in
mass graves in that area. In the Serbian press, the facts dribble out slowly.
For example, in its June 29 issue, the Belgrade
daily Politika reported that a district judge in Belgrade had announced
that 36 bodies had been found in one of the graves near the "antiterrorist"
police center, of which 10 were the bodies of children under age seven.
The remains of an eight-month-old fetus was also found. The judge noted
by their clothing that all the victims were civilians.
Another article in the same issue of Politika
reported the findings of a team of forensic experts from the University
of Nis who investigated two graves near Petrovo Selo. They found 74 bodies,
all men, apparently shot to death.
The Kosovar Albanian human rights organization,
the KMDLNJ, estimates that at least 10 percent of those summarily executed
in the terror carried out by Milosevic's forces in the spring of 1999 were
children, most of them killed along with their families. -G.F.
Socialist Action /July 2001 |