Unpunished and Unknown War Crimes
Macabre Terrorist Kitchen: Albanians Masquerading as Yugoslav Soldiers During Kosovo War
Geza Farkas, former chief of VJ (Vojska Jugoslavije — Yugoslav Army) Security Administration, testifying at the Kangaroo Court in the defense of the former chief of General Staff, General Dragoljub Ojdanic accused of responsibility for war crimes Yugoslav Army allegedly committed in Kosovo-Metohija province during the 1998-1999 Albanian insurgency war, said that the Yugoslav military leadership “did all it could to prevent the crimes in Kosovo and punish the perpetrators as soon as it learned about them.”
Mr. Farkas also revealed that a number of war crimes in Kosovo province during the war were committed by the Albanians wearing VJ uniforms who had been infiltrated into southern Serbian province of Kosovo from the neighboring Albania.
From the Sense Agency reporting from Kangaroo Court:
In late 1999, there were suspicions of crimes against Albanian civilians, Farkas said. Ojdanic sent him and a group of military intelligence officers to Kosovo. After a two-day visit to the province, he came back to Belgrade and told General Ojdanic that some of the Army personnel had been involved in crimes, but that 95 percent of the perpetrators had been prosecuted or are under investigation.
[...] Milosevic demanded the withdrawal of all irregular units from Kosovo, the witness claims. He also demanded that all the perpetrators be punished and new crimes prevented, even if it meant to ‘close off the border on the Drina’ to prevent the infiltration of the paramilitaries [from Bosnia] who then went on to commit crimes in the name of the military and police.
Apart from the problem of the paramilitary formations infiltrating from across the Drina river, the [Yugoslav] army faced the problem of crimes committed by the armed groups from Albania masquerading as the VJ [...] As he explained back at the Milosevic trial [in 2005], they spoke perfect Serbian and committed the crimes wearing VJ uniforms.
Medak Pocket, Croatia: Serbian Woman Impaled Alive
Meanwhile, in Zagreb, retired Croatian Army medical corps colonel Marko Jagetic testified at the trial of Croat generals Rahim Ademi [an ethnic Albanian, just like war criminal Agim Ceku, also accused of atrocities over the Serbian population in Croatia] and Mirko Norac for war crimes committed in the Medak Pocket region of Krajina, inhabited by Serbs for centuries. He said that many of the corpses of Serb civilians he was ordered to collect had marks of torture and massacre.
“Almost all the executed [people] were civilians and no weapons or documents were found on any of them,” said Jagetic, an army doctor in charge of the team that collected the bodies of the dead after the slaughter. He explained that “many of the injuries pointed to heavy torture and a massacre of civilians,” and gave an example of the body of Andjelija Jovic, where he saw injuries caused by the victim being impaled alive.
In the field, Mr. Jagetic testified he saw traces of torture, two men hanged from a tree with a chain and a rope, and that he discovered remains of a human spine and pelvis on a site where a house had burned down.
According to the Croat report, he also heard about the crimes from soldiers, like one that recalled they had “roasted a lamb under the bodies of the two hanged civilians.”
“When UNPROFOR started entering the area, they excavated ‘a chetnik leader’ who had been cut to pieces alive for two hours. He was then put in a trench, covered with earth and a mechanical shovel passed over him,” testified Jagetic.
He also said that Serbian houses were pillaged and burned down, while the cattle was taken away.
Alija Izetbegovic and the Rest of “Secular” Bosnian Muslims
In Belgrade, Justice Minister Dusan Petrovic has today rejected the Bosnian request to transfer the Tuzla Column war crime case to the Bosnian judiciary.
Ilija Jurisic, former president of the Tuzla municipal government in Bosnia, has been charged by the Serbian War Crimes Prosecution for taking part in the offensive launched against Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) troops on May 15, 1992 during their withdrawal from the city, in a case known as the Tuzla Column.
Bosnian Muslims attacked a JNA military convoy, killing more than 200 retreating conscripts and officers and detaining 140, who were subsequently tortured and killed. The event was being broadcast live on a local television station. Part of that footage, including abuse and murder of the conscripts by the Bosnian Muslims is shown in the documentary “Truth.” While the local Muslim television was showing the burning column of Yugoslav Army vehicles, the studio commentator asks for cold beer and then informs the viewers they ought to go and “help out” one conscript he saw reaching the entrance of a nearby building.
A survivor of the Tuzla Column assault describes how one of his unarmed friends that was lightly wounded in the arm managed to hide in the entrance of a building, only to be handed over in a body bag six days later.
Jurisic was arrested in Belgrade in May this year, while trying to escape to Cologne (Koln), in Germany. He is charged of having directly participated in ordering the grisly attack.
And for a quick reminder of what the Serbs were facing in Bosnia during the 1992-1995 war and beyond, see this YouTube clip by the British Sky News: The Story a Lot of People Don’t Want to be Told.