KOSOVO HUMAN RIGHTS FLASH #34
MASSACRE IN MEJA
AT LEAST ONE HUNDRED MEN BELIEVED EXECUTED

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Holly Cartner (New York): 1-212-216-1277
Alexandra Perina (New York): 1-212-216-1845
Jean-Paul Marthoz (Brussels): 322-736-7838

KOSOVO HUMAN RIGHTS FLASH #33
CIVILIANS AT RISK BY YUGOSLAV USE OF CIVILIAN PROPERTY FOR MILITARY PURPOSES
NATO Urged to Use Extreme Caution

Residents from three villages close to the southern town of Urosevac (Ferizaj, in Albanian) and from a village close to the Macedonian border told Human Rights Watch that after Serbian security forces attacked their villages and forcibly expelled them from their homes, tanks were hidden in civilian houses and courtyards. Those houses left intact were used as military offices, and to house soldiers.

Several witnesses told Human Rights Watch that the Yugoslav military entered the village of Sojevo, approximately 5 kilometers east of Urosevac, on April 6 and searched the village for persons linked to the Kosovo Liberation Army. According to the witnesses, they then hid their tanks in courtyards of civilian homes. The following day, paramilitaries entered the village, setting fire to houses and forcing the remaining population to flee.

A refugee from the nearby village of Biba (around 2 kilometers east of Urosevac) described a similar operation in her village on April 14. She told Human Rights Watch, "The day we left, the military came to the village at around 5 p.m. They put tanks inside the houses and covered them in straw. Then they told us to go to NATO." She also explained that "[the military] are staying in the houses of Albanians" in the village. The village was looted and burned as the villagers fled the following morning.

The Yugoslav Army also concealed Serbian tanks and soldiers in the village of Kamena Glava (Komoglave in Albania), 5 kilometers southeast of Urosevac. According to one witness interviewed by Human Rights Watch, "The military came into the village with tanks at 11 a.m. on Friday (April 9). They were destroying the doors and putting tanks in the yards of houses. They stayed in the village - they dug trenches, they put tanks in houses, and the three houses they didn't destroy they used as offices." His account was confirmed by another witness from Kamena Glava, who described how the military had established "a headquarters" in the village and estimated that there were as many as 40 tanks hidden in the village. The witness also claimed that "NATO had bombed a tank parked in the yard of one my houses [in the village]." Similarly, another woman from the same village told Human Rights Watch that "nearly all the houses in Komoglave were burnt except for those where the army had hidden their tanks."

Serbian forces employed a similar strategy in the village of Globovica (Globocica in Albanian). The village, which is close to the Macedonian border, was attacked on April 10. Witnesses said the police killed farm animals and beat villagers before expelling them. One resident explained that "we didn't leave our village until the tanks came," indicating that there were as many as 50 tanks involved in the operation against the village. Witnesses also described the use of civilian property by Serbian forces for military purposes: "I saw an armored personnel carrier sheltered in the yard of a friend of mine," one man explained to Human Rights Watch. "The military are staying in all of our houses at the moment [in Globovica] because they are afraid of NATO."

Human Rights Watch is concerned that a pattern is emerging in which the Yugoslav Army and Serb police are placing equipment, ammunition and vehicles in or near civilian structures, thereby increasing confusion about what is a military and what is a civilian area and significantly increasing the likelihood of loss of civilian lives. Human Rights Watch urges Yugoslav forces to refrain from taking actions that further jeopardize the security and safety of the civilian population. The organization also urges NATO to take this emerging pattern into consideration when identifying targets for attack so as to avoid to the fullest extent possible more civilian casualties.

(New York, April 29, 1999, 10:45am EDT) —The entire village of Hade near Obilic in central-eastern Kosovo, with approximately 1,400 inhabitants, was systematically expelled from Kosovo yesterday. Villagers reported that Serbian security forces executed five male civilians in the village one week ago.

Human Rights Watch conducted seven separate interviews with men and women from Hade yesterday on the border in northern Albania. All of them reported that the police rounded up the entire village this morning around 8:00 a.m. and forced the villagers into at least ten buses, four of which took the villagers to the Albanian border at Morina, where they crossed into Albania around midday. Refugees reported no physical maltreatment along the route to Albania, although Serbian police took the refugees' money and identity papers.

All of the refugees interviewed yesterday said that military and paramilitary units had surrounded Hade one week ago, on Monday April 19, and killed five civilian men. The forces arrived first at the Mirena family compound on the edge of the village, four witnesses said. A teacher in the village, Milaim Mirena, 40 years-old, and his father left their house, with Milaim waving a white towel at the approaching forces. Two witnesses who were in the Mirena house heard Milaim tell the security forces, in Serbian, "we are surrendering ourselves." According to these witness, however, the security forces shot Milaim before he could even finish his sentence. Four different witnesses said that Milaim was hit in the stomach by a few bullets. They asked the police for help, but received none. Milaim died five hours later.

The other members of the Mirena family exited the house after Milaim was shot. Two witnesses said that the security forces then selected four men from the Mirena family, ranging in age from twenty-five to eighty. Some other young men were let go with the rest of the women and children. All of them fled into another part of the village, eventually settling into an unburned house with forty-six other people.

Two days later the Mirena family members went back to their house where they found the bodies of the four relatives who had been taken: Jakup Mirena, 80, Mexhit Mirena, 40 (Jakup's son), Ajet Mirena, 65, and Fitim Mirena, 25 (Ajet's son).

Four witnesses told Human Rights Watch that they saw the bodies. According to Mexhit's wife and sister, Jakup and Mexhit were in the barn, which was burned. There were dead animals including a burned cow that was on top of the bodies. The bodies were virtually unrecognizable, they said, with the skin burned off. Fitim's body was in the door of his own house, and only parts of Ajet's burned legs were found, also in the Mirena house.

The witnesses told Human Rights Watch that some of the security forces had grease paint on their faces, while others had hoods to cover their faces. All of them had shaved heads and wore green camouflage uniforms with a red eagle on the right shoulder. Some of the witnesses claimed that the forces were members of Vojislav Seselj's paramilitaries, although this could not be confirmed. The forces carried automatic weapons and pistols, and some of them also had hatchets. Two people interviewed together said that some of the soldiers had big knifes in their belts that were serrated on one side.

Hade is now empty and approximately one hundred houses have been destroyed, the seven interviewees reported. The villagers who arrived in Albania yesterday said that the buses followed a route from Hade to Obilic and then on to Pristina, which had very few people on the streets. From Pristina, the buses took a round-about road south through Urosevac, Prizren, and then to the village Zhur, where the villagers were unloaded and forced to walk the remaining five miles to the Morina border crossing.

(New York, April 28, 1999, 4:45pm EDT)— Two ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo told Human Rights Watch yesterday that they had been raped by Serbian security forces while being held captive in Kosovo. Three other rape victims from the same village have also reported their cases to doctors in northern Albania.

The two victims, from the village of Dragacin in the Suva Reka municipality, gave testimony that was detailed and credible. Many aspects of their stories were corroborated by eight other women villagers, interviewed separately. Human Rights Watch is withholding the names of the victims at their request to protect them from government retaliation.

All of the women interviewed told how the police surrounded the village of Dragacin on April 21. Most of the men fled into the mountains, but between 200 and 300 women (including fifty women from the nearby villages of Mujlan and Dujle (in Albanian)), as well as eleven elderly men, stayed behind. The security forces gathered the entire group in a field, where they searched and then separated the eleven elderly men, including a ninety-three-year-old man named Ymer. None of the men have been seen since, although three of the women interviewed said they later saw one of the eleven men lying dead in a Dragacin street.

The government security forces divided the women randomly into three private houses in the village (the houses of Shahin T., Avdi T. and Halil T.), where they were held for three days. During this time, the women were repeatedly threatened and harassed. One woman said that the police held a knife to her three year-old boy, saying that they would kill him if she didn't produce gold or money. Certain women were compelled to cook and clean for Serb forces. Some were forced to have sex with their captors.

The two rape victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch were held in the same house, which was crowded with frightened women and children. Women held in other houses described similar conditions. One of the victims described how she was sexually abused on two occasions, during one of which she was raped. At approximately 4 p.m. on her second day of captivity, she was "chosen" from among a large group of women by a man in a green camouflage uniform. The man took her to another house and raped her, she said.

The following day another man demanded she go with him to a different house some ten minutes' walk away. According to the woman's account, the man did not tell her where he was taking her or why, but instead pushed her forward with his gun when she started crying.

The house was full of members of the Serbian security forces, she told Human Rights Watch. They asked her questions, using a mixture of gestures and very basic words to communicate, as the woman hardly understood Serbian. They asked her age -- twenty-three, she said -- whether she had any children, and the whereabouts of her husband. They asked her for money. When she told them that she had none, they ordered her to take off her clothes. She started crying and pulling out her hair, which made the men laugh. They put on some music.

After she took off her clothes, the men approached her one by one as she stood before them naked. She told Human Rights Watch that all of them looked at her, then they left her alone in the room with the man she believed to be their commander and another officer. The commander, whom she recognized as such because he had gold stars on his cap and had issued orders to others, reclined on his back about ten feet away from where the victim and the officer were lying on a bed. The man on the bed, who was nude, touched her breasts but did not force her to touch him. "I kept crying all the time and pushing his hands away," she said. "Finally he said to me, I'm not going to do anything. The commander just stared at us."

After about ten minutes, the other soldiers returned to the room and, still nude, the woman was forced to serve them coffee. She was then ordered to put her clothes back on and clean up. She picked up the dirty cups and dishes and swept the floor, she said. Then she was returned to the house with the other women. When the others asked what had happened to her, she refused to tell them.

The second rape victim, age twenty-nine, reported to Human Rights Watch that the police took her away from the house where she was being held and brought her to another house. There she was placed in a room and forced to strip naked. One after the other, five members of the Serb forces entered the room to look at her body, but it was only the last man who raped her, she said. While he was assaulting her, the other four entered the room and watched. The woman also stated that someone had placed a walkie-talkie under the bed in the room, and that throughout the ordeal the Serbian forces shouted at her via the walkie talkie to scare her. In all, she was held in the room for about half an hour.

A doctor at the camp in Kukes where the refugees from Dragacin are currently living told Human Rights Watch that three other women had come to him yesterday to report that they had been raped. The doctor said that one of these women showed obvious signs of severe emotional distress.

Other women held in the Dragacin houses told Human Rights Watch that they had seen or heard women being taken by the Serbian forces during their three days in captivity. One elderly woman from Mujlan said that, on the third night, the police entered the house of Avdi T., shining a flashlight in the faces of the women, many of whom were trying to cover their heads with their scarves. They found one woman and said, "You come with us." She returned approximately two hours later and, when asked what happened, said, "Don't ask me anything."

On Saturday, April 24, all of the women in Dragacin were forced by government forces to walk to the nearby village of Dujle, where they were held in the local school for two days without food or water, although no one reported further physical abuse. On April 26, they were taken in two buses to the village of Zhur, where they were forced to walk across the border into Albania. Human Rights Watch has received unconfirmed reports that rapes occurred between April 24 and 26.

Witnesses' descriptions of the uniforms — green camouflage and blue camouflage — indicate that the incidents described above were a joint operation by the Serbian special police (MUP) and Yugoslav Army (VJ). Some of the perpetrators also wore black ski masks.

KOSOVO HUMAN RIGHTS FLASH #30
REFUGEES RECOUNT WEEKS ON THE MOVE

(New York, April 26, 1999, 6:30pm EDT)—Refugees now arriving in Macedonia report that Yugoslav military forces chased them from village to village in Kosovo during the preceding three to four weeks. Refugees explained they were sometimes directed by Yugoslav troops toward a particular town, only to later be forced to flee that town. However, when they tried to flee Kosovo altogether, Yugoslav forces prevented them from leaving. It was not immediately clear why the Yugoslav forces would have kept refugees trapped in the region. Those who had been on the move for weeks, were exhausted, in shock and traumatized when they finally arrived in Macedonia

Refugees from the Urosevac (Ferizay in Albanian) and Gnjilane areas of southern Kosovo told Human Rights Watch strikingly similar stories of their ordeal: weeks spent fleeing or being forced to move from one village to another. Many refugees from Urosevac, for example, fled their homes soon after the NATO air strikes began on March 24, seeking shelter in the nearby village of Sojevo. They were later forced to flee Sojevo as well when Yugoslav army troops entered the village on April 6, joined by paramilitary soldiers on April 7, and began burning houses and firing weapons.

Most of the villagers escaped into the mountains, but the very elderly and disabled were left behind. One man told Human Rights Watch that when he fled with his wife and children he had been forced to leave his paralyzed father and elderly mother behind in their home. He had believed they would be safe because "[paramilitaries] wouldn't touch a paralyzed man." However, when he returned several hours later, he found both his mother and father shot dead in their home, his mother's body had been mutilated, and that there were dozens of empty bullet casings on the ground. At least two other elderly people were also killed in Sojevo, according to three of the villagers interviewed by Human Rights Watch who buried them.

Terrified by what they had experienced, the villagers tried to flee to Macedonia. Some were stopped outside Urosevac by the Serb special police and Yugoslav military and prevented for several days from taking the road to the Macedonian border. Others, traveling by train, were turned back on several occasions from the border town of Djeneral Jankovic. Some refugees took different routes. But these, and other refugees, all tell the same story: they were repeatedly stopped by police, military or the paramilitaries, turned back in the direction they had come from, told to stay in different villages, then later forced to move again. Some refugees appear to have been deliberately directed towards specific towns, where a few days later soldiers and paramilitaries arrived and forced them to move on again. Many refugees described persistent extortion of large sums of money by soldiers along the route. For many, this pattern continued for weeks on end.

One woman who had just arrived in Macedonia told Human Rights Watch, "I traveled a lot, I was just escaping from one place to another. Everywhere we went they were following us. I have not slept in the same place for one month. This is our first night in peace for these four weeks. I would rather sleep here on this ground, than be there - just for some peace."

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