SUMMARY

For the previous eleven weeks-since the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) pulled out of Kosovo on March 19-the population of Glogovac and the surrounding villages had been besieged and terrorized by Serbian special police and paramilitaries, as well as by the Yugoslav Army (VJ). As NATO bombs fell throughout Yugoslavia, Serbian and Yugoslav forces launched a brutal campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against the Albanians of Kosovo that involved summary and arbitrary executions, arbitrary detentions, regular beatings, widespread looting, and the destruction of schools, hospitals, and other civilian objects. As a stronghold of the KLA and an area of constant fighting with government forces, the Glogovac municipality was particularly hard-hit.

This report documents some of the abuses and war crimes that took place in the Glogovac region between March 19 and June 15. It is based on extensive interviews with ethnic Albanians while they were refugees in neighboring Macedonia, as well as on interviews with those who returned to the Glogovac area in late June. The testimonies from the two groups, as well as the physical evidence in the region, are remarkably consistent and, taken together, paint an undeniable picture of systematic abuse by Serbian and Yugoslav forces. This report does not, however, attempt to cover all of the abuses that took place in the area, since many crimes, including large-scale killings, are still being investigated. With few exceptions, witnesses and survivors are only identified by their initials in order to protect them from possible reprisals.

The most serious atrocities documented in this report took place in two villages near Glogovac: Staro Cikatovo and Stari Poklek, both places where the KLA was active. In Poklek, the police blocked a group of ethnic Albanians-mostly members of the extended Muqolli family- from fleeing their village and forced them into the house of a relative. After a few hours, the owner of the house, Sinan Muqolli, and another man were taken outside, executed and thrown into the family well. Shortly thereafter, a grenade was thrown into the room holding at least forty-seven persons, including twenty-three children under the age of fifteen. One man in uniform raked the room with automatic gunfire, a survivor said, killing everyone inside except six people. A member of the Muqolli family is a local commander of the KLA, which may explain the killings.

A Human Rights Watch researcher visited Sinan Muqolli's largely burnt house on June 25, 1999. The room where the killing took place had bullet marks along the walls and bullet casings from a large-caliber weapon scattered on the floor. The basement below the room had dried blood stains dripping from the ceiling and walls and a large pool of dried blood on the floor. Surviving family members displayed a cardboard box containing some of the bones allegedly collected from the room and showed the nearby well where they claimed some of the bodies had been dumped.

In Staro Cikatovo on April 17 the police attacked the village and separated the men from the women and children. By the end of the day, twenty-three men from the Morina family had been killed. Another four were still missing as of June 25 and presumed dead by their families. The survivors from Staro Cikatovo insist that none of the dead men were involved in the KLA, although several members of the family are admittedly KLA soldiers, including two who were wounded in the assault. As in Poklek, this may be one explanation for the executions.

Human Rights Watch visited Staro Cikatovo on June 25, 1999. Between 40 and 50 percent of the approximately one hundred homes had been badly damaged or destroyed. Most houses had been burned from the inside, indicating that they were purposefully burned rather than damaged in combat. Several structures had also been demolished bybulldozers. Human Rights Watch has also interviewed a witness who claims that dozens of prisoners were executed at the mine in Staro Cikatovo.

Very credible allegations of mass killings have also emerged from other villages around Glogovac, specifically in Vrbovac and Cirez. Human Rights Watch visited Cirez on July 11, 1999. A local human rights activist showed a list with the names of seventy-two persons allegedly executed in the area of Cirez and Baks villages. In Vrbovac, between eighty and 150 people are believed to have been executed.

Although they were generally not as violent as in the surrounding villages, Serbian and Yugoslav forces also committed serious abuses in the town of Glogovac itself. At least five, and as many as nineteen, civilians were reportedly executed by Serbian police or paramilitary forces in the town, usually in connection with looting and robberies. Glogovac's inhabitants, including the large numbers of internally displaced persons from the nearby villages, were subjected to repeated harassment, including detentions, beatings, house-to-house searches, robbery and extortion, as well as the destruction of foodstuffs. In addition, private homes, shops and businesses were deliberately ransacked, looted, and burned. Finally, the majority of the population was systematically expelled from the town over a five-day period in early May and sent toward the Macedonian border.

The actions in the Glogovac municipality were clearly coordinated between the regular Serbian police, the Yugoslav Army, and paramilitaries, whom witnesses identified as having long hair and beards, with colored bandanas on their heads and sleeves. While the police were responsible for many of the beatings in Glogovac, as well as the organized mass expulsion, it is the paramilitaries who are implicated in most of the serious violence, such as in Poklek and Staro Cikatovo. A number of witnesses claimed to have seen what they thought were members of Arkan's Tigers-the notorious paramilitary group run by the indicted war crimes suspect Zeljko Raznjatovic (Arkan), but their presence in the region could not be confirmed.

The only person identifiable by witnesses was a deputy police chief from Glogovac known as "Lutka," which means "doll" in Serbian. A known policeman in the town, residents said that he did not behave brutally, unlike many of the paramilitaries, although he was involved in thefts, and he was a principal organizer of the forced depopulation in early May, telling Albanians that they should "get on the buses or go to Albania by foot."

It should be noted that these abuses are hardly the first war crimes committed by Serbian or Yugoslav forces in the Glogovac municipality. Since February 1998, the Drenica region has been the sight of numerous executions, arbitrary detentions, beatings, and the systematic destruction of civilian objects, such as schools, medical clinics, and mosques. Previous Human Rights Watch reports ("A Week of Terror in Drenica," February 1999, and "Humanitarian Law Violations in Kosovo," October 1998) document war crimes committed in Gornje Obrinje, Golubovac, ,irez, Liko_ane, and other villages in the area.