Prizren Municipality
The
Prizren municipality, located in Kosovo's southwestern corner, had a relatively
mixed ethnic population. According to the OSCE, 78 percent of the population
was ethnic Albanian, 5 percent Serbian, and 17 percent other national communities,
such as Turks and Roma.1 Throughout 1998 and early 1999, the municipality
was less severely affected by the war than Djakovica and Decani to the
northwest. However, villages in the northeastern part of the municipality,
in the direction of Suva Reka and Orahovac, were trouble spots due to the
ongoing presence of the KLA.
Prizren municipality was the site of many crimes
during the period of NATO bombing, including in the city of Prizren itself,
especially the neighborhood of Tusus. Villages north of the city on the
border with Orahovac municipality, such as Pirane, Mala Krusa, Mamusa (Mamushe),
Zojic (Zojiq), and Randubrava (Randobrave), were particularly hard hit
due to KLA activity in the area and the use of certain villages as rebel
transit routes. The villages of Pirana (Pirane) and Mala Krusa, stretching
north along the main road to Celina and Zrze (Xrxe), are covered separately
in the chapter on the Prizren- Djakovica Road.
The Yugoslav Army's Third Army, responsible for
Kosovo, had a barracks in Prizren, and witnesses claimed that the army
was very active in the municipality, coordinating actions with the police.
Based in Prizren was the army's 549th Motorized Brigade, commanded by Col.
Bozidar Delic (see Forces of the Conflict). Prizren was also one of the
seven regional bases in Kosovo of the Serbian police, known as a Sekretarijat
Unutrasnjih Poslova (Secretariat for Internal Affairs), or SUP. The Prizren
SUP covered the municipalities of Prizren, Orahovac, Suva Reka, and Gora.
The commander of Prizren SUP throughout 1998 was Col. Gradimir Zekavica,
and Lt. Milan Djuricic was the section head of Prizren SUP's police department.2
A new SUP head was apparently appointed in January 1999: Col. Milos Vojnovic,
who was also assistant chief of the police department in the Serbian Ministry
of Internal Affairs.3 But, based on awards issued to MUP officers after
the war, Col. Zekavica was commander during the war (see Forces of the
Conflict).
Prizren City
A historic
Ottoman outpost with several fourteenth century Serbian Orthodox churches
as well as centuries-old mosques, the city of Prizren, in south-western
Kosovo, was largely spared the physical devastation suffered by so many
other cities in Kosovo. Ethnically diverse, its pre-war population was
roughly two-thirds ethnic Albanian, but with sizeable numbers of ethnic
Serbs, Roma, Turks, Vlachs, and Muslim Slavs. It was not known as an important
center of KLA activity and, in comparison to other Kosovo cities, both
Albanian and Serb, relations among the various ethnic groups were relatively
peaceful prior to the conflict.
At the outset of the NATO bombing campaign, the
OSCE has reported, Serbian military and police shelled a few areas of the
city and destroyed the historic seat of the "League of Prizren," an important
historical monument for Kosovo's ethnic Albanians.4 Yet, with the exception
of the Tusus neighborhood, the "ethnic cleansing" of Prizren was carried
out with a lesser degree of violence and fewer wanton attacks than in many
other parts of Kosovo. Thus, Jamie Shea, NATO spokesman during the air
strikes, was either exaggerating or misinformed when he stated on May 17,
1999, that Prizren was the city that "has probably suffered the most over
the last months in the whole of Kosovo."5 Serbian forces cleared some areas
of Prizren systematically, but many ethnic Albanians remained in the city
throughout the conflict. Because of the obvious dangers outside, men generally
stayed within their homes for weeks and months at a stretch.
In April 1999, on at least two occasions, Serb police
and military rounded up hundreds of men in Prizren and forced them to serve
on trench-digging brigades near the border with Albania. Human Rights Watch
interviewed two men who were taken from their homes on April 24 to serve
in such brigades.6 They were initially brought to Prizren's sports center,
near the military barracks, and given outdated army uniforms to wear; then
they were brought to the Dragash municipality south of Prizren and made
to dig trenches for a month. Other Prizren natives who fled the city in
mid-April reported that they had left in order to escape a similar round
up. One man stated that he had been held at the sports center for five
hours with about 200-300 other people, but was released after a doctor
certified that he was disabled.7
Tusus Neighborhood
The May 26
attack on the Tusus neighborhood of Prizren, in which Serb forces killed
some twenty-seven to thirty-four people and burned over one-hundred homes,
was the most violent episode in Prizren during the conflict. In the first
half of June, Human Rights Watch interviewed three refugee eyewitnesses
from Tusus in Albania.8 A Human Rights Watch researcher then visited the
Tusus area on June 14, just after NATO's entry into Kosovo, photographing
the devastation and interviewing additional witnesses. In all, Human Rights
Watch heard the testimonies of fourteen Tusus residents.
The Tusus violence was apparently sparked by the
killing of at least two Serbian police officers on Ramiz Sadik street,
a major avenue that cuts through the area. Several witnesses told Human
Rights that they had heard about the killings, while one witness, L.V.,
stated that he saw the bodies on May 26 in the early morning. "One [of
the police] was lying on his back," L.V. explained. "The other was face
down, with lots of bullet holes in his back; his back was bloody."9 Kosovapress,
a KLA press organ, reported higher numbers of Serb losses, stating that
twenty-one Serbian police and paramilitaries were killed in Tusus by a
KLA commando unit the night before the attack.10 The Serbian Ministry of
Internal Affairs website, gives the names and photographs of two policemen
killed in Tusus on May 26: Milosav Rajkovic (born in 1975), and Zlatomir
Stankovic (born in 1957).11
By about 7:30 a.m. on May 26, the Serbian forces
had begun a violent rampage though the neighborhood. F.K., a thirty-three-year-old
Tusus resident, told Human Rights Watch that he and sixteen members of
his family "stayed in the basement and heard lots of shooting." The gunfire,
he said, "was non-stop, very close, maybe fifty meters away from our house.
After a half hour of shooting, they started burning and demolishing houses
in the neighborhood. They smashed everything."12 He said that the fires
continued through the early evening, at which time his family finally escaped
by climbing over their garden wall, walking through burning timbers to
reach a road out of the neighborhood.
Other families described how Serbian forces entered
their homes, sometimes to kill, sometimes to conduct searches. L.V., a
sixteen-year-old boy, told Human Rights Watch:
More than fifteen Serbs came in the house. They
asked us, "Are there KLA here?" They searched the house, staying inside
for about five minutes. They were special police, wearing a red insignia
of the Serbian flag on their arms. They took me outside and said, "We're
going to kill you. Take a last look at your family because we're going
to kill you."13
When L.V. was brought outside, however, a man whom
he believed was the Serbian commander told the others to release him. L.V.'s
mother was also harassed; she said that she thought the security forces
were going to take her away but that her mother-in-law's screaming saved
her.14 More than one group of Serbian security forces visited their house,
which is centrally located on Ramiz Sadik Street.
Just off Ramiz Sadik Street was the home of the
Abdulmexhidi family. J.A., a nineteen-year- old woman, described the family's
ordeal:
The police came to our house around noon and ordered
all the men to face the wall. There were six Serbs in green camouflage
uniforms; the word police was written across their chest. We were inside
the house at the time. They came inside and they ordered everyone outside,
except my father and uncle.15
F.A., her mother, continued:
They called the women from inside the house and
demanded money from us. They said they'd kill our husbands. They put a
Kalashnikov to my husband's head. I gave them 2,000 DM and the men gave
them 1,500 DM. Everyone came outside. They ordered us to leave and they
kept the men . . . . When we left, we saw the men being beaten. They kicked
the men in the stomach and back, and hit them with the butt of their guns.16
Six men, including F.A.'s husband, her brother-in-law,
and her two sons, age seventeen and twenty-one, were forced to stay behind.
F.A.'s daughter described what happened next. She explained: "[T]he men
were facing the wall with their hands up. When we got to the road, we heard
shooting, the sound of Kalashnikovs."
F.A. returned to the house the next day, finding
it blackened and burned, its roof caved in. The family's small dog had
been shot. She saw blood everywhere around the house but no sign of her
relatives. "Someone suggested to me that the men were in jail, not dead,
but I knew they were dead," she told Human Rights Watch. Two days later
she found their bodies in the morgue.
Residents who stayed in the area throughout the
attack said that the security forces left the neighborhood in the mid-afternoon.
At about 4 p.m., after the security forces were gone, a truck arrived to
pick up the bodies of the dead. The group of people handling the truck
were said to include an ethnic Albanian driver, four Serbian civil servants,
and four Roma, charged with retrieving the bodies. "Their truck was full
of dead bodies," said one witness. "It was open in the back and you could
see them. The gypsies were going house to house looking for bodies. They
threw them in the back of the truck like sacks."17 According to another
witness, who said that she saw numerous bodies wrapped in white sheets
in the back of the truck, one of the civil servants carried a camera and
was photographing the dead.18
Human Rights Watch interviewed two people who picked
up bodies at the local morgue in the following days. M.B., age sixty-five,
said that he and a few friends picked up about two dozen bodies from the
morgue that Friday, including a thirty-four-year-old woman who was completely
burned; she had lived on his street. He recalled: "The doctor at the morgue
told us that we had to decide: either we bury them or they would put them
in a mass grave. I transported some of the bodies in a horse cart."19 Another
sixty-five-year-old man, F.D., went to the morgue for several days in a
row, each time picking up a couple of bodies. He attended a funeral for
many of the dead that Sunday at a cemetery near the local mosque.
The perpetrators of the attack appear to have been
a mix of special police forces and paramilitaries. One woman said that
they wore green camouflage uniforms; some wore masks, and some had bandanas
on their heads. An eleven-year-old remembered them as carrying "big knives"
and "smoking cigars."20 One witness reported the presence of "Greeks and
Russians who didn't even speak Serbian."21
Estimates of the total number of neighborhood residents
killed range from twenty-seven to thirty-four. Two witnesses said that
they had each personally seen more than twenty-five corpses.22 When Human
Rights Watch visited Tusus on June 14, 1999, about three weeks after the
killings, residents claimed that thirty-four people had been killed, and
they provided the names of twenty-six of them. The area was physically
devastated: entire streets were blackened, with nearly every house on them
reduced to charred wreckage. Approximately one hundred homes were badly
damaged.
Bilbildere Neighborhood
An-other Prizren
neighborhood in which killings were reported is _Bilbildere. On the morning
of May 16, 1999, two ethnic Albanian men were said to have been summarily
executed there by paramilitaries. Human Rights Watch interviewed three
relatives of the men who were killed, all members of a single family.
The witnesses said that almost all of the residents
of the neighborhood fled to Albania in late April, leaving only their family
and six others. Three weeks passed without incident, but then early on
Sunday, May 16, a group of Serbian police arrived and searched the house
for weapons. Not long after the police left, a large group of paramilitaries
arrived. E.M., a twenty-six-year-old woman, told Human Rights Watch what
happened:
At about 9:00 a.m. Arkan's men came, nearly one
hundred of them. They had light blue bandanas around their heads, and special
vests that they wore open; you could see their chests. They wore necklaces
with crosses and other emblems. Most of them had shaved heads; some had
beards. There was a Russian with a beard; he didn't speak Serbian . . .
. They had greasepaint on their faces, under their eyes. They wore camouflage
green uniforms, like soldiers, but a few had dark blue ones . . . . They
didn't come into our house but were all over the neighborhood. We were
terrified.23
E.M. said that the paramilitaries took away her
two brothers-in-law, Elez Muharremi and Enez Muharremi, as well as Fatmir
Muharremi, the son of Enez. Not long after the men were taken away the
remaining family members heard automatic weapon fire. A.M., the mother
of the two older men, explained: "I heard the sound of shooting. `I'm afraid
they've killed them,' I told my other son . . . . it was a burst of fire
from an automatic weapon."24 After the paramilitaries left the neighborhood,
the family found the bodies of two of the men in the bathroom of a neighboring
home.
Enez's surviving brother told Human Rights Watch:
I heard the women cry out when they found the bodies
so I ran over. A neighbor told me, "don't go in, you won't be able to bear
the sight," so I didn't go in. I went to the police station to get the
police, but on the way I ran into three police. They came to the house
with me and we entered the bathroom together. That's when we saw the bodies:
they were lying on the floor. There was blood everywhere. Enez had been
shot twice in the chest and arm; Fatmir had been shot in the chest and
foot. The police never took the bodies to the morgue.25
As of June 1999, the whereabouts of the other brother-in-law,
Elez Muharremi, were not known.
1 OSCE/ODIHR, Kosovo/Kosova:
As Seen, As Told, Part I, p. 331.
2 "In Complex Security Circumstances,
They Fulfill Their Obligations With Success," Policajac,
no. 3/98, February 1998.
3 "At New Duties," Policajac,
no. 1/99, January 1999.
4 OSCE/ODIHR, Kosovo/Kosova:
As Seen, As Told, Part I, pp. 332-335.
Serbian sources, in contrast,
claim that the building was destroyed by aerial cluster bombs dropped by
NATO. See Committee for National Solidarity, "Aide Memoire on the Use of
Inhumane Weapons in the Aggression of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia," May 15, 1999.
The League of Prizren was founded
in 1878, bringing together representatives of all Albanian inhabited regions
to demand autonomy from the Ottomans. The establishment of the League was
a landmark in the movement for Albanian self-determination. The building
that was destroyed-where the League was organized-archived historic documents
relating to the League's creation and activities.
5 Press conference given by NATO
Spokesman Jamie Shea and SHAPE Spokesman Major General Walter Jertz, Brussels,
Belgium, May 17, 1999. (Available at www.nato.int/_kosovo/press/p990517b.htm,
April 19, 2001.)
6 Human Rights Watch interview with
R.G., Kukes, Albania, June 6, 1999; Human Rights Watch interview with F.K.,
Kukes, Albania, June 9, 1999. Human Rights Watch also interviewed the relatives
of six other men who were said to have been taken at the same time. The
six were killed in the attack on the Tusus neighborhood of Prizren only
days after they were released from digging trenches. Human Rights Watch
interviews with F.A., H.A., and J.A., Prizen, Kosovo, June 14, 1999.
7 Human Rights Watch interview with
L.G., Morina border crossing, Albania, April 14, 1999.
8 The Washington
Post interviewed several refugee eyewitnesses
within days of the incident. See John Ward Anderson, "Massacre Reported
in Kosovo," Washington Post,
May 30, 1999. The UNHCR also reported on the incident based on refugee
testimonies. See UNHCR, Kosovo Crisis Update, June 2, 1999 (stating that
twenty-five people were allegedly killed on May 26 in Tusus), available
at www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Kosovo-Current_News209.htm, (March 23, 2001).
9 Human Rights Watch interview with
L.V., Prizren, Kosovo, June 14, 1999. Another witness told Human Rights
Watch that his wife saw the bodies of two Serbian police in the street
at about 7:30 that morning. He said that he woke up "to a burst of automatic
weapon fire," and that his wife had gone to peer out into the street to
see what was happening; she then noticed the bodies. Human Rights Watch
interview with F.K., Kukes, Albania, June 9, 1999.
10 "As the Historic City of Prizren
Burns, Dozens of Kosovars Murdered," Kosovapress, May 28, 1999. Available
on the internet at: http://www.alb-net.com/kcc/052899.htm#7, (March 23,
2001).
11 See the MUP website, www.mup.sr.gov.yu/domino/mup.nsf/pages/index-e,
(March 23, 2001).
12 Human Rights Watch interview with
F.K., Kukes, Albania, June 9, 1999.
13 Human Rights Watch interview with
L.V., Prizren, Kosovo, June 14, 1999.
14 Human Rights Watch interview with
A.V., Prizren, Kosovo, June 14, 1999.
15 Human Rights Watch interview with
J.A., Prizren, Kosovo, June 14, 1999.
16 Human Rights Watch interview with
F.A., Prizren, Kosovo, June 14, 1999.
17 Human Rights Watch interview with
L.V., Prizren, Kosovo, June 14, 1999.
18 Human Rights Watch interview with
A.V., Prizren, Kosovo, June 14, 1999.
19 Human Rights Watch interview with
M.B., Kukes, Albania, June 11, 1999.
20 Human Rights Watch interview with
K.V., Prizren, Kosovo, June 14, 1999.
21 Human Rights Watch interview with
M.B., Kukes, Albania, June 11, 1999. Press accounts cite other witnesses
who claim that Russian "mercenaries" were involved in the Tusus killings.
Roy Gutman, "Russian `volunteers' allegedly helped Serbs," Newsday,
June 22, 1999; Maggie O'Kane, "Russian soldiers' peace role gives refugees
chills," Guardian (London),
June 24, 1999; "Retour des Russes sous l'habit de la KFOR: Tusus n'y croit
pas," France 3 Infos, June 21, 1999.
22 The Washington
Post reported that one woman claimed to have
seen thirty-one bodies at the morgue. Anderson, "Massacre Reported in Kosovo."
23 Human Rights Watch interview with
E.M., Kukes, Albania, June 11, 1999.
24 Human Rights Watch interview with
A.M., Kukes, Albania, June 11, 1999.
25 Human Rights Watch interview with
S.M., Kukes, Albania, June 11, 1999.
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