Serbian authorities must ensure the protection of a former member of the Serbian security forces who yesterday gave astonishing eyewitness testimony about the killings of 19 Albanians in the 1999 Kosovo war.
At the trial of Sasa Cvjetan, Goran Stoparic testified for two hours about the shooting of 19 ethnic Albanians, most of them women and children, by Serbian security forces. The killing took place in the Kosovo town of Podujevo on March 28, 1999, four days after the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
“Stoparic took an enormous risk to step forward,” said Rachel Denber, acting executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division. “Serbian authorities now have a duty to protect him. If he is harmed, other potential witnesses won’t risk coming forward.”
Stoparic, at the time a member of the “Scorpions” group in the Special Anti-Terrorist Unit (SAJ) of the Serbian police, provided a detailed chronology of the events that preceded the killing. He said a wall obstructed him from seeing the shooting itself, but that he heard the shots fired and saw a group of the “Scorpions”—including Cvjetan—change their rifle clips immediately afterward. He said he also heard a discussion among the unit members about the shooting later that day.
Stoparic was supposed to testify on December 8, but cancelled, saying he was unwell. In yesterday’s testimony, Stoparic said that, two days earlier, he feared taking the stand because the commander of his unit, Slobodan Medic, was in the court building and had warned him minutes before the scheduled testimony to conceal the truth. According to Stoparic’s testimony, the commander’s brother was among the perpetrators of the crime.
The presiding judge issued a formal order of protection for Stoparic, but as Human Rights Watch’s monitoring has found, other war crimes trials in Serbia and Montenegro lack a systematic, properly funded witness protection program.
Human Rights Watch also noted that the Serbian prosecutor’s office is obliged to investigate Stoparic’s allegations that other members of the “Scorpion” unit were involved in the Podujevo killings, as well as the obstruction of justice throughout the trial.
Background:
Serb forces killed 19 Albanian civilians on March 28, 1999, in Podujevo. Seven women and seven children were among the killed. Three buses carrying the “Scorpions” unit arrived in Podujevo early in the morning of that day. Shortly afterward, the unit members left the buses and sought housing for the night. They entered the front yards and ordered the Albanian inhabitants of the houses to leave. Those killed apparently had remained in a house in the center of Podujevo; they were killed in the yard after having been expelled from the house.
At the beginning of April 2002, the prosecutor for the southern Serbian town of Prokuplje indicted Sasa Cvjetan and Dejan Demirovic on war crimes charges. The trial began in October 2002, in Prokuplje, with Demirovic tried in absentia because he had absconded. On November 27, 2002, the Supreme Court of Serbia transferred the case to the Belgrade District Court, after the presiding judge and prosecutor in Prokuplje faced acts of intimidation, apparently by supporters of the defendant. The trial recommenced in Belgrade on March 12, 2003. Four survivors, all children at the time of the killings, now reside in the United Kingdom; they testified in the Belgrade District Court on July 9-10, 2003. A number of former members of the “Scorpions” testified in Prokuplje and Belgrade, all claiming that they did not know who was responsible for the killings in Podujevo.
Dejan Demirovic, age 28, who moved to Canada in 2001 and was jailed for five months in 2003, is challenging extradition proceedings.
