WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (39 page)

In May 2005, all three men were taken to a secret detention centre somewhere in the Yemen and today they are still being held without having received an official trial or charges. Yemeni officials said they had been given explicit instructions by the US government to continue to detain the three men until they receive further instructions.

Zahra Salloum was told that her husband had been deported to the Yemen because his passport was not valid, and this story was repeated by the media. Salloum was suspicious about the story and phoned al-Assad’s 75-year-old father who lived in the Yemen. He travelled to the capital to see if he could find his son, but he was assured by the Yemini government that al-Assad had never entered the country. Determined to find out what had happened, he continued his journey to Dar-es-Salaam, where he filed a
habeus corpus
petition with the Tanzanian courts. Al-Assad’s father was later to learn from Tanzanian officials that his son had been handed over to US custody, but no one knew where he had been taken.

It appears that two months earlier the same thing had happened to Salah Nasser Salim ’Ali and Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah. All three men had entered the USA’s covert network of illegal detentions and had simply ‘disappeared’. The aim of the network is to try and collect as much information as they can through the use of long-term interrogation, without any judicial oversight. What is also worrying is the fact that is was a high-ranking official like an immigration officer who made the original arrest. This would suggest that the CIA are placing considerable reliance on foreign security and intelligence services to aid them in their rendition operations. The detainees are denied their legal right to speak to a lawyer, their families, doctors or even to be given a fair trial.

What these three cases have brought to light is the fact that the rendition system is not just for ‘high category’ detainees, and it is feared that the network is far more complex than originally believed. The three ordinary men mentioned here detained in at least four different secret locations, which were most likely to have been in different countries, judging by their descriptions of the length of their flights.

In September 2005, the Minister of the Interior Rashad Al-Alimi reported that the three men had been accused of being members of terrorist groups. They said their trial would commence as soon as they received the files from the CIA, but as yet no information has been forthcoming.

Muhammad Bashmilah stated, ‘If there are really charges we are ready to defend ourselves . . . we are Yemenis in Yemen, so why is the minister waiting for the Americans to decide?’

Following mounting investigation in Europe, it is believed that the US Senate will soon approve a rule that will necessitate the director of national intelligence to provide regular and detailed updates about any covert detention centres that are maintained by the USA overseas. This would also require an in-depth report on the treatment and condition in which the detainee is held.

EUROPE FIGHTS BACK

On 17 February, 2003, an Egyptian cleric by the name of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr (also known as Abu Omar) was allegedly abducted by the CIA as he walked to his mosque in Milan to take morning prayers. He had been living in asylum in Italy after his Islamic organization was declared illegal by the Egyptian government. Omar literally vanished off the face of the earth and nothing was heard of him until

13 months later, when he was able to make several phone calls to his friends and relatives. He claimed to have been abducted by US agents and taken to a joint US/Italian base, from where he was flown to Egypt. In Egypt he was subjected to aggressive torture tactics, such as beatings and electric shocks applied to his genitals. At the time of the phone calls, Omar had been released from detention on the orders of an Egyptian judge due to lack of evidence against him. However, a short while later he was again arrested and his whereabouts are no longer known.

Unhappy with the misuse of European soil during rendition operations, an Italian judge, Guido Salvini, issued a warrant for the arrest of 22 people believed to be agents or operatives of the CIA in June 2005. By November, the Justice Ministry in Italy requested for the extradition of the 22 suspects from the USA, and in December European arrest warrants were issued. These warrants were enforceable in all the 25 EU member countries and did not require the approval of any government.

The 22 agents have been accused of abducting Abu Omar without Italian permission and flying him to Egypt for interrogation. Italy claims that the abduction of Omar not only hampered their own investigations into Italian terrorism, but also violated Italian sovereignty. The arrests of these agents by Italy are part of a retaliation against the rendition policies used by the CIA. Many Italian citizens have voiced quite openly that they are not happy about the prospect of people being taken away from their own country to be tortured elsewhere. Sweden has also been looking into the activity of rendition, and Canada has set up hearings after one of its citizens was captured by US agents and flown to Syria for questioning without the knowledge of the Canadian government.

There is no doubt that the rendition controversy has damaged the United States’ working relationship with the EU in the war on terrorism. However, despite the fact that Europe’s governments have repeatedly denied their collaboration in the US programme of renditions, as evidence of the practice has come to light it has become clear that many European governments have adopted a ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ approach when it comes to rendition flights using their territory.

Genocide In Kosovo

1998-99

Kosovo is a province in southern Serbia that borders Montenegro, Albania and the Republic of Macedonia. It has an ethnic population of about two million people, predominantly Albanians, with smaller proportions of Serbs, Turks and Bosniaks. The province has been under United Nations administration since 1999, and it has been the subject of long-running and territorial disputes between the Serbian government and Kosovo’s Albanian population.

In the late 1980s, a new, authoritarian leader emerged, a Serbian named Slobodan Milosevic. He was a former communist who had turned to nationalism and religious hatred in his efforts to gain power. As the Yugoslav federation started to collapse, Milosevic saw the opportunity to take control by inciting the long-standing tensions that were already present between the Serbs and Muslims in Kosovo. The Orthodox Christian Serbs, who were in the minority, claimed they were being downtrodden by the Albanian Muslim majority and Milosevic played on the dissent within the population. Under Josip Tito, the Muslims had enjoyed considerable independence, however, under the power of Milosevic, this autonomy would soon be taken away.

THE START OF ETHNIC CLEANSING

In 1989, Milosevic closed down the regional assembly and government and imposed a police state on Kosovo. Tens of thousands of Albanians lost their positions in government and private institutions alike, and Serbs were put in their place. Milosevic, who was trying to ethnically ‘cleanse’ the province, encouraged the migration of young Albanian men. Fearing for their own safety and now finding it difficult to earn a living, this is exactly what happened. Literally hundreds of thousands of Albanians fled Kosovo for Western Europe and North America, which created one of the largest migrant communities in the world.

Back in Kosovo, conditions for the remaining Albanians deteriorated as they were the subject of constant surveillance and harassment. Dr Julie Mertus, who was a member of Human Rights Watch, later reported that between the years 1989 and 1997, almost half the adult Albanian population in Kosovo was either arrested, interrogated, interned or remanded for no particular reason other than the fact they were not Serbs.

After nearly a decade of repression, the Albanians were no longer prepared to take a back seat and in 1966 they formed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The KLA started off as a small guerilla organization that fought for independence from Serbian rule. Their initial attacks were aimed at the Serbian police, government officials and refugee centres in western Kosovo. Their aim was to provoke an open conflict in which they believed the West would be forced to intervene. Milosevic seized the opportunity and his regime started to plan a way of ridding Kosovo of Albanian culture once and for all – by acts of genocide.

THE KILLING STARTS

By 1997, the KLA’s access to weapons was boosted by the eruption of civil war in neighbouring Albania. The country’s armouries were raided by many different factions, and many of the automatic weapons found their way into the hands of the KLA.

The first major military assault by the KLA took place in September 1997, with the use of anti-tank weapons over a quite a large area of Kosovo. In February 1998, their attacks took on a more sinister tone when they started to attack Serb houses in the villages of Klina, Decani and Djakovica. They attacked a Serb refugee camp at Baboloc and ambushed several Serb policemen on the road between Glogovac and Srbica. Their actions provoked a major counter-offensive by Yugoslav security forces against the KLA strongholds, which resulted in one of the worst massacres in the history of Kosovo. Approximately 80 Albanians, including many women and children, were killed in the central Drenica region of Kosovo.

For two days the Serb police massacred the Albanians, either shooting them with shotguns or hitting them with other hard or sharp objects. Everywhere you could see the evidence of heinous carnage that had taken place. Bodies, many of which had been badly mutilated, lay on the ground and slumped across the thorny bushes that lined the roads.

Reprisal killings continued into 1998, including the massacre of the Deliaj clan in September of that year. After the massacre the bodies of 15 women, children and elderly members of the clan lay in grotesque positions among the rocks and streams of the gorge just below their village. Some had been shot at close range, others had been mutilated as they tried to escape the Serb forces. One of the cases of mutilation was a 30-year-old woman, Lumnije Deliaj, who was seven months pregnant. Her abdomen was slit open. Many of the houses had been burnt to the ground with the inhabitants still inside, too afraid to run outside for fear of being shot. Down a dirt track, just a few miles from the village lay the bodies of three elderly people, who had been shot in the head as they apparently came out to plead for their lives. However, the massacre that actually forced the West to get involved took place at the village of Racak on 16 January, 1999.

RACAK

In the early hours of 15 January, 1999, members of the Serb police force surrounded the village of Racak, in the district of Stimlje. They were searching for a group of terrorists from the KLA, who had killed a policeman, Svetislav Przic, five days earlier. They were notorious for having carried out multiple criminal acts of murder and torture and the security forces were eager to stop them doing any further damage.

The Serbs started by shelling the village in the early hours of morning, then stormed in and rounded up a group of around 40 men and youths. Most of them were severely beaten before being led down a steep path which went into a gully. The bodies of 45 ethnic Albanian civilians were later discovered outside the village by residents shortly after the government forces withdrew. The gully was filled with a mass of tangled bodies, there was blood everywhere and many corpses showed horrific signs of mutilation.

Following an international outcry, the Serbian government orchestrated a cover-up story by saying that Racak village was a base for KLA fighters. Appalled at what was happening in Kosovo, after the Racak massacre the international community, led by the USA, stepped up pressure on the Milosevic regime. They arranged a conference at the French chateau of Rambouillet to try and negotiate a peace settlement that would give Kosovo partial autonomy, not the full scale independence that the Albanians were demanding. The conference was a disaster, and the Serbs refused to sign any form of peace agreement. Instead, they withdrew to make their own plans to deal with the ethnic-Albanian problem. Their solution was ‘Operation Horseshoe’.

The existence of the operation was immediately denied by the Yugoslav and Serbian governments, and by Milosevic himself, but it remains a subject of controversy right up to the current day. There is no doubt that there was some form of systematic ethnic cleansing, which produced the refugee crisis in Kosovo. It is estimated that a village a day was hit during 1998–99, targeting homes, shops and businesses owned by Albanians. Serb police used ruthless tactics to wipe out the villages neighbourhood by neighbourhood. The Albanians were literally ear-marked for destruction, solely because of their racial identity.

SUVA REKA

On 26 March, 1999, the Serb forces attacked the village of Suva Reka and killed 44 members of the Berisha family. Only two women and one child survived the massacre and one of them, Shyhrete Berisha, later testified at the trial of six former Serbian officials. Among the dead were 14 children, three babies and 14 women, including one who was nine months pregnant.

It all started when police stormed out of the local police station and started firing at six men standing in a courtyard outside their family home. Despite the fact that the men raised their arms in surrender, the police still shot them in cold blood. Other members of the family tried to run away, but they were stopped in front of a cafe not far from their house. The police forced the family inside the cafe, where they opened fire and threw two hand grenades inside the building.

Shyhrete Berisha was badly wounded, but she played dead as it appeared the police were firing at anything that moved. After about 30 minutes, the police threw the bodies into the back of a truck. Shyhrete and another two survivors managed to jump off the back of the truck without being noticed, and local Albanians helped them escape through the woods. A month later they all took refuge in Albania.

MEJA

On 30 April, 1999, an estimated 100 to 300 men and youths (the exact figures are still not known) are believed to have been executed at the village of Meja, northwest of Djakovica. Starting on 27 April, Serbian police and paramilitary units, together with soldiers of the Yugoslav army, forcibly expelled residents from the villages of Pecaj, Nivokaz, Dobrash, Sheremet, Jahoc, Ponashec, Racaj, Ramoc, Madanaj, Orize and Cuska. The Serbs surrounded the villages, rounded up the inhabitants and forced them to walk towards Djakovica. During the course of the day many of the men and boys were taken away from the rest of the group. There are reports that the soldiers were seen holding literally hundreds of men at gunpoint. Those people who passed by later in the day reported having seen an ‘enormous pile of bodies’ at the side of the road.

Those who made it across the border into Albania, mainly women, children and the elderly, were severely traumatized and spoke of mass slaughter at the village of Meja. One witness claimed she saw 70 or more men squatting with their hands behind their heads in a small ditch that ran parallel with the road. Refugees that passed through Meja on that afternoon said there was blood and bodies everywhere, many lying face down and none of them were moving.

CLOSING DAYS OF THE WAR

In the closing days of the war, the grim and sordid details of mass slaughter appeared on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. It was given the label of the ‘Serbs Factory of Death’ as more and more evidence came to light of the atrocities that had taken place. In Kosovo’s capital of Prishtina, a beautiful 16th-century mosque was burnt down. Bulldozers had been used to flatten the rubble of many other mosques and buildings, leaving just the scars of war on the landscape. One elderly ethnic Albanian told a reporter, ‘They tried to wipe out our Moslem history. You can erase our buildings but you cannot destroy our people.’

It appears that is exactly what the Serbs were trying to do: eradicate the Albanians from Kosovo. Vucitrn was another site of destruction, when the Serbs massacred about 70 men after being herded into courtyards. The women and children were robbed of their money and jewellery by masked paramilitaries, while listening to the screams of their menfolk being slaughtered. The only reminders of their families at the end of the day were the bloodstains on the grass and a pair of dentures embedded in the mud.

Ultimately, many displaced persons ended up in villages to the north-east of Vucitrn, such as Bajgore, Vesekovce, Kurillove and Sllakovce, which became overcrowded with the homeless, frightened Albanians. Several witnesses reported that they had to live with as many as 100 people to a single house and that others were forced to sleep out in the open air. On their travels to Albania the refugees had been subjected to cursing and threats from the Serb soldiers.

As the group of refugees passed through Vucitrn, seeing the bodies lying at the side of the road, they decided to tie a white cloth to their tractor, to show that they wanted to surrender. The soldiers simply ignored the symbol of surrender and started shooting and shelling the occupants of the tractor. A woman used a mattress to cover her children as they drove as fast as they could away from the village. As the refugees approached a warehouse, they saw a line of soldiers on the left hand side of the road. They stopped the refugees and told them to get out of their tractors, put their hands behind their heads and then to sit down on the road. The soldiers started cursing, kicking and beating them as they walked among the petrified families. One woman was beaten just because her child was crying.

There is no accurate record of just how many Albanians were killed during the Kosovo War, as new evidence is being discovered all the time. In 2001, the existence of a mass grave at Batajnica was uncovered, after the fall of the Milosevic regime in October 2000. As many as 1,100 bodies have been exhumed from this site alone, but it is believed their has been widespread tampering with the gravesites and destruction of evidence, in an attempt to cover the true extent of the atrocity. It is certain that genocidal massacres continued throughout the war, but then came the long, hard task of trying to find out who was responsible and bring them to justice.