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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The evidence of the torture committed by uniformed Serbian police against the Kosovo Albanian population is part of a larger pattern of atrocities committed. On Thursday, NATO said it had already uncovered evidence of 100 mass graves that contain the bodies of more than 10,000 people killed by Serbian forces, police and paramilitaries over the past three months.
That number, which is far higher than earlier NATO estimates, seems set to go up, as each hour NATO-led peacekeeping forces and returning Kosovo Albanian refugees uncover more mass graves, bodies stuck in wells and other killings. It is impossible to drive a few miles in Kosovo without seeing KFOR troops roping off some new area where mass graves or dumped bodies have been found. At some sections of road in Kosovo, the smell of rotting flesh is overpowering.
"Tragically, our estimates of the numbers of innocent men, women and children killed will almost certainly have to be revised upwards," British Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon told the press Thursday.
Investigators with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had toured the torture site in Pristina earlier Friday, and collected evidence of possible war crimes. War crimes investigators look set to be very busy in Kosovo.
According to wire reports, French peacekeepers found human remains in a house in the southeastern village of Vlastica, while several more bodies were found dumped in four wells in a village near the capital Pristina. Local villagers say as many as 100 ethnic Albanians were killed by Serbs before NATO troops entered Kosovo last week.
Italian soldiers in Kosovo discovered a mass grave that included the burned bodies of three children near the southwestern city of Djakovica, which saw some of the worst atrocities. Local Albanians told reporters that mass graves contained the remains of 120 men and boys killed on April 27 because they were suspected of being Kosovo Liberation Army rebels.
Villagers in Poklek, a hamlet 20 miles west of Pristina, say Serbian police killed 62 ethnic Albanians, most of them women and children from one extended family, in a home two months ago. According to a 15-year-old girl who survived the attack by jumping out a window, a Serbian policeman gathered the people in a house, tossed in a grenade and then sprayed the survivors with machine gun fire before setting the house ablaze. Near Poklek, at the Feronikl factory in Glogovac, several ethnic Albanians are reported to have been incinerated by Serbian police who used the blue factory visible from the main road as a strategic base.
About the house of torture in Pristina, British Foreign Office Minister Hoon said what was most disturbing was that, the station "seems to have been just an ordinary police headquarters. In other words, the barbaric acts carried out in this building were probably almost a matter of routine."
