NGOs respond to S Asian quake/tsunamis
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Serbia returns 44 Kosovo corpses, 100s more to come
16 Dec 2004 15:39:06 GMT
Source: Reuters
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(Releads with return of bodies, changes dateline, adds details) By Matthew Robinson MERDARE, Serbia and Montenegro, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Serbia on Thursday returned the remains of 44 Albanians who were killed in Kosovo in 1999 then trucked 350 km (220 miles) north in secret, to be concealed in a mass grave outside Belgrade. The return was one of the largest between Serbia and the United Nations-run province since gruesome burial pits were discovered near the capital in 2001, filled with the corpses of some 700 ethnic Albanian victims of the 1998-99 Kosovo war. NATO peacekeeping troops at the frost-covered Merdare boundary crossing watched as crowds of grieving relatives filled a large tent where the bodies of men, women and children were unloaded from a blue truck. They filed silently past the zipped-up white bodybags, placing flowers at the foot of each bag, obscuring the four-digit identifying tags. "Serbia is killing our brothers everyday they keep them in their land," said Nekibe Shala, whose brother is missing. The existence of the graves -- undeniable evidence of a bid to cover up atrocities -- was revealed as reformers who ousted former leader Slobodan Milosevic braced the country for his extradition to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Around 350 identified remains have been returned so far, out of a total of 836 corpses found on a police training ground outside Belgrade and at another site in eastern Serbia. The dead were all trucked there from Kosovo five years ago, in what U.N. prosecutors say was a systematic operation to conceal evidence of the murder of civilians. CAUSE OF DEATH "UNKNOWN" Kosovo became a U.N. protectorate in 1999 after NATO bombing expelled Serb forces accused by Western powers of ruthless use of force in fighting an insurgency by the Albanian majority. An estimated 10,000 people died in the war. More than 3,000 are still missing, of whom 2,400 are ethnic Albanians. Kosovo's U.N. overseers say Serbia should speed up the handover of bodies for the sake of reconciliation. Serbia is obliged to identify the bodies before returning them, a process Belgrade says is slow and complicated. "We hope to have better cooperation in order to end the suffering of these people," said Thomas Monaghan, Kosovo's U.N.-appointed director of justice. Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj, a former rebel leader currently under investigation by the U.N. tribunal, said the relatives' suffering could be relieved "if the bodies were all returned in one go." U.N. forensics experts say that despite post-mortems conducted by Serbia, most bodies have been returned with cause of death recorded as "unknown". Subsequent examinations by U.N. experts have established that 65 percent died of gunshot wounds. Serbia says it is investigating the case, but has yet to charge anyone. It also refuses to hand over four generals indicted by the Hague tribunal for war crimes in Kosovo.
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