Son of kidnapped, murdered Serbs takes stand

"despite the efforts of two of their Albanian neighbors, who tried to save them."

This should be the messgae of the day - that there are good and bad on both sides and that no-one needs war again as unfortunetly those who are crazy and evil take advantage of the anarchy that war provides.

Those ethnic-Albanians who tried to stop the killings shold be praised for their efforts. They are an example that all peoples can and should be able to live together and new barriers need not be created but real reconciliation and understanding to bring forth real and better future for all the peoples of Serbia - that is my message of win-win.

No comments from anyone now since the victims are Serbian, let's just get over it, I wonder why?? ...and people wonder why Serbian police tried to take control of the situation in 1999.

Well said Princip!

What are you talking about "no comments" since the victim is Serbian? Whenever a victim is Serbian this site is filled with comments!!

Why don't you read this and tell me again that Serbia's crackdown was justified. Police taking control of the 'situation'? Who created that situation?

----
Gruesome details of Kosovo war crimes emerge

BELGRADE, Serbia - Decomposing corpses were dumped into a trash-filled ditch. Blindfolded and hands bound, three Albanian-Americans were led to its edge and shot in the head, their bodies joining the others.

The details, emerging for the first time at the trial of two former Serbian commandos, shed light on how the regime of late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic tried to conceal atrocities against ethnic Albanians in the 1998-99 Kosovo war.

Thousands were killed in the Serbian crackdown against Kosovo separatists in 1998-99. When NATO launched air strikes to stop the carnage, hundreds of bodies of Kosovars were dug up and moved more than 200 miles to three locations in central Serbia, reburied in mass graves to cover up the killings.

The commandos have been charged as accomplices in the murder of brothers Illy, Mehmet and Agron Bytyqi - three U.S. citizens who had left New York to fight in Kosovo and were captured by the Serbs.

The bodies of the Bytyqi brothers were discovered in 2001. Their identities were later confirmed by an FBI forensics team.

"One day, a truck carrying some 30 corpses appeared in our camp," Radomir Djeric, a former commander of a special police training facility in Petrovo Selo, some 60 miles east of Belgrade, said at the trial Wednesday.

His testimony for the prosecution was closed to the public but minutes were made available to The Associated Press.

Djeric said he thought a large ditch had been dug to be used as a garbage disposal for the police training camp.

But when the truckload of corpses arrived from Kosovo, Djeric said he felt "manipulated and foolish" because the garbage-filled pit was primarily intended as a mass grave.

"The decomposing bodies were unloaded from the truck by men wearing gas masks to keep out the stench," Djeric said. "The bodies slid from the rear of the truck into the pit."

The indictment against the former commandos, Sreten Popovic and Milos Stojanovic, says the Bytyqi brothers were brought to the edge of the pit and shot in the head, causing them to slump into a mass grave atop 70 corpses dumped there earlier.

"They were positioned next to each other, with a cloth over their face and hands bound with wire," Bosko Radojkovic, a forensic expert who had exhumed the mass grave, said during the trial Thursday.

The three Albanian-Americans had left their home and pizza business in New York in 1999 to join the so-called Atlantic Brigade, which fought Serb forces in Kosovo, before they were arrested close to the Serbia-Kosovo boundary in July 1999, days after the Kosovo hostilities ended.

Serbian authorities, who ousted Milosevic from power in 2000, have identified 924 victims in the mass graves uncovered in Serbia. They said 53 were children younger than 16, and 72 were women.

In earlier court testimony, retired Serb policeman Bozidar Protic described how he transported the corpses.

"I was ordered by my superiors to take an empty truck (from Belgrade) to Kosovo. No one mentioned any bodies at first," Protic said, adding that he was initially just told he was to "perform a confidential task, important for the state."

But he said he soon realized that the transport involved bodies of people killed at several locations in Kosovo.

Protic detailed how he made "four rounds" with the truck, transporting a total of about 120 bodies from four locations in Kosovo to the three mass graves in Serbia.

The mass graves in central Serbia were discovered after Milosevic lost power. The former president was extradited to the U.N. war crimes court in the Netherlands in 2001, where he died last year, before his war crimes trial ended.

Serbia is trying to keep Kosovo as a province in the face of a U.N. plan unveiled last month that proposes supervised statehood for the predominantly ethnic Albanian territory.

Several of Milosevic's close aides are being tried by the U.N. war crimes court in The Hague for the Kosovo atrocities, while lower-level perpetrators - including the two ex-commandos - are being tried locally.

---

WHY DIDN'T B-92 REPORT THIS? IT IS IN SERBIA ISN'T IT??

Princip , I have never seen you coment on the trial where top serb officials are being judged for masacres of K-Albanians and I never heard you side with victims of massacre(of course I am talking about Albanians).

"Stijović told him that they had been released after Hilmi Haradinaj’s intervention. He is the father of the accused Ramush Haradinaj."
I though the Haradinaj family was killing Serbs not saving them. Why are the Prosecutors questioning witnesses that are defining the Haradinaj’s? I think that the Prosecutors should go after the ones that order the killing of Milovan and Milka Vlahović and hang him high! There is no excuse for the killing of civilian (Albanian, Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian).

Art, Serbs only see what others did to them, and the do not see the crimes perpetrated against more than 150 000 Muslims and 12 000 Albanians by their own! Serbs like Matthew and Ida remember the Krajina but nothing preceeding the Krajina. They accuse the Croats and the Bosnians of atrocities but dont recall their own!

Pity indeed!

"Princip… I never heard you side with victims of massacre (of course I am talking about Albanians)."
I've seen Princip condemn atrocities committed by Serbians and even apologize for their crimes.
"Matthew and Ida remember the Krajina but nothing preceeding the Krajina. They accuse the Croats and the Bosnians of atrocities but dont recall their own!"
Are you perhaps speaking of WWII Victor? Being that every family in the area lost loved ones to the dreaded Ustashe and many of those who survived are alive today and remember that horror. Or perhaps you are referring to Borovo Selo? Although I'm willing to bet you'd blame that on the Serbs as well.
As far as accusing me of refusing to acknowledge crimes were committed by Serbians, we all know that's hogwash. I've consistently condemned such atrocities. The work I did with Bosniak Humanitarian groups speaks for itself. The fact that I was publicly called a traitor on Serbian television would seem to negate your accusations that I am somehow an extreme nationalist. However, I suppose in your mind its impossible to love Serbia and to care for our victims without being a Nationalist. Its still amazing to me that you can not tell the difference between a far left wing extremist moderate like myself, and a dyed in the wool Nationalist.
The fact remains Victor, if you look at raw numbers, the number of Serbian victims in all the conflicts in the Balkans very nearly reflects their population distribution. This is true in Bosnia and in Kosovo. However, you continuously proclaim that innocent Serbian villagers deserved the fate that awaited them simply because some gangsters from Belgrade committed horrible atrocities.
And as always Victor, you are just making up numbers once again. Why aren't you using the figure of 250,000 innocent Bosniak civilians, you like that number, its pretty…
To be honest, I find it very distasteful to try to minimalize the crimes of one side by pointing out the crimes of the other side. Instead, we all need to look at the crimes committed in our names and acknowledge that it was wrong. Just because some gangster from Belgrade, (or elsewhere), raped, robbed and stole, and then proclaimed he was doing it for the good of the Serbian people, does not make it right. Those people are the true traitors to the Serbian people and should see justice. They do not speak for me, nor for the vast majority of regular Serbian folk. All they did was bring suffering and dishonor upon the Serbian nation. However, that in no way diminishes the suffering or justifies the crimes committed against innocent Serbians. Nor does it invalidate the right of the Serbian people on the ground to resist the revival of the Ustashe movement. They had every right to fear for their safety. History has proven that what was started in WWII was completed in 1995.

Well here statistics is not valid but the attempt of create eguality from a colourful narrative, I am certain that all no serbian who with their bare hands had some vegeance from the killings made by the serb army will be prosecuted and hung up and serbs will cry her dozen victims for the tube of the entire world no word will be said or wrote about the thousands and thousands of disarmed civilians victims of the serbian cleasing. All this mattar is one sided. serbians supporters made small pieces of the atrocities committed and choose only the very few who serbs lost.
Ok i can write all the guys of this site are all neutral pro serbs this show how all events was managed and because serbs could pratice horrofic crimes with till media support.

the history is ever wrote by the owners of the political power one day (perhaps) the real history will be showed.
This is the hope of the victims. Memory is the only weapon now

Victor.
I would not even go to Bosnia at all. Just to comment on 12.000 Albanians "killed by the Serbs".
Information from International Red Cross will tell you that from Jan 1st, 1998 until today, in Kosovo 8,700 people have been "killed or missing".
Out of this number 6,200 are Albanians (4,700 dead and 1,500 missing) and 2,500 "Serbs and other non-Albanians" (1,880 dead and 620 missing).
This number includes Kosovo victims, those inside Serbia are not included in this number.
THOSE ARE THE FACTS, VICTOR.
If you don't believe International Red Cross, same data is available to you at UNMIK's Missing persons Commitee, and Missing Persons Comitee of Kosovo Interim Government (I guess you can at least trust Kosovo Government).
There's really no excuse for throwing those numbers around any more.
By the way, if you will continue from now on, to claim that Serbs viciouslly killed 6,200 Albanians, that would also be false.
This number includes ALL Albanian victims for this period.
-For example, it includes KLA fighters that died during combat. What number would that be? I don't know. But, I'm sure that you are aware of all the monuments erected to KLA fallen fighters all over Kosovo. Or do you think that none of KLA fighters died?
-This number includes Albanians killed by NATO bombs. I'm sure that you are aware of two refugee convoys hit by NATO planes, to name just those cases. Albanians died during the bombing, that's a fact. They died long after the bombing too (cluster bombs. Or do you think that none of Albanians died due to NATO actions?
-This number also includes Albanians deliberatelly killed by KLA (collaborators, etc.)
Example again, isn't Idriz Balaj at the trial right now for murder of two Albanian sisters? Or that some of the mass graves in Haradinaj's area of responsibility contained not only non-Albanian bodies, but Albanians as well?
Take it way back to this period (1998) before any significant action by Army or Police took place in the summer.
One example, liquidation of entire Albanian family in Klina, for their bussiness ties to Serbia. etc. There are many others. Are you aware of this at all?
-Finally, there are Albanians who simply died because they were cought in the crossfire, etc. Wars inevitably bring civilian casulties. That's a fact.

Substract those numbers and you will arrive to number of Albanians brutally murdered by the Serbs. And there are those, no doubt. Crimes were commited, and there is no excuse for them. 95% of the crimes done by Serbs in Kosovo were commited after NATO started the bombing to stop those crimes (that did not start yet). Don't get me wrong here, I'm not trying to deny that. I would just like you to put things in the right place.

I do not know where get their statistics from. Obviously people on this forum just post non-sense and do not read enough. According to ICT 100,000 people died in Bosnia, over 30,000 of which were Serbs, the rest were Bosnian Muslims and Corats. The latest numbers on the Kosovo conflict which came out in December of 2006 from a report done by Spanish NATO members stated that 2500 people died in Kosovo from both sides, Serbs and Albanians. The report goes on to say that this includes all persons killed either by Serbs, KLA, or NATO. It also states that the ESTIMATES done previously double and tripple counted bodies thus it was not accurate. This report was published by very few agnecies, I read it on India Daily. Obviously for propaganda purposes the mass media still qotes that 250,000 people died in Bosnia and that more that 10,000 people died in Kosovo both of which are innacurate. I hope that you guys do more research before you try to use MORE propaganda to try to justify your arguments.

"despite the efforts of two of their Albanian neighbors, who tried to save them."

This should be the messgae of the day - that there are good and bad on both sides and that no-one needs war again as unfortunetly those who are crazy and evil take advantage of the anarchy that war provides.

Those ethnic-Albanians who tried to stop the killings shold be praised for their efforts. They are an example that all peoples can and should be able to live together and new barriers need not be created but real reconciliation and understanding to bring forth real and better future for all the peoples of Serbia - that is my message of win-win.

No comments from anyone now since the victims are Serbian, let's just get over it, I wonder why?? ...and people wonder why Serbian police tried to take control of the situation in 1999.

Well said Princip!

What are you talking about "no comments" since the victim is Serbian? Whenever a victim is Serbian this site is filled with comments!!

Why don't you read this and tell me again that Serbia's crackdown was justified. Police taking control of the 'situation'? Who created that situation?

----
Gruesome details of Kosovo war crimes emerge

BELGRADE, Serbia - Decomposing corpses were dumped into a trash-filled ditch. Blindfolded and hands bound, three Albanian-Americans were led to its edge and shot in the head, their bodies joining the others.

The details, emerging for the first time at the trial of two former Serbian commandos, shed light on how the regime of late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic tried to conceal atrocities against ethnic Albanians in the 1998-99 Kosovo war.

Thousands were killed in the Serbian crackdown against Kosovo separatists in 1998-99. When NATO launched air strikes to stop the carnage, hundreds of bodies of Kosovars were dug up and moved more than 200 miles to three locations in central Serbia, reburied in mass graves to cover up the killings.

The commandos have been charged as accomplices in the murder of brothers Illy, Mehmet and Agron Bytyqi - three U.S. citizens who had left New York to fight in Kosovo and were captured by the Serbs.

The bodies of the Bytyqi brothers were discovered in 2001. Their identities were later confirmed by an FBI forensics team.

"One day, a truck carrying some 30 corpses appeared in our camp," Radomir Djeric, a former commander of a special police training facility in Petrovo Selo, some 60 miles east of Belgrade, said at the trial Wednesday.

His testimony for the prosecution was closed to the public but minutes were made available to The Associated Press.

Djeric said he thought a large ditch had been dug to be used as a garbage disposal for the police training camp.

But when the truckload of corpses arrived from Kosovo, Djeric said he felt "manipulated and foolish" because the garbage-filled pit was primarily intended as a mass grave.

"The decomposing bodies were unloaded from the truck by men wearing gas masks to keep out the stench," Djeric said. "The bodies slid from the rear of the truck into the pit."

The indictment against the former commandos, Sreten Popovic and Milos Stojanovic, says the Bytyqi brothers were brought to the edge of the pit and shot in the head, causing them to slump into a mass grave atop 70 corpses dumped there earlier.

"They were positioned next to each other, with a cloth over their face and hands bound with wire," Bosko Radojkovic, a forensic expert who had exhumed the mass grave, said during the trial Thursday.

The three Albanian-Americans had left their home and pizza business in New York in 1999 to join the so-called Atlantic Brigade, which fought Serb forces in Kosovo, before they were arrested close to the Serbia-Kosovo boundary in July 1999, days after the Kosovo hostilities ended.

Serbian authorities, who ousted Milosevic from power in 2000, have identified 924 victims in the mass graves uncovered in Serbia. They said 53 were children younger than 16, and 72 were women.

In earlier court testimony, retired Serb policeman Bozidar Protic described how he transported the corpses.

"I was ordered by my superiors to take an empty truck (from Belgrade) to Kosovo. No one mentioned any bodies at first," Protic said, adding that he was initially just told he was to "perform a confidential task, important for the state."

But he said he soon realized that the transport involved bodies of people killed at several locations in Kosovo.

Protic detailed how he made "four rounds" with the truck, transporting a total of about 120 bodies from four locations in Kosovo to the three mass graves in Serbia.

The mass graves in central Serbia were discovered after Milosevic lost power. The former president was extradited to the U.N. war crimes court in the Netherlands in 2001, where he died last year, before his war crimes trial ended.

Serbia is trying to keep Kosovo as a province in the face of a U.N. plan unveiled last month that proposes supervised statehood for the predominantly ethnic Albanian territory.

Several of Milosevic's close aides are being tried by the U.N. war crimes court in The Hague for the Kosovo atrocities, while lower-level perpetrators - including the two ex-commandos - are being tried locally.

---

WHY DIDN'T B-92 REPORT THIS? IT IS IN SERBIA ISN'T IT??

Princip , I have never seen you coment on the trial where top serb officials are being judged for masacres of K-Albanians and I never heard you side with victims of massacre(of course I am talking about Albanians).

"Stijović told him that they had been released after Hilmi Haradinaj’s intervention. He is the father of the accused Ramush Haradinaj."
I though the Haradinaj family was killing Serbs not saving them. Why are the Prosecutors questioning witnesses that are defining the Haradinaj’s? I think that the Prosecutors should go after the ones that order the killing of Milovan and Milka Vlahović and hang him high! There is no excuse for the killing of civilian (Albanian, Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian).

Art, Serbs only see what others did to them, and the do not see the crimes perpetrated against more than 150 000 Muslims and 12 000 Albanians by their own! Serbs like Matthew and Ida remember the Krajina but nothing preceeding the Krajina. They accuse the Croats and the Bosnians of atrocities but dont recall their own!

Pity indeed!

"Princip… I never heard you side with victims of massacre (of course I am talking about Albanians)."
I've seen Princip condemn atrocities committed by Serbians and even apologize for their crimes.
"Matthew and Ida remember the Krajina but nothing preceeding the Krajina. They accuse the Croats and the Bosnians of atrocities but dont recall their own!"
Are you perhaps speaking of WWII Victor? Being that every family in the area lost loved ones to the dreaded Ustashe and many of those who survived are alive today and remember that horror. Or perhaps you are referring to Borovo Selo? Although I'm willing to bet you'd blame that on the Serbs as well.
As far as accusing me of refusing to acknowledge crimes were committed by Serbians, we all know that's hogwash. I've consistently condemned such atrocities. The work I did with Bosniak Humanitarian groups speaks for itself. The fact that I was publicly called a traitor on Serbian television would seem to negate your accusations that I am somehow an extreme nationalist. However, I suppose in your mind its impossible to love Serbia and to care for our victims without being a Nationalist. Its still amazing to me that you can not tell the difference between a far left wing extremist moderate like myself, and a dyed in the wool Nationalist.
The fact remains Victor, if you look at raw numbers, the number of Serbian victims in all the conflicts in the Balkans very nearly reflects their population distribution. This is true in Bosnia and in Kosovo. However, you continuously proclaim that innocent Serbian villagers deserved the fate that awaited them simply because some gangsters from Belgrade committed horrible atrocities.
And as always Victor, you are just making up numbers once again. Why aren't you using the figure of 250,000 innocent Bosniak civilians, you like that number, its pretty…
To be honest, I find it very distasteful to try to minimalize the crimes of one side by pointing out the crimes of the other side. Instead, we all need to look at the crimes committed in our names and acknowledge that it was wrong. Just because some gangster from Belgrade, (or elsewhere), raped, robbed and stole, and then proclaimed he was doing it for the good of the Serbian people, does not make it right. Those people are the true traitors to the Serbian people and should see justice. They do not speak for me, nor for the vast majority of regular Serbian folk. All they did was bring suffering and dishonor upon the Serbian nation. However, that in no way diminishes the suffering or justifies the crimes committed against innocent Serbians. Nor does it invalidate the right of the Serbian people on the ground to resist the revival of the Ustashe movement. They had every right to fear for their safety. History has proven that what was started in WWII was completed in 1995.

Well here statistics is not valid but the attempt of create eguality from a colourful narrative, I am certain that all no serbian who with their bare hands had some vegeance from the killings made by the serb army will be prosecuted and hung up and serbs will cry her dozen victims for the tube of the entire world no word will be said or wrote about the thousands and thousands of disarmed civilians victims of the serbian cleasing. All this mattar is one sided. serbians supporters made small pieces of the atrocities committed and choose only the very few who serbs lost.
Ok i can write all the guys of this site are all neutral pro serbs this show how all events was managed and because serbs could pratice horrofic crimes with till media support.

the history is ever wrote by the owners of the political power one day (perhaps) the real history will be showed.
This is the hope of the victims. Memory is the only weapon now

Victor.
I would not even go to Bosnia at all. Just to comment on 12.000 Albanians "killed by the Serbs".
Information from International Red Cross will tell you that from Jan 1st, 1998 until today, in Kosovo 8,700 people have been "killed or missing".
Out of this number 6,200 are Albanians (4,700 dead and 1,500 missing) and 2,500 "Serbs and other non-Albanians" (1,880 dead and 620 missing).
This number includes Kosovo victims, those inside Serbia are not included in this number.
THOSE ARE THE FACTS, VICTOR.
If you don't believe International Red Cross, same data is available to you at UNMIK's Missing persons Commitee, and Missing Persons Comitee of Kosovo Interim Government (I guess you can at least trust Kosovo Government).
There's really no excuse for throwing those numbers around any more.
By the way, if you will continue from now on, to claim that Serbs viciouslly killed 6,200 Albanians, that would also be false.
This number includes ALL Albanian victims for this period.
-For example, it includes KLA fighters that died during combat. What number would that be? I don't know. But, I'm sure that you are aware of all the monuments erected to KLA fallen fighters all over Kosovo. Or do you think that none of KLA fighters died?
-This number includes Albanians killed by NATO bombs. I'm sure that you are aware of two refugee convoys hit by NATO planes, to name just those cases. Albanians died during the bombing, that's a fact. They died long after the bombing too (cluster bombs. Or do you think that none of Albanians died due to NATO actions?
-This number also includes Albanians deliberatelly killed by KLA (collaborators, etc.)
Example again, isn't Idriz Balaj at the trial right now for murder of two Albanian sisters? Or that some of the mass graves in Haradinaj's area of responsibility contained not only non-Albanian bodies, but Albanians as well?
Take it way back to this period (1998) before any significant action by Army or Police took place in the summer.
One example, liquidation of entire Albanian family in Klina, for their bussiness ties to Serbia. etc. There are many others. Are you aware of this at all?
-Finally, there are Albanians who simply died because they were cought in the crossfire, etc. Wars inevitably bring civilian casulties. That's a fact.

Substract those numbers and you will arrive to number of Albanians brutally murdered by the Serbs. And there are those, no doubt. Crimes were commited, and there is no excuse for them. 95% of the crimes done by Serbs in Kosovo were commited after NATO started the bombing to stop those crimes (that did not start yet). Don't get me wrong here, I'm not trying to deny that. I would just like you to put things in the right place.

I do not know where get their statistics from. Obviously people on this forum just post non-sense and do not read enough. According to ICT 100,000 people died in Bosnia, over 30,000 of which were Serbs, the rest were Bosnian Muslims and Corats. The latest numbers on the Kosovo conflict which came out in December of 2006 from a report done by Spanish NATO members stated that 2500 people died in Kosovo from both sides, Serbs and Albanians. The report goes on to say that this includes all persons killed either by Serbs, KLA, or NATO. It also states that the ESTIMATES done previously double and tripple counted bodies thus it was not accurate. This report was published by very few agnecies, I read it on India Daily. Obviously for propaganda purposes the mass media still qotes that 250,000 people died in Bosnia and that more that 10,000 people died in Kosovo both of which are innacurate. I hope that you guys do more research before you try to use MORE propaganda to try to justify your arguments.