The Kosovo Cover Up

For nearly two years the fate of thousands of ethnic Albanians missing in the Kosovo war was a tightly held secret in Serbia. Then, it started unraveling. In this report, American RadioWorks examines new evidence that Serbian forces removed, hid and burned the bodies of Albanians as part of a cover up personally ordered by Slobodan Milosevic

June 28, 2001
Ever since the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans 600 years ago, June 28 has been a signal date in Serbian history, solemnly commemorating patriotism and tragedy.

June 28, 2001 was no different.

Bowing to intense international pressure (and promises of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and credits) Serbian authorities sent the country's former ruler, Slobodan Milosevic, on a secret journey that ended in a jail cell at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Milosevic was charged with crimes against humanity for killings and expulsions of ethnic Albanians during the war in Kosovo (he now faces a separate indictment for war crimes during the 1991-92 war in Croatia).

As a military aircraft was flying Slobodan Milosevic to Holland, Serbian state television broadcast shocking images that exposed one of Milosevic's most secret wartime operations. In a program that for many Serbs signaled an end to the 13-year Milosevic era—a period in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed in brutal warfare—Serbian television broadcast raw footage of workers unearthing a mass grave on the outskirts of Belgrade. In the report, a Serbian pathologist described the discovery of charred remains of some 40 people, including two young children.

After more than four months of excavations, Serbian officials now say they have located at least seven mass graves and some 430 bodies in Serbia outside of Kosovo province. Those sites include graves at Batajnica near Belgrade, in Petrovo Selo in eastern, Serbia and near Perucac dam in western Serbia. Investigators believe most of the victims are ethnic Albanian civilians—including women and children—killed and shipped out of Kosovo in refrigerator trucks. Many were shot at close range and some were bound and blindfolded.

The Investigator
The job of investigating the graves fell to Captain Dragan Karleusa, a middle-aged police commander who is deputy commander of Serbia's anti-crime task force, a unit formed after Milosevic's ouster in October 2000. Karleusa's previous experience was largely limited to vice and corruption inquiries. Without specifying what kind of evidence Serbian authorities had gathered, Karleusa alleges the graves are part of an elaborate cover-up ordered by Slobodan Milosevic to hide evidence of war crimes in Kosovo.

Karleusa says investigators were stunned by the trajectory of the investigation. "We have a saying. 'We were hunting a rabbit and snared a wolf.' That means we thought we were looking for something small, but it turned out to be very big."

The mass graves and eyewitness testimony compiled by Karleusa's team are also big discoveries for investigators from the U.N. war crimes tribunal (ICTY) in The Hague. In addition to teams from the International Red Cross and a Serbian human rights group, ICTY investigators have closely monitored the exhumations. As ICTY investigators rush to gather more evidence against former President Milosevic, they are seeking to establish direct links between Milosevic and military and police units that conducted ethnic cleansing operations.

For Dragan Karleusa, there is little doubt that the bodies dug out of graves hundreds of miles from Kosovo are those of missing ethnic Albanians. Sitting in his office in the Serbian Interior Ministry in Belgrade, Karleusa says: "These people were killed somewhere in Kosovo. They were killed in one way or another. That's the first part of the story. The other part is the way these people were then transported from there to here in order to hide the bodies."

One key piece of evidence pointing to Milosevic's involvement in the cover up is the location of many of the grave sites. Most were discovered on or near police bases where Milosevic's elite units were stationed and trained in clandestine operations. More evidence against Milosevic is believed to have come from a former senior police official who provided a basic outline of the body disposal operation to investigators, according to Belgrade press reports.

Nevertheless, Dragan Karleusa says his team is still trying to piece together how the operation was conducted and where all the bodies went. "One aspect of the investigation is to find out how the system worked," says Karleusa. "Who drove trucks, who gave orders on the ground, who escorted trucks, who ordered where the bodies were to be disposed?"

'Civilians were the Priority'
For this report, American RadioWorks met with more than 10 men, all Serbian veterans of the Kosovo campaign, who were involved with the removal of bodies of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. Six of the men directly participated in the actions, either as security escorts or drivers or for logistical support. Several men showed photographs of bodies that apparently had been pulled from graves and stacked near trucks or at industrial facilities.

One man who asked to be called "Dusan" says he was a field commander in a secret police unit that escorted trucks filled with corpses to graves and industrial sites throughout Serbia. He agreed to tell his story and provide written testimony on the condition that we conceal his real name and identity. Dusan met an American RadioWorks team at a noisy café in the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro and then drove to an isolated spot where he spoke in short, nervous sentences. Dusan says he has direct knowledge of 12 trucks that carried a total of around 300 bodies.

"Women, children, and civilians were the priority," says Dusan. "The operation was to remove only civilian bodies. Most of them were burned to conceal crimes ... in smelting plants, in crematoriums, in a steal plant, or they were buried in remote places and near military and police bases."

In addition to mass graves, Dusan says, he delivered bodies to industrial complexes in Serbia apparently so they could be burned in furnaces. These sites included the copper smelting facility at Bor, a mountainous area in the east of Serbia and a huge steel plant in Smederevo, a city on the Danube downriver from Belgrade. Dusan says he also delivered bodies to the Trepca lead refinery in Kosovo itself, a complex where at least six other fighters say they burned hundreds of bodies during the war (American RadioWorks reported in February 2001 that, soon after the air war, French investigators searched the Trepca mines amid reports that Serbian forces dumped hundreds of bodies down the mineshafts. The investigators found no bodies. A separate team of investigators from the U.N. war crimes tribunal inspected the Trepca industrial complex and lead refinery—located at Zvecan, some 10 miles from the mines&151;but as of June 2001 the tribunal had conducted no forensic tests at the site, according to an ICTY investigator. A spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Kosovo, Claire Trevena, says the OSCE "can't say yes or no to whether or not there was burning of bodies" at the Trepca industrial complex).

Dusan says the bodies were transported from Kosovo in refrigerator and tractor-trailer trucks under secret police escort to conceal the operation from ordinary Serbs. "The trucks were always under security escort, maybe two, three jeeps," he says. "Sometimes the trucks would have Red Cross signs. It was coordinated in such a way by the security service that we never got stopped. No one would dare."

A reservist in the same secret police unit, a man who asked to be called "Petar," says he escorted trucks to a mass grave near Belgrade and to two other sites in western Serbia. Petar says many of the victims were from villages near the Kosovo towns of Suva Reka and Prizren. Petar describes how the bodies were unloaded:

"The ground was already prepared. The truck backed up close to the pit and the bodies were dumped in. We would then burn them and close the pit with dynamite. These people were civilians, &091;but they were] stubborn people who refused to leave their homes after we ordered them out."

American RadioWorks verified many details provided by Dusan, Petar, and other former fighters and secret police operatives with Serbian and western war crimes investigators. For example, the location of secret facilities used by the security forces, the sources for some of the trucks, and dates when bodies were believed to have been removed.

Serbian investigators say they still cannot confirm that bodies were incinerated. But western government officials who spoke off the record say they have strong evidence that industrial facilities were used. Some of this evidence came in secret communications with Serbian informants during the 1999 NATO air war. Western officials say the Serbian informants told western governments, including the United States, that bodies of ethnic Albanians were being trucked to industrial sites in Serbia like the Bor copper smelter.

Code name: Nicholas
One informant was a Serbian army reservist and truck driver who was given the code name "Nicholas." Milos Vasic is a senior journalist with the Belgrade magazine Vreme. Vasic has seen transcripts of testimony Nicholas gave to war crimes investigators. In them, Nicholas said he was ordered to drive refrigerator trucks from a police base in Kosovo to eastern Serbia.

"He &091;Nicholas] would be given a loaded and padlocked truck in that army and police base (located in eastern Kosovo), drive it to the Bor complex, leave it at the security check on the entrance and an empty truck would be returned by a police officer," says Vasic.

Nicholas was not told what he was carrying, but he soon became suspicious and with the help of friends took a look. "When they opened the truck, they found it full of bodies," says Vasic. "They took photographs—poloroids—of the operation, including the license plates of the Yugoslav Army truck."

Shocked by his discovery, Nicholas managed to flee Serbia and eventually took his story and photographs to the United States embassy in Croatia. Vasic says Nicholas is now a protected witness and is expected to testify in the war crimes trial against former President Milosevic.

Nicholas was not the only one disturbed by the body disposals. Several fighters, including Dusan, say they were disgusted with the operation and angry at commanders for ordering them to handle corpses.

"Maybe you've never seen a decomposing body," says Dusan. "I'm talking about an arm here, a leg there ... like gelatin. The smell sticks to you and you can't get rid of it for days."

Milosevic's Order
This was not the first time in the wars in former Yugoslavia that civilian killings were covered up. Investigators say all the warring sides used mass graves and many are in Bosnia and Croatia, including some containing Serbian victims.

When war came to Kosovo, investigators and former secret police operatives say Slobodan Milosevic and his advisors tried to avoid mistakes from Bosnia, where mass graves produced crucial evidence for war crimes trials.

According to Dragan Karleusa, soon after NATO started bombing Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999, a top police commander reminded Milosevic that the bodies of ethnic Albanian civilians piling up in western Kosovo could be used one day as evidence for war crimes investigations. Milosevic then summoned senior commanders to Belgrade.

"Milosevic ordered that all bodies in Kosovo that could be of interest for the Hague Tribunal, that is, that could be a problem, should be removed," says Karleusa.

But the regular police were overwhelmed and hastily dumped many bodies in shallow graves and in rivers. Two weeks into the air war, in mid-April, 1999, Slobodan Milosevic held another meeting in Belgrade in which he ordered his trusted security service-the secret police-to take over the body disposal operation, according to former police officers and a Yugoslav army intelligence officer with unique access to details of the meeting.

These sources say the job fell to one of the most notorious members of the security service's six-man executive council—Franko Simatovic. Simatovic was a legendary and notorious commander of brutal Serbian police militias during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. Simatovic's field unit, called the "Red Berets" or "Frenki's boys" and also known by its formal name, Unit for Special Operations (JSO), conducted key combat operations and was a conduit for fighters and material, according to investigators. Dusan, the field commander interviewed for this report, says Simatovic gave direct orders to seven unit commanders in Kosovo tasked with disposing of bodies. Dusan knows this, he says, because he was one of the commanders.

"Franko controlled this," says Dusan. "We reported to Franko, only Franko. Nobody else. Franko gave us the orders ... The army, the police, everyone was subordinated to the state security."

War crimes investigators have long suspected that Franko Simatovic was a key link - perhaps the main link - between Slobodan Milosevic and armed Serbian groups that led ethnic cleansing operations in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

U.N. war crimes investigators have been closely tracking Simatovic since the mide-1990s. Recently, Simatovic and his former secret police boss, Jovica Stanisic, were named as part of a "criminal enterprise" in an ICTY indictment against Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes allegedly committed during the 1991 war in Croatia. An ICTY spokesperson says that means both men are under formal investigations and could be subjects of separate indictments.

Dennis Milner, a senior ICTY investigations commander, says there is credible evidence that Simatovic's team conducted extensive operations in Kosovo.

"If those units were the perpetrators of particularly significant mass killings, it would certainly be logical to assume that they would take steps to dispose of bodies," says Milner.

Serbian police and army sources say JSO forces in Kosovo were commanded by Milorad Lukovic (also known as Milorad Ulemek)-nicknamed "The Legion"— who served directly under Simatovic in the formal command hierarchy of Milosevic's department of state security. The Security Service's six-man executive council received orders directly from Milosevic during the air war, according to investigators and former fighters. (In June 2001, Lukovic was relieved of his command and fled to the Serbian Republic in Bosnia, according to newspaper accounts and former fighters. In Bosnia, Lukovic and an unknown number of JSO officers joined the security detail for Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader who is facing an ICTY genocide indictment and is in hiding, according to former police operatives.)

These details are important for war crimes investigators because they reveal the actual (or de facto) command structure of Serbian forces in Kosovo. The accounts of the fighters interviewed for this report do not show that Milosevic personally ordered the killings of Albanian civilians. But they indicate the former Serbian leader knew about large scale killings of ethnic Albanian civilians by Serbian forces from the beginning of the air war and had authority and control over some of the suspected perpetrators.

From his jail cell in The Hague, Slobodan Milosevic continues to maintain his innocence. In several defiant appearances before the court, Milosevic has insisted he committed no crimes and legitimately defended Serbia from NATO aggression. Milosevic alleges the western alliance conducted an illegal war and killed Serbian civilians. Milosevic's wife and supporters in Belgrade say the mass graves are a hoax and the removal of bodies in Kosovo was part of routine clean up operations.

But for investigators like Dragan Karleusa, there is no other plausible explanation for how hundreds, possibly thousands, of bodies, could have been transported under such secrecy.

"Why would they remove bodies in this way if the people had died normally," says Karleusa. "Well, they didn't die normally. It was a crime. And this is how they wanted to cover up those crimes. "

It is now the job of prosecutors to prove that the clean up of bodies in Kosovo was in fact a cover-up of a terrible crime.

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