Former Kosovo Judge Recalls Escape from Serb Forces

A former judge from Kosovo told the war crimes trial of six former Serb officials how he and his family were forced to flee Serb persecution in 1999.



Mahmut Halimi, who previously testified in the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in 2002, returned this week to give evidence in the trial of the six former political, military and police officials from Serbia who stand accused of war crimes in Kosovo in 1999.



Former Serbian president Milan Milutinovic, former deputy Yugoslav prime minister Nikola Sainovic, former Yugoslav army chief of staff Dragoljub Ojdanic, and police and army officers Vladimir Lazarevic, Sreten Lukic, and Nebojsa Pavkovic are charged with responsibility for the ethnic cleansing and persecution of thousands of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo allegedly committed by forces under their command in 1999.



The indictment against the six men states that “during late March and continuing through to the middle of April 1999, forces of the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] and Serbia expelled residents of the town of Kosovska Mitrovica. Some houses and at least one mosque were set on fire, women were sexually assaulted and Kosovo Albanians were robbed of their valuables. Other villages in the municipality were subject to a similar fate”.



“The Kosovo Albanian residents of the municipality were forced to join convoys going to the Albanian border where they were robbed of valuables and stripped of their identity documents,” the indictment further alleges.



Halimi, who was a judge at the district court in the Kosovan municipality of Mitrovica at the time relevant to the indictment, spoke of the persecution he said he and his family suffered at the hands of Serb forces seven years ago.



In his statement given to the Office of the Prosecutor, OTP, on the August 24, 2001, Halimi claimed he and his family first fled their home in Mitrovica after receiving an anonymous phone call on March 25, 1999.



The caller told him, "You have to escape, because it is your turn. They [will kill you in] the end."



After receiving this anonymous tip-off, he and his family fled to his brother’s house in the village of Zhabar, Halimi told the trial chamber this week.



He then recounted how he had received a second call from the same person - a woman speaking in Serbian - who told him, “They have approached your home.”



The witness understood the caller to be “talking about the military and paramilitary forces”.



Halimi struggled to contain his emotions when remembering the events of seven years ago. He broke down when recalling how he later discovered that his friend and colleague, Agim Hajrizi, a prominent trade union leader in Kosovo, was murdered the same night he received this tip-off.



Serb policeman Nenad Pavicevic was later found guilty of the murder of Hajrizi and his family at a trial presided over by Judge Halimi in November 2000.



“After that I learnt that the night of March 25, Agim Hajrizi had been killed at his own home. He was killed together with his young son...who was not yet 13,” he said.



During his testimony, Halimi went on to describe how he was asked to leave the village of Zhabar by members of the KLA, who said his presence there could constitute a risk to the other villagers.



The witness heeded this advice, he said, and, along with his brother’s sons, hid out in the mountains for six nights before returning to Zhabar.



He then told how on April 15, 1999, he and his family watched as people living in the surrounding area were driven from their homes en masse towards Zhabar by Serb police and military forces.



“It was a very sad sight,” he said.



When asked by the prosecutor to indicate how many people were in this convoy, Halimi found it hard to estimate.



“There were so many people that the road was not wide enough for them to walk on,” he explained.



He then recalled seeing “the police, the paramilitaries and regular military forces” starting to “burn houses in the lower part of Zhabar”.



Some time after this, he and his family joined a column of vehicles leaving the village – Montenegro was their final destination, he said.



On returning home on July 11 that year, Halimi described how he found his home “completely burnt”.



“In that neighborhood, my house was the only one that had been burnt,” he said.



This week, the trial chamber also heard the testimony of Veton Surroi, a Kosovan journalist, publisher, and member of the Assembly of Kosovo, who also previously testified at the Milosevic trial in April 2002.



Prosecutor Thomas Hannis questioned Surroi about the discrimination allegedly suffered by Kosovo Albanians in the province after Milosevic stripped Kosovo of its autonomy on becoming president of Serbia in 1989.



“After 1990, the first victim [of the annulment of Kosovo’s autonomy] was education,” said Surroi, before describing how a new segregation policy separated Albanian and Serbian children in schools throughout Kosovo.



The witness also testified about his role as part of the Albanian delegation to the peace negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo, which were held in Rambouillet in February and March 1989, and were backed by the US, the UK, Germany, Russia and France.



Surroi testified about the role of Sainovic and Milutinovic at the talks - which were a last-ditch attempt to stem the escalating conflict in Kosovo by persuading Serb and Albanian representatives to sign up to an agreement giving Kosovo more autonomy – the collapse of which sparked NATO airstrikes against Serbia later that month.



“Sainovic, for quite a large part of the negotiations was the political leader of the Belgrade delegation,” he said, “while Milutinovic would come every now and then from Belgrade” to take part.



The trial continues next week.



Caroline Tosh is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.