Lukic “Not Responsible” for Killings

A Serb policeman said this week that his former boss was not responsible for killing Albanian civilians or shipping their bodies out of the province.



Cedomir Sakic, a member of the Serbian interior ministry’s security unit, was testifying in the trial of former head of the Serbian interior ministry in Kosovo in 1998-9, Sreten Lukic.



The former police chief is accused alongside five other high-ranking officials of war crimes, murder, persecution and seeking to drive out most of the Albanians living in the province to ensure it remained part of Serbia.



Also on trial are former Serbian president Milan Milutinovic, former deputy prime minister Nikola Sainovic, ex-Yugoslav army chief of staff Dragoljub Ojdanic, and army officials Nebojsa Pavkovic and Vladimir Lazarevic.



This week, Sakic said that orders to ship Albanians’ bodies out of the province in a refrigerated truck had not come from Lukic, as was previously stated by a former prosecution witness.



Sakic told judges that the orders came from another officer. He also described talking to a police officer loading the bodies into the truck, who apparently said, “The shqiptars were killed by their own side, by NATO”, using a derogatory expression for Albanians.



Sakic’s testimony that Lukic did not order the disposal of the bodies contradicted that of former prosecution witness Bozidar Protic.



Sakic explained the discrepancy between their accounts was the result of a post-war falling out between Protic and Lukic over the ownership of a flat. Sakic claimed to have heard Protic tell the general that he would testify against him in The Hague, and would “bury him”.



This week, former police officer Dragan Paunovic, and former deputy head of the Serbian state security centre in Pristina, Ljubivoje Joksic, also testified in the trial.



They both denied that Lukic bore any responsibility for the activities of the Red Berets, the Serbian government’s elite police force, which was set up to arm, train and coordinate the activities of Serbian paramilitary groups.



Joksic said the Red Berets were under orders from the chief of Serbian state security, and that Lukic had no operational control over them.



In further testimony, he denied that the interior ministry had persecuted Albanian nationalist leader Ibrahim Rugova, who would go on to become the first president of Kosovo, or his close associate, Adnan Merovci.



He said that the house arrest of these two men had been ordered for their own protection against the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA - the guerrillas fighting Serbian rule. He even refused to call this house arrest, since “they could move freely about the house”, thereby contradicting previous testimony from the two men themselves.



Joksic went on to accuse the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, of aiding and training the KLA through its Kosovo Verification Mission, KVM, which was set up to monitor the situation in the region. He also blamed German intelligence for the mass exodus of Albanian civilians.



Fourth defence witness General Zoran Mijatovic, the ex-deputy head of the Serbian secret service, told the court that no-one from the interior ministry knew about paramilitary units operating in Kosovo. He said the KLA stepped up its campaign against civilians and police officers after the OSCE’s mission withdrew in March 1999.



Mijatovic insisted that the interior ministry had acted entirely within the law, and blamed the army for many of the crimes the police are accused of.



“Some military officers insisted on taking over services, which according to the law they should not have taken over,” he said, although he did not know who these officers were.



He also said KLA guerrillas had worn Serbian police and army uniforms to commit crimes against civilians in order to provoke NATO into attacking Serbia. However, he gave no evidence to back up this assertion.



Marija Radovanovic is an IWPR reporter in Belgrade.