Kosovo Doctor Describes Massacre

A Kosovo Albanian doctor who said he was expelled from his village by Serb forces testified at the Hague tribunal this week about the upheaval and massacre of Albanian civilians in Kosovo in 1999.



Liri Loshi said that he ended up in the village of Tushile in March that year after Serb troops forced him to leave his village in the Skenderaj municipality.



“The Serb forces came to my village, they burnt my house first, and then burnt a couple of other houses… They expelled all the villagers,” he said.



While in Tushile, a group of women arrived from the nearby village of Izbica, seeking shelter and saying that Serb forces had just massacred a group of men in their village, he said.



Loshi said he went to Izbica on March 30 to investigate, and found dozens of bodies.



He told judges that he recorded his findings with a video camera.



“As a doctor, I saw that I could not help the executed people, but as a journalist, I thought that I could record the massacre so I could show the public what had happened, so they would learn about the massacre committed by the Serb forces in Izbica,” he explained.



Loshi was testifying in the trial of former Serbian police official Vlastimir Djordjevic, who is charged with crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war including the murder, deportation and persecution of the Kosovo Albanian population between January 1 and June 20, 1999.



Djordjevic was head of the public security department of the Serbian interior ministry, MUP, and is accused of participating in a Serb-led criminal plan which allegedly led to the removal of around 800,000 Kosovo Albanians from Kosovo.



According to the indictment against Djordjevic, on or about March 27, 1999, Serb and Yugoslav forces surrounded Izbica. The troops robbed the villagers of their valuables and then the men were separated from the women and children, it said.



“The men were then further divided into two groups, one of which was sent to a nearby hill, and the other was sent to a nearby streambed. The forces of the FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) and Serbia then fired upon both groups of men and at least 116 Kosovo Albanian men were killed,” alleges the prosecution in the indictment.



During Loshi’s examination-in-chief, prosecutor Daniela Kravetz played the video recordings which the witness had taken, showing the aftermath of the massacre.



Loshi, who was testifying for the third time at the Hague tribunal, explained that the two groups of dead bodies seen in the footage were mainly those of elderly people.



The film showed walking sticks strewn among the dead bodies. Three of the victims were members of his family while many others had been his patients, he said, as he was working in the villages around the area at that time.



Asked to describe the injuries inflicted on the dead, the witness gave a grim picture.



“These were wounds that are created by firearms at close distance with projectiles of a large calibre. These were very large wounds on their faces, bodies, hands and arms and legs. Wherever they were caught by the projectiles, their wounds were irregular and large,” he said.



Among the dead, there was also a woman who had been shot and another who appeared to have been burnt alive, said Loshi.



“She was in a tractor and the Serb forces just set the tractor on fire and she was burnt alive in the tractor,” he told judges, although he didn’t witness these events.



The video footage showed bodies clad only in civilian clothes and Loshi explained that none of the dead were members of the military, but ordinary civilians.



He said that he and some other people from the area identified 127 bodies and listed the victims’ names. They buried the bodies, marking their names and dates of birth on wooden plaques by the graves, he told the court.



According to Loshi, in the weeks before the massacre, up to 25,000 people from settlements in the Skenderaj municipality had taken shelter in Izbica.



They did so after hearing about the killing of civilians by Serb forces in the area, he said, adding that he himself went to the village to help them.



“A large group of people started to gather in Izbica because the place where they gathered was a valley between two hills and they felt safer there from the shelling,” he told judges.



But then when Serb forces began to shell Izbica itself on March 24, people started heading for the nearby village of Tushile, said Loshi.



“The fear was the Serb forces would penetrate Izbica very soon, so the majority of the people started to leave,” he said, explaining that of all its residents and people who had sought refuge there, only around 3,000 remained.



Then, just a few days later, civilians were forced out of Tushile too, he said.



“On March 30, I saw the Serbian forces in the direction of Tushile forcing the civilian population out of their houses,” Loshi told the court, explaining that he could see what was happening from a hilltop overlooking the area.



“[Serb forces] were directing people – some in the direction of Skenderaj and some others in the opposite direction,” he added.



During cross-examination, Djordjevic’s defence team put forward the theory that the shelling that frightened and killed members of the civilian population was conducted by NATO rather than Serb forces.



NATO conducted a military operation in Kosovo between March 24 and June 11, 1999, to force a Serb withdrawal from the province.



But Loshi denied that NATO airstrikes were responsible for the casualities.



“In the area where I lived, there was no bombing by NATO. The shelling came from the Serb forces, land forces, from their position on the ground,” he said.



Djordjevic’s defence counsel, Dragoljub Djordjevic, sought to advance his argument that it was the Serb army, rather than the police headed by his client, that was responsible for the Albanian casualties.



Loshi confirmed that a tank he saw belonged to the Serb army and not the police.



However, he said the Serb police arrested civilians in the days around March 30, and took them to the police station in Skenderaj.



The counsel also put it to the witness that the actions of the Serb army and police were simply an effort to maintain the sovereignty of the Serb state in the face of armed resistance from ethnic Albanian separatists the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA.



But Loshi rejected his argument.



“The objective was killing, inflicting horror and terror among the population, as well as fear and forcing the Albanian population in Kosovo to leave towards Albania and Macedonia,” he said.



“One cannot defend sovereignty by mass killings. And this is what the Serb army and police did.”



Simon Jennings is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.