Kosovo Victims' Relatives Testify About Mass Graves

An ethnic Albanian testifying about events in Kosovo during the spring of 1999 told judges that he saw mass graves being dug in the area of Prizren as Serbian police forced him to leave for Albania.



“On April 3, while in the convoy – when we were expelled and ordered to go to Albania by the [Serbian] police forces – we were stopped [by the road],” Hysni Berisha, whose family members were allegedly killed by Yugoslav and Serb forces, told The Hague tribunal.



“I was very near these two grave sites. It was dark and raining and I heard some machinery working.”



According to the witness, he was six or seven hundred metres away from the scene and he could see the headlights and hear the noise of the vehicles digging graves.



Berisha explained that while at the time he did not know what the two excavators he saw were doing, when he returned to Kosovo during the summer of 1999, he had spoken with three men who, he said, told him that they had been involved in transporting bodies to the mass graves.



“I spoke with three workers that were engaged in loading the bodies,” he explained. “These three persons told me that on April 2 or 3, they were forced to load bodies onto a refrigerated truck [and] that it was the [Serb] police forces who ordered them to do that.”



The prosecutor asked the witness how he knew that the burying of the dead in mass graves was the same operation that he had seen conducted by headlights on the night of April 3.



“[The three men] described the weather; they said it was raining and it was dark and it was some time in early April,” he said. “[It was] the same night.”



According to the witness, the men – two Romas and one Albanian – said that Serbian police dug the graves and they were forced to load bodies onto a truck.



“They said that after they finished the job, they returned to Prizren,” he said, explaining that they had also been beaten and appeared very distressed.



Hysni Berisha was testifying in the trial of Vlastimir Djordjevic, a former Serbian police chief who is charged at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, with five counts of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war committed as part of a bid to alter the ethnic balance of Kosovo and maintain Serbian control over the province.



During 1998 and 1999, forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, FRY, and Serbia conducted what prosecutors allege was “a systematic campaign” – including acts of murder, deportation, and persecution – that led to hundreds of deaths and the expulsion of approximately 800,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.



According to the indictment, on or around March 26, 1999, 47 members of the Berisha family were shot dead or wounded by FRY and Serbian forces in a coffee shop in the town of Suva Reka in southern Kosovo.



Body parts of family members have since been unearthed at a firing range site in Prizren municipality, say prosecutors, as well as at a second site at Batajnica near Belgrade. The prosecution alleges that victims’ remains that had initially been buried in mass and individual graves throughout Kosovo were later dug up by police and civilians and loaded onto trucks to be transported to places where they would be better hidden.



“Over 100 bodies of civilian men, women and children were unearthed from two mass graves at a military firing range outside Prizren,” prosecutors state in their pre-trial submissions to the court.



Commenting on a photograph of the Prizren firing range site shown by prosecutors in court this week, Hysni Berisha explained that the site was located 13 kilometres outside Suva Reka, on the way to Prizren.



He marked the location of two mass graves there, explaining that he had taken part in the formal process of identifying bodies which were exhumed by a British forensic team in September 1999.

Prosecutors then showed the witness a photograph of members of the Berisha family that he himself had found in one of the mass graves.



“This picture reminds me of the worst moment I experienced,” he said.



“This is the pencil box of Mirat [Berisha] who was in first grade,” he explained, emotionally, looking at the photo.



“That day was the first day of school and on that day, he was not amongst us any more.”



During his cross-examination of the witness, defence lawyer Dragoljub Djordjevic sought to cast doubt on the credibility of the testimony.



He asked him if it was correct that most of his knowledge of atrocities in and around Suva Reka came from what he’d been told by the next of kin of those who had been killed or gone missing from the area during the spring of 1999.



“Yes. Most of it is from the families,” agreed the witness.



Following the witness’s identification of the two mass graves from the photograph of the Prizren firing range, the defence sought to determine whether the witness was actually present when the mass graves were dug and people were buried in them.



“I was lucky and I was not in that group. If I had been, I would have been in the grave myself,” he said.



However, when later questioned by prosecutors, he said that he had found out afterwards that he had in fact witnessed this from afar.



A second member of the Berisha family, Halit Berisha, who is a former mayor of Suva Reka, also testified this week about his forced removal from the town at the hands of Serbian police and the atrocities that occurred there in March 1999.



He, too, gave evidence about the identities of bodies found in the mass graves near Prizren as he had helped identify the remains when they were unearthed.



Prosecutors showed Halit Berisha a picture of various items dug up at the Prizren firing range that allegedly belonged to Berisha family members and asked him if he recognised anything.



“It’s the tracksuit,” he said, referring to a piece of red cloth that he said was part of the clothing worn by his brother, Jashar Berisha, on March 26, the day he went missing from Suva Reka.



The witness had explained earlier in his testimony that his brother was wearing the bottom half of a red tracksuit under his jeans when he had left for work at the petrol station on the morning of March 26.



“I told him not to go to work because there was a war going on and I didn’t want him to suffer something bad,” remembered the witness.



He had waited for his brother to return from work that evening but he never did, the witness told judges.



According to Halit Berisha, the rest of his brother’s remains were found later at Batajnica, the second alleged mass grave site near Belgrade. Forensic experts in Pristina had confirmed a body to be that of his brother, he said, after he and other members of his family provided them with a blood sample.



“They told me that both arms and legs had been burnt. I was told he had been fired [at] on his back and his head. He had bullet marks,” he said.



The prosecution’s case continues in two weeks after the Easter break.



Simon Jennings is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.