The New York Times

Tuesday, June 15, 1999

TRIBUNAL

Investigators From Many Nations to Begin Search for War Crimes

By MARLISE SIMONS

PARIS -- War crimes investigators will enter Kosovo on Tuesday to start their most sweeping inquiry since conflicts began in the former Yugoslavia in 1991, officials of the war crimes tribunal said Monday.

Prosecutors from the international tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, are putting together at least 12 teams of investigators involving some 300 people. The teams will consist of both tribunal personnel and police experts on loan from various countries who will work simultaneously across Kosovo.

The first teams are scheduled to spend at least a week doing surveying work, such as photographing, filming, and mapping out sites to record crime-scene evidence that risks being lost or changed, Paul Risley, a tribunal spokesman, said.

In the second phase, eight or ten days from now, forensic experts are expected to begin digging up areas that are suspected of holding mass graves of slain Albanians, Risley said.

The investigators are following in the footsteps of NATO peacekeepers who are tracking sites in which the court is particularly interested.

On Monday, troops cordoned off the first such sites, including three suspected mass graves near the village of Kacanik in southern Kosovo. Before investigators can get to work, they need clearance from the military, assuring them that no mines, booby traps or live ammunition remain on a site. It is this safeguarding of the sites, tribunal officials explained, that has delayed the investigators' work.

Until now, a tribunal staff of close to 30 people has been working at offices in Skopje, Macedonia. But the group is expected to swell tenfold once the experts promised by numerous countries are in place.

A team of British forensic experts has already arrived in Skopje, according to Risley. The first of a group of agents from the FBI and experts from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are expected in Skopje on Tuesday and Wednesday, he said. Others countries, including France, Germany and Norway, have pledged to send specialists in the coming days.

"This operation will be a massive undertaking," said Graham Blewitt, the deputy prosecutor of the tribunal in The Hague. "It will be unique in terms of the scale and the speed with which we will operate."

In contrast, he said, investigators who began to work in Bosnia and Croatia in 1995 usually had to do their work months or even years after the events. They were often blocked by Bosnian Serb authorities.

The police detectives and forensic experts coming in from abroad are expected to bring their own equipment, like cameras, tools and storage space for evidence. They also may have to learn some new rules.

"Our people will be briefing the outside experts on the procedures used by the tribunal, on what evidence we need and how we must safeguard that evidence," Blewitt said.

Risley said that targets for investigation included six towns and villages in Kosovo listed in the tribunal's recent indictment of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia; they will be investigated for mass graves. The surveying teams will also be looking for other crimes, Risley said. For example, they will consider whole villages that were destroyed either by arson and looting, or by shelling. And they will try to corroborate accounts from refugees, including accounts that Yugoslav police at border posts had taken away and destroyed their documents before they let them cross into Macedonia or Albania.

Finding such evidence, however modest it may appear beside atrocities, is essential for tribunal prosecutors as they prepare their charges, Risley said.