The New York Times

Friday, July 9, 1999

Alleged Mass Grave in Kosovo Probed

By The Associated Press

LJUBENIC, Yugoslavia (AP) -- Bones littered the ground in this western village in Kosovo and NATO peacekeepers said Friday they fear the remains of up to 350 victims of Serb killings may be scattered in the nearby gorges and valleys.

The peacekeepers sealed off parts of this mountainous area Friday so war crimes experts could investigate reports of the mass burial site. If confirmed, it would be the largest massacre site yet discovered in Kosovo.

Villagers said Serb security forces shot some residents and hurled others off cliffs into streams below.

``They divided the women and children from the men and told them to go to Albania. After that, they executed two men from the village in front of us and after a while they started to shoot us, using all different kinds of weapons,'' said one villager, Sadik Jamurati.

As NATO troops tried to assess the full damage of what President Slobodan Milosevic's forces did in Kosovo, Serb anger toward the authoritarian leader surged again Friday.

City assemblies in two Yugoslav cities -- Nis and Sombor -- joined other Serbian towns in passing declarations calling on Milosevic to step down.

In Nis, the aldermen from Milosevic's Socialist Party protested the declaration, saying it was ``an act of treason'' and accusing the opposition of ``provoking a civil war.'' In Lescovak, 120 miles southeast of Belgrade, 2,500 people lit candles during a fifth straight day of anti-government protests, demanding that Milosevic resign.

Yugoslavia's main pro-democracy group, the Alliance for Change, said it would start a petition drive in Belgrade for Milosevic's ouster, the private Beta news agency reported. It would be the group's first public protest in the capital since NATO's 78-day bombing campaign.

U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, on a European tour, noted that Milosevic was an indicted war criminal and warned other countries not to give him refuge.

``If there is any place where he seeks sanctuary, perhaps I would recommend The Hague,'' Cohen said, referring to the site of the international war crimes tribunal.

At the alleged massacre site in Ljubenic, villagers said as many as 80 people were killed on April 1, the day Serb police reportedly surrounded it and the nearby hamlets of Streoc Zhebel and Rausic. Residents were told they had five minutes to get their possessions together.

``They told us, `We're just going to ask you a few questions and then we're going to escort you to Albania.' That is how they betrayed us,'' said Sali Huskaj, a 58-year-old teacher.

Many of those who survived the first killings in the villages fled into the steep mountains just west of Ljubenic, braving snow that in April was up to six feet deep.

Survivors said they hid in the mountains for a week before Serb security forces caught up with them.

``We were attacked from all sides,'' said Huskaj, who had fled into the mountains with his wife. ``They threw people from the rocks down into the streams.''

Huskaj said the victims included ``paralyzed people, retarded people, and a 90-year-old woman.''

Villagers declined to take journalists to the killing site in the mountains, saying it was at least a four-hour trek. NATO peacekeepers blocked off the area to protect evidence for investigators from the international war crimes tribunal and said they wanted to check for possible mines.

Huskaj said he was at the site two days earlier. ``I saw bodies, some with their heads cut off ... bodies on top of each other,'' he said.

Lt. Commander Louis Garneau, a KFOR spokesman, said peacekeepers have been told there could be 350 bodies around Ljubenic, but they have not yet been able to confirm the accounts.

Huskaj said he is certain there are hundreds of bodies in the mountains -- a claim that other villagers agreed was true.

``(The mountains are) full of dead people,'' Jamurati said, adding that villagers have already begun bringing down some of the bodies.

The reported massacre site is near the western city of Pec in the sector patrolled by Italians, said NATO spokesman Maj. Jan Joosten in Pristina.

In Celine and another nearby Kosovo village, German peacekeepers late last month found what appeared to be graves containing 119 people.