[Given UNMIK's track record - officiating over the
murder of thousands of Kosovo civilians and the ethnic cleansing of
hundreds of thousands of others since June of 1999, while not
prosecuting a single perpetrator of these crimes - who has the greater
credibility on this issue?]
Friday July 20 9:08 AM ET
No Truth in Kosovo Serb Mass Grave Report -UN
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - United Nations
officials in Kosovo said on Friday there was no truth
in a Serbian media report that they had discovered a
grave containing up to 900 bodies, suspected to be of
Kosovo Serbs.
Belgrade's B-92 radio, citing a U.N. official in
Kosovo, said the site had been discovered near the
southern town of Suva Reka. It also said those buried
there were suspected to have been killed after Kosovo
came under international rule in 1999.
Guido Van Rillaer, the head of the missing persons
unit at Kosovo's U.N. police force, said around 230
people were buried at Suva Reka -- but in a cemetery
for unidentified bodies exhumed from mass grave sites
by war crimes investigators.
``It�s a cemetery, very clear and simple,�� he said.
``It�s a storage place...a cemetery kept for
unidentified bodies.��
The B-92 report said officials would probably not
start exhuming the alleged mass grave site until next
year.
A U.N. spokeswoman suggested the report may be
politically motivated, in line with a message spread
by some Serbian media that the U.N. is doing nothing
to trace missing Kosovo Serbs.
``The Serb press says we�re doing nothing on the
missing,�� said Susan Manuel, a spokeswoman for the
U.N. mission in Kosovo. ``It�s definitely a
distortion.��
Bodies in the Suva Reka cemetery managed by the United
Nations are only some of the 1,256 that were exhumed
by the war crimes tribunal in 1999 and 2000 and remain unidentified,
Manuel said. Investigators exhumed some 4,000 bodies in those two years
in an effort to gather evidence against former Yugoslav leader Slobodan
Milosevic, who was transferred to the U.N. war crimes tribunal at The
Hague last month, and other war crimes suspects. The vast majority of
those identified from mass graves in Kosovo are ethnic Albanians
believed to have been killed by Serb forces before or during NATO's 1999
bombing of Yugoslavia. Bodies of many more victims may never be found
due to attempts to conceal or destroy them, investigators say. But Serbs
say 1,300 members of their community have gone missing since the end of
the air war in June 1999, when the province was transferred from Serbian
to international rule, and have demanded the U.N. and NATO do more to
help find them.
Serbian News Network - SNN
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.antic.org/
