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To read my entire commentary, "The Crimes of the KLA: Who Will Pay,"
please go to: http://www.antiwar.com/orig/jatras9.html, where I write about the righteous Bytiqi brothers. Natasa
Kandic has been described as a George Soros mercenary who still imagine they can
rearrange the world as they see fit by their own yardstick. Stella.
"Unfortunately,
the Albanian-American
brothers
"righteous jihad" is one that further promotes bin Laden's war of terrorism against the American people. Sadly, they were pawns in that tragic game, victims of the unscrupulous lies and machinations of men like Congressman Eliot L. Engel of New York and William Walker, former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador and former member of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), who knew the facts but twisted and distorted them for their own purposes. It was William Walker who accompanied the bodies of the Bytyqi brothers back from Kosovo to New York.
"To compare the deaths of three Albanian-American brothers who
went
to fight on foreign soil as warriors of Islam along side the Marxist, narco-terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army to America s "Fighting Sullivan brothers," as reported in the Wadler article, is an insult to the memory of those brave sailors who were fighting for our country. When Mr. Walker joined Representative Engel at the funeral, he stated that he "was not certain the brothers were getting the recognition they deserved." To that I certainly agree, but not in the sense Mr. Walker intended. "So
what exactly is going on here? The connection between Osama
bin Laden's KLA and Al Qaeda is indisputable; these are the same terrorists our nation is fighting against. President Bush's admonition should be directed to those who support the KLA, in particular of Mr. William Walker and Congressman Engel: "You're either with us or against us." Which is it?" http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/26/world/europe/26kosovo.html NEW YORK TIMES (USA) August 26, 2006 2 Serbs Charged With Killing 3 Albanian-American Brothers in 1999 By NICHOLAS WOOD BUCHAREST, Romania, Aug. 25 - Serbia's war crimes prosecution office has charged two former Serbian police officers in connection with the killings of three Albanian-American brothers from Long Island who went missing in Serbia in 1999 and whose bodies were later found in a mass grave. The two men, Sreten Popovic and Milos Stojanovic, members of an elite Serbian police unit in Kosovo during the 1999 conflict between government forces and ethnic Albanian separatists, are accused of having had the three taken from a prison to a police training camp, where they were later executed. The indictments, brought Thursday, say the two former policemen violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war in their handling of the brothers. The three, residents of Hampton Bays, had come to Kosovo, the southern Serbian province, in 1999 to join ethnic Albanian guerrillas who were fighting Serbian forces there. The charges carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. A third former police officer was detained in May but has not been charged. The United States Embassy in Belgrade welcomed the announcement, but it also urged the Serbian authorities to try other police officers suspected of crimes. The three brothers - Ylli, Mehmet and Agron Bytyqi, all in their 20's - were detained on Kosovo's boundary with the rest of Serbia on June 26, 1999, two weeks after the end of the Kosovo conflict. The brothers' relatives say that when they were detained, they were helping a Gypsy escape persecution by ethnic Albanian refugees returning to Kosovo after the fighting. Serbian prosecutors say that the brothers were taken by members of Serbia's special police from a prison in Prokuplje, in southern Serbia, where they were serving a 15-day sentence on charges of illegally entering the country, and that they were driven to a training camp outside Petrovo Selo, a town near Serbia's border with Romania. Their bodies were found in July 2001 in a mass grave on the edge of the camp, with their hands bound and bullet wounds to the back of their heads. The war crimes prosecutors assigned to the investigation said earlier this year said they believed that the brothers were killed in revenge for the NATO-led air campaign waged against Serbian forces to stop repression of ethnic Albanians. The formal investigation began in March, when Mr. Popovic and Mr. Stojanovic were arrested. Mr. Popovic was a colonel in the Serbian gendarmerie, a special police force for antiterrorism operations, until this year. While the indictments were welcomed by human rights groups in Serbia, a leading rights lawyer accused the Serbian judiciary of being slow to prosecute senior police and military officials accused of war crimes. Natasa Kandic, the director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, said the authorities had failed to prevent the flight of two senior commanders suspected of involvement in the killings of the three brothers as well as other crimes during the Balkan wars of the 1990's. One of these, Gen. Goran Radosavljevic, the commander of special police units accused of executing the men, left Serbia earlier this year and his whereabouts are unknown. Gen. Vlastimir Djordjevic, accused by Serbian prosecutors of ordering the brothers' killings, left Kosovo after the fall from power of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, in 2000. Serbian and United Nations investigators have said they believe that he is hiding in Moscow. |
