An ethnic Albanian woman testified Wednesday before the U.N. war crimes tribunal and defendant Slobodan Milosevic that she was the only survivor among nearly 50 family members killed together in a Kosovo town three years ago -- escaping the Serbian police and paramilitaries she said committed the massacre by pretending to be dead and then jumping off the truck carrying their bodies to a grave site.
The tribunal's indictment against the former Yugoslav president listed 45 persons bearing the surname Berisha, 18 of them children between 1 and 18 years old, among the killed in March 1999 at the Kosovo town of Suva Reka. They all lived in the same street.
Shureta Berisha, 41, told the court her husband and four children -- the oldest 16 years of age and the youngest only 22 months -- were mowed down along with much of her extended family.
The massacre occurred on March 26, two days after NATO launched an air campaign against Yugoslavia over alleged atrocities by Yugoslav security forces against Albanians in Kosovo.
Shureta said her family house had been rented by the Organization for Security and Cooperation as the local headquarters.
But when OSCE officials left the town with the rest of the Kosovo mission on 20 March, her husband Nedzad was first beaten up and then shot and wounded by security forces who had come in large numbers to the town with several tanks. Another man was killed outside the house. A large tank posted nearby had its gun directed at the house, Shureta said. The police took 50,000 German marks, or about $25,000, from her family and OSCE office equipment was looted, she said.
Shureta said in the early afternoon on March 26, Albanian women and children with some older men, most of them members of her wider family, were driven out of their homes, forced into a cafe and killed or mortally wounded in a hail of bullets from automatic rifles. The shooting lasted for 20 minutes or more and when it ended she could see some people around her in great pain and crying.
"It was absolutely horrible," Shureta told the court.
She said there were about 30 men, some in civilian clothes and others in uniforms, who carried out the executions. She identified two civilians by first names but was not certain about their surnames.
She said she heard men shouting in Serbian, "Prepare the lorries and take the bodies away as soon as possible." She herself was wounded, but played dead and told one of her sons who was still alive to do the same, Shureta said.
It was previously understood that her son also survived but she told the court, "My husband and my four children, two sons and two daughters, were killed at Suva Reka."
The dead bodies and the wounded were loaded on to the lorries and ferried toward Prizren, the witness said. Although gravely injured, she managed to jump off the lorry at the village of Ljutoglav where she was given first aid by fellow Albanians. She later received medical treatment at Budakovo and after six weeks joined a convoy of refugees and crossed into Albania after surrendering all their identity documents to Yugoslav border authorities, Shureta said.
Presiding judge Richard May advised Milosevic to forgo the cross examination of this witness. He said, "Considering the experience she went through, I suggest you should at least this once try to forsake your questioning."
Milosevic, who is representing himself in the trial, agreed but brandished a document with a statement by a man named Marjan Krasniqi. The former Albanian traffic police inspector claimed the massacre had been carried out by a local group of criminals, including an Albanian, and people mentally disturbed and that their purpose was plunder.
He demanded that the statement made to tribunal investigators in the Albanian capital Tirana be registered as the tribunal's official document. The judge said the chamber would consider the request.
The week at the trial started with another of the tribunal's star witnesses, Norwegian ambassador to the United States Knut Vollaebeck. He heard Milosevic accuse him of responsibility for NATO's attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 because as chairman of the OSCE at the time he withdrew its Kosovo peace verification mission under orders from the Alliance.
Vollaebeck categorically rejected the allegation, telling Milosevic he, not Vollaebeck, was responsible for the 11-week bombing campaign. Serb forces had not honored an 1998 agreement with the OSCE to deal with restraint with the ethnic Albanian population but "went around committing crimes," he said.
Countering Milosevic's claim that Albanian refugees fled Kosovo in fear of the NATO bombs, Vollaebeck said he had talked to many refugees in Macedonia and Albania and that all of them told him they had been expelled by Serb forces.
The diplomat said Milosevic, as head of state was responsible for the exodus.
"You, your government and military forces began to force the Kosovo population to leave their homes long before the start of the bombing. ... You wanted a small-scale war which would smolder and you were prepared to make concessions little by little so that you could stay in power. You were surprised to see that this was no longer possible," Vollaebeck declared.
Milosevic said he opposed the proposed agreement being negotiated at the abortive international peace conference in Rambouillet, France, because its military provisions would have amounted to an occupation of Kosovo and Yugoslavia, a point that Vollaebeck denied.
The Norwegian diplomat also testified that only hours before the air raids began on March 24, he telephoned Milosevic to say Yugoslav forces had been torching Albanian houses in Kosovo and that its population were fleeing to Macedonia and Albania. Milosevic told him it was members of the Albanians' Kosovo Liberation Army who were burning hay to simulate houses on fire and that the population were in fact going on picnics to the two neighboring countries.
"Mr. Vollaebeck, you're watching the CNN too much," the diplomat quoted Milosevic as saying. |end| Content: 02002000 02006000 02008000 11006000
