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EVENTS
Serbia's secret clean up of Kosovo
Kosovo, a sovereign state as of 17th February 2008, had for years been home of vicious conflict between the Serbs and Albanians who disputed the borderland between the two countries.
Two million of its inhabitants (that’s 90% of its population) are Kosovo Albanians (ethnic Albanians). Albanians who basically occupied the Western Balkans long before the Slavs came between the 6th and 8th century AD.
For years the Serbian government referred to Kosovo as the 'Cradle of the Serb nation' removing rights of Kosovo Albanians and harassing the Albanian population at large. After years of nonviolent resistance by the population, occasional violence began being used against the Serbian police and army in 1996.
These occasional acts of violence began getting bigger and bolder. Until eventually full-blown armed conflict erupted between the two, and consequently 700,000 weapons were put into circulation.
The KLA (Kosovo liberation army) had by July 1998 gained control of a third of Kosovo through guerilla tactics, which caused Serbs to fight back with greater acts that ranged from reported organised ‘rape camps’ to countless massacres, shootings and kidnapping; causing the UN to intervene against the Serb's ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.
Eventually, the Serbs withdrew but there are still 225,000 Kosovars missing and of the 20,000 victims of sexual violence between 1998-99 there has only been one conviction.
These missing Kosovars have been forgotten about until a fisherman in an eastern village of Tekija discovered a refrigerator truck with a logo from a Slaughterhouse from Prizren, a Kosovan town. When crime scene technicians were sent further down to explore the truck, they found no slaughtered animals- rather decomposing human bodies.
Albanian corpses killed by Serbian forces during 1999 were dumped as part of a cover-up. Upon finding out about the truck the local police tried to continue the cover-up by suggesting to repaint the truck and put Serbian plates on the vehicle and aimed to move to it to Belgrade in the night. Among the dead where bodies of a 5-year-old boy and 6-year-old girl.
However, Serbia’s cover-up has since been discovered as more bodies and human limbs where discovered across the country - villages and even police training centres.
Unfortunately, the officials that took hundreds of murdered Albanian corpses from Kosovo to Serbia, to conceal in graves have and will probably never face prosecution in their home country.
Many are aware of the atrocities committed during Milosevic’s Kosovo offensive but not many are aware of the cover-up and the families are still wondering what happened to their loved ones to this day.
