In her latest fairy tale on Political Mavens, our bellowed comedian and expert for Balkan pointed again some things and used well known method to show Kosovo people as "muslims" and enemies of whole world. But did she offer anything to confirm her story. As usually NO. She claim that opposite things happened in Kosovo, Serbs was expelled not Kosovari. Even she knows (or maybe paymaster didn't tell her) that Serbian government did send Croatian refugees on Kosovo they came, sell their by Serbian regime given properties and they left but that is another story. So lets elaborate for Julia a little what happened on Kosovo and remind her because the whole free world know only she need this remind.
In the Spring of 1999, NATO launched an air war against Yugoslavia to stop Serbs from terrorizing Albanians. The ethnic cleansing of Kosovo expanded and intensified despite military intervention by the international community. The U.S. State Department reported on ten broad categories of human rights violations in Kosovo: forced expulsions, looting, burning, detentions, use of human shields, summary executions, exhumation of mass graves, systematic and organized rape, violations of medical neutrality, and a new type of ethnic cleansing, identity cleansing.
At the end of the 20th century, war waged between armed soldiers dressed up in uniform fighting only against each other is extremely rare. The trend now is that 90 percent of war-associated casualties occur in the civilian population. In Hague, the UN has assembled the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia which is investigating the genocide in Kosovo. The War Crimes Tribunal will test the reach of international law and the will of governments to bring high officials to justice.
On the 26th of June 1990, Serbia intensified its cultural, social and economic persecution of Albanians and, when the Kosovan assembly tried to block it and instead propose the recognition of Kosovo as a republic, the Serb controlling the assembly adjourned the meeting.
On the 2nd July 1990, when the Kosovan assembly was not recalled as promised, it met anyway and declared Kosovo a republic, to which Serbia responded by dissolving Kosovo's government. On the 7th September, a democratic constitution for a sovereign, independent Kosovo was made public, which was accepted by referendum in 1991 and on the 24th of May 1992, secret voting elected a democratic government for Kosovo.
From then on, the Serbian government's harrying of Kosovo Albanians was carried into every aspect of life and when Serbia attacked Bosnia-Hercegovina, Bosniak and Albanian identities were collapsed into a singular "Muslim" identity, as they were caricatured as Islamic fundamentalists set on holy war against Christian Europeans. Under Rugova's leadership, Kosovo Albanians responded by appealing for international intervention, employing non-violent resistance and maintaining an autonomous administration, complete with education and health systems, funded by a voluntary tax on emigres.
By the time Milosevic had withdrawn his troops from Kosovo, NATO troops had entered and the UN Kosovo Force (KFOR) had been mobilised in June 1999, in addition to the 10,000 people who had been killed and the 800,000 who had been displaced , 70,000 of Kosovo's 500,000 homes had been reduced to rubble and 207 of its 609 mosques had been damaged or destroyed .
On March 24, 1999, the eyes of the world turned to Kosovo as aircraft from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began to bomb targets in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The start of NATO's air war against Yugoslavia was also the beginning of the bloodiest period in Kosovo since the end of the Second World War. In the twelve weeks that followed, Serbian and Yugoslav military, police, and paramilitaries expelled more than 850,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, internally displacing several hundred thousand more.1 Many were robbed and beaten as they were forced from their homes, which were frequently looted and burned. Scores of women were raped. Thousands of adult males were detained, and many of them were executed, in some cases together with women, children, and the elderly, although the total number of civilians executed is still unclear. In more than a dozen mass killing sites, government forces tried to hide the evidence by destroying or removing bodies. The brutal campaign against ethnic Albanian civilians came to a halt only after the withdrawal of Yugoslav soldiers and Serbian police and paramilitaries and the entry of NATO forces on June 12, 1999.
Despite the scale of the displacement during 1998 and early 1999, many observers believed Kosovo, with its 90 percent ethnic Albanian population, would be exempt from large-scale ethnic cleansing, if only for the practical obstacles to the expulsion of an entire people. In ethnically-mixed Bosnia and Herzegovina, and contested areas of Croatia where no one ethnic group had an absolute majority, the expulsion of one ethnic group was a means of consolidating control over that territory by a rival group. By contrast, Kosovo with its overwhelming ethnic Albanian majority had experienced a steady outflow of its Serb population over preceding decades, with Belgrade resorting to forced resettlement of Croatian Serbs in an attempt to reverse the migration of Serbs out of the province.
A second explanation for the "ethnic cleansing" is that it was designed to destabilize the neighboring countries of Albania and Macedonia. In March 1999, the young state of Macedonia, with two million inhabitants, at least 25 percent of whom are ethnic Albanian, was widely perceived as unstable and, at the same time, as a pivotal country for regional stability. The mass influx of refugees from Kosovo could easily have disrupted the fragile ethnic balance, if not destablized the entire country.
More than eight years after the end of the war, the total number of victims killed between March and June 1999 remains unclear. Although the explanations for the lack of clarity in the death toll are straightforward and common to many post-conflict situations, the total number of dead remains one of the most controversial aspects of the war. Ultimately, however, what matters is not whether the dead number 5,000 or 15,000, but that large numbers of civilians were targeted for execution by Serbian and Yugoslav security forces.
The more direct reason for the uncertainty, however, is a deliberate attempt on the part of the Serbian and Yugoslav government to destroy evidence and remove bodies. Both the ICTY and Human Rights Watch have documented cases where bodies were disinterred and removed from the crime scene, in an apparent attempt to conceal the killing. A radio documentary broadcast on National Public Radio in the United States on January 25, 2001, called Burning the Evidence, claims that Serbian and Yugoslav forces systematically transported the bodies of Kosovar Albanians to the mining complex at Trepca near Kosovska Mitrovica, where they were incinerated. Citing Serbian fighters and "a well-placed Serbian intelligence officer," between 1,200 and 1,500 bodies were destroyed at Trepca, according to the report.
So I ask Julia does she hide something in her closet.
Who was responsible?
As Madame Justice Louise Arbour pointed out, the indictment handed down by the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in May 1999 marked the first time a sitting head of state had been charged "during an on-going armed conflict with the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian law." On May 27 1999, the Tribunal announced the indictment for war crimes in Kosovo of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president until he was overthrown in October 2000; Serbian President Milan Milutinovic; Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic; Dragoljub Ojdanic, Chief of Staff of the Yugoslav Army; and Vlajko Stojiljkovic, Serbian Minister of Internal Affairs. All were charged on "three counts of crimes against humanity and one count of violations of the laws or customs of war" (ICTY press release, May 27 1999). Massacres and other atrocities at Racak, Bela Crkva, Velika Krusa, Mali Krusa, Djakovica, Crkolez, and Izbica figured in the indictment, with 340 individuals given as the preliminary list of victims -- overwhelmingly men who had been summarily executed.
The specific charges against the four Serbian leaders are that they conspired to commit:
1. Murder, a crime against humanity, punishable under Article 5(a) of the Statute [of the Criminal Tribunal], and also a violation of the laws or customs of war, punishable under Article 3 of the Statute (namely a violation of Article 3 common to the 1949 Geneva Conventions); 2. Persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, a crime against humanity pursuant to Article 5(h) of the Statute [of] the Tribunal; and
3. Deportation, a crime against humanity, punishable under Article 5(d) of the Statute of the Tribunal.
Many others in the mafia-ridden Serb regime played a crucial role in planning and perpetrating the atrocities in Kosovo. Down to the operational level, Yugoslav military commanders stood by as the notorious paramilitary forces, who had done most of the gendercidal dirty work in Bosnia and Croatia, were sent in to "cleanse" and destroy Kosovar communities. In many ways the strategy was that adopted, on a far vaster scale, by Nazi forces towards Jews, Soviet males, and others on the eastern front during World War Two (see the case-study of the Jewish holocaust). In both cases, the measures were designed to allow the regular military to maintain something of a "hands-off" approach to the worst of the atrocities, while still ensuring that the crimes were carried out. It is an important feature of the Tribunal indictment that Yugoslav Army Chief Dragoljub Ojdanic is among those accused of war crimes in Kosovo, just as recent scholarship on the fate of Soviet POWs and Jews has increasingly tied the regular German army to the genocides committed against those groups. The chain of responsibility for genocidal and gendercidal actions in Kosovo therefore extends from the Serb leadership down to the paramilitary units that carried out the murderous commands, and the regular army officers who looked on approvingly.
At the time of writing, it was unclear whether the Tribunal's indictment would be extended to include the charge of genocide. In the view of Gendercide Watch, the indictments should be aggressively pursued, and broadened to include the genocidal actions of the Serb leadership in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995.
In October 2000, a huge mass movement succeeded in toppling President Milosevic from power. His successor, Vojislav Kostunica, became the first Serb leader to acknowledge guilt for the genocidal atrocities inflicted upon Bosnians and Kosovars, stating: "as a Serb I will take responsibility for many of these ... crimes." (See "President Admits Genocide", The Sydney Morning Herald, October 25, 2000.) Shortly afterwards, however, Kostunica issued a statement claiming he had been misquoted (see "Kostunica Denies He Admitted Serb Atrocities in Kosovo to CBS", The Chicago Tribune, October 27, 2000.)
