Kosovo

READ THIS: During the armed conflict in 1998 and 1999 in Kosovo the Serbian Army and police allegedly used excessive and random force, which resulted in property damage, the displacement of population and death of civilians. Some claim that Belgrade unleashed Operation "Horseshoe" (Potkovica) in the summer of 1998, in which hundreds of thousands of Albanians were driven from their homes. The Yugoslav Army, Serbian police and Serb paramilitary forces in the spring of 1999, in an organized manner, initiated a broad campaign of violence against Albanian civilians in order to expel them from Kosovo and thus maintain the political control of Belgrade over the province. According to the legally binding verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Federal Army and Serbian police systematically attacked Albanian-populated villages after the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia that began on 24 March 1999; abused, robbed and killed civilians, ordering them to go to Macedonia, Albania or Montenegro, and burned their houses and destroyed their property. Nemanja Stjepanović claimed that within the campaign of violence, Kosovo Albanians were expelled from their homes, murdered, sexually assaulted, and had their religious buildings destroyed. The Yugoslav forces committed numerous war crimes during the implementation of a "joint criminal enterprise" whose aim was to "through the use of violence and terror, force a significant number of Kosovo Albanians to leave their homes and cross the border in order for the state government to retain control over Kosovo." The ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population was performed in the following way: first the Army surrounded a location, followed by shelling, then the police entered the village and often with them and the Army, and then crimes occurred (murders, rapes, beatings, expulsions...) According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, by June 1999, the Yugoslav military, Serbian police and paramilitaries had expelled around 850,000 Albanians from Kosovo, and several hundred thousand more were internally displaced inside Kosovo, in addition to those displaced prior to March. Approximately 440,000 refugees crossed the border into Albania and 320,000 fled to Macedonia, while Bosnia and Herzegovina received more than 30,000. Presiding Judge Iain Bonomy, who imposed the sentence, said that "deliberate actions of these forces during the campaign provoked the departure of at least 700,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo in the short period from late March to early June 1999". Human Rights Watch claims that the Yugoslav Army indiscriminately attacked Kosovo Albanian villages. Killed 12,000 unarmed innocent mainly civilians. Police and military forces partially or completely had destroyed thousands of Albanian villages in Kosovo by burning or shelling them. According to a UNHCR survey, nearly 40% of all residential houses in Kosovo were heavily damaged or completely destroyed by the end of the war. Out of a total of 237,842 houses, 45,768 were heavily damaged and 46,414 were destroyed. In particular, residences in the city of Peć was heavily damaged. More than 80% of the 5,280 houses in the city were heavily damaged (1,590) or destroyed (2,774). Religious objects were also damaged or destroyed. According to the report of the Physicians for Human Rights, there were 155 destroyed mosques in Kosovo in August 1999 based on claims from Albanian refugees. Identity cleansing! Identity cleansing was a strategy employed by the government of Serbia during the Kosovo War. Identity cleansing is defined as "confiscation of personal identification, passports, and other such documents to make it difficult or impossible for those driven out to return back to their homes". Expelled Kosovo Albanians claimed that they were systematically stripped of identity and property documents including passports, land titles, automobile license plates, identity cards and other documents. In conjunction with the policy of expelling ethnic Albanians from the province, the Yugoslavs would confiscate all documents that indicated the identity of those being expelled. Physicians for Human Rights reports that nearly 60% of respondents to its survey observed Yugoslav forces removing or destroying personal identification documents. Human Rights Watch also documented the common practice of "identity cleansing": refugees expelled toward Albania were frequently stripped of their identity documents and forced to remove the license plates from their vehicles. The occurrence of these acts suggested that the government was trying to block their return. In addition to confiscating the relevant documents from their holders, efforts were also made to destroy any actual birth records (and other archives) which were maintained by governmental agencies, so as to make the "cleansing" complete (this latter tactic sometimes being referred to as archival cleansing).

• published: 03 Apr 2017
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