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Serbia Mass Muslim Grave Open to Press for First Time
BATAJNICA, Yugoslavia, July 9 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - At the end of an overgrown dirt track winding through a special police base on the edge of Belgrade, a gaping pit marks the spot where agents of the former regime of Slobodan Milosevic hid the bodies of some 36 Kosovo Muslim Albanians during the war two years ago.
For the first time, Serbian police allowed journalists to visit one of the mass graves on Monday.
The bodies have been removed for DNA testing in order to establish their identities and cause of death, but the two-meter (6.5 foot) deep clay grave still exudes a sickening smell in the summer heat.
Two twisted black metal frames, apparently hospital stretchers, lie on the side of the pit, but apart from the lingering odor and three plastic-covered tables nearby used by investigators, there is little here to indicate what was once hidden in the ground.
Police suspect that the bodies of 13 men, 14 women and nine children exhumed from the grave are among those of 800 Muslim Albanians killed by the former regime during its bloody two-year campaign in Kosovo and shipped to Serbia proper.
They believe the bodies, which constituted key evidence against the regime, were removed in secret and hidden in a number of mass graves as the international community rallied against Milosevic and NATO troops readied to move into Kosovo itself in 1999.
Criminal police deputy, Dragan Karleusa, told the French news agency (AFP) last week, that in addition to the bodies taken from Batajnica -- an anti-terrorist police base 20 kilometers (12 miles) west of the capital -- another 75 had been recently exhumed from two mass graves in Petrovo-Selo in eastern Serbia.
Some of the decaying corpses there were scarred by clear bullet marks, and a number of the bullets had been found at the site, a local judge said.
Another grave has been found on the Belgrade-Skopje highway, Karleusa said, where agents apparently dumped bodies into craters created by NATO bombs before resurfacing the roads.
"We suspect that the former regime also disposed of bodies at the bottom of Lake Perucac (300 kilometers southwest of Belgrade). From time to time some bodies are coming up to the surface," Karleusa said.
Milosevic and four of his former allies have been indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the U.N. war crimes tribunal. Milosevic was extradited to The Hague court on June 28.
Thousands of ethnic Albanians went missing during the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict, and the international community has accused Milosevic's forces of committing widespread atrocities.
Around 4,000 corpses have been dug up by U.N. war crimes investigators in Kosovo itself, but the discovery of bodies on the outskirts of the capital has for the first time brought home to many Serbs the reality of what was done by their former government.
The evidence has snowballed since early May, when a small crime-reporter magazine in eastern Serbia first ran a story on a truck full of bodies pulled from the river Danube in April 1999, during the NATO air war.
The magazine ran a long interview with the police diver who oversaw the operation to pull the Kosovo-registered refrigerator truck from the river, describing the scene as local police opened the doors.
"Bodies started to slither out of the refrigerator compartment. There were many bodies of women, children and elderly people. Some of the women were dressed in traditional Muslim dress, while some children and elderly people were naked," diver Zivadin Djordjevic was quoted as saying.
Police opened an investigation, quickly tracing drivers who were ordered to take trucks full of bodies to a number of sites in Serbia.
The sudden revelation of the graves helped turn public opinion in Serbia against Milosevic, undercutting his arguments that he had acted only to protect Serbs, and priming the public for his abrupt extradition to The Hague last month.
The bodies in the refrigerator truck are thought to have ended up in Petrovo-Selo.
Many commentators believe they were from Suva Reka in southern Kosovo, the scene of a massacre by Serbian forces early on in the NATO air campaign which aimed to end Belgrade's bitter war with Kosovo Albanian separatists.
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