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Police Abuse of Albanians Continues Despite Peace Accord, Disarmament
WASHINGTON, Aug 22 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Abuse of Muslim Albanians by Macedonian police continues despite the recent signing of a peace accord and the NATO-administered disarming of Albanian soldiers, according to a press release Wednesday from Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The New York-based international human rights organization said that on August 13th, the very same day as the signing of the accord - against a backdrop of sporadic violence threatening a tenuous ceasefire - police in Skopje beat a suspected Albanian "rebel" to death.
The man was one of four others who had come to Skopje's main hospital to pick up an elderly relative; police searched the car and began to beat the four men after claiming to find a bullet in the trunk, the HRW press release said.
While the world watched Macedonian and Albanian officials sign a peace deal giving more rights to Muslim Albanians, the Skopje officers severely beat the four ethnic Albanians continuously for hours; the 29-year-old father of a six-year-old and a two-year-old, Nazmi Aliu, died later the same day from his injuries, the press release said.
HRW has released two previous reports on human rights abuses by Macedonian police:
A Threat to Stability in June 1996 and Police Violence in Macedonia in April 1998 were followed by a May 31, 2001 press release entitled
Macedonian Police Abuses Documented.
In the May 31st press release, HRW "noted that police abuse of ethnic Albanians, as well as of Macedonian Slavs who run afoul of the police, is endemic in Macedonia, as documented in two earlier Human Rights Watch reports."
The Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA), which has supplemented most of the fighting on the side of Muslim Albanians against Macedonian forces trying to quell their fight for rights, has said that among its list of grievances against the Macedonian government has been "its failure… to address police abuse as well as other forms of discrimination against ethnic Albanians," the press release said.
HRW investigated incidents of torture by Macedonian police, interviewing victims who had been tortured in detention and conducting medical exams that found scars and bruises consistent with their testimonies.
A 51-year-old father of six, who went by the pseudonym "Ymer Aqifi," told HRW how he and eight other men he was detained with were beaten at the Kumanovo police station on Sunday, May 27th.
He said that while he was made to lie face-down and suffer beatings and kicking, the police investigators "were swearing, insulting my mother and sisters, all kinds of curses. They were asking who is NLA, where the Imam [religious leader] of the village was, where the civilian defenses were, where the headquarters were. But no one wrote down anything, they didn't wait for answers."
"Ymer Aqifi", who showed HRW investigators the deep bruises, hematoma and swelling on the parts of his body he said he had been beaten on, said that he passed out after an hour of beating and was brought to with water, then taken to another corridor.
"Down there, all night long, there were screaming people beneath us," he said in the HRW report. "You could hear how they beat them."
The testimony of "Ymer Aqifi" was just one of many collected by HRW in its investigations; HRW also said that the Macedonian military has also been implicated, and issued a press release detailing the May 21st case of a family of seven that was beaten by Macedonian forces, who also burned several houses in the family's small mountain village.
"Ethnic Albanian men fleeing the fighting in Macedonia face severe ill-treatment by the police," said then-executive director of HRW's Europe and Central Asia division Holly Cartner in the May 31st press release. "We have documented serious beatings and torture of ethnic Albanians at the Kumanovo and Skopje police stations in the last week. The victims we interviewed have the bruises and injuries to back up their claims of abuse."
The division's current executive director, Elizabeth Andersen, in Wednesday's press release expressed concern that there was no accountability at all for those who torture and otherwise mistreat detainees.
"Persistent police abuse in Macedonia is simply shocking," she said. "Macedonia must urgently address the violence in its police stations."
Muslim Albanians have been pressing for greater rights as a substantial minority among the country's Macedonian Slav majority. The NLA, which in February upgraded the rights movement to an uprising in the face of continued oppression, was not a party to the peace talks but has agreed to disarm since the peace signing, and NATO has begun to deploy troops from several different countries to oversee the disarmament.
The NATO operation, called "Operation Essential Harvest," was launched at midday Wednesday after none of the 19 NATO member countries voiced objections to a conditional approval of the mission reached Tuesday by the alliance's Secretary General Lord George Robertson this week
The United States on Wednesday called for Macedonians of all ethnicities and religions to respect the peace agreement as NATO forces began to deploy.
"Macedonia now has a real opportunity, through the framework agreement reached August 13th and through the NATO weapons collection mission, to avoid a catastrophic civil war," State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said.
He spoke as the first of some 3,500 NATO troops began deploying in Macedonia to start their mission to collect weapons from Albanian soldiers within 30 days.
"We look to the insurgents to cooperate with NATO and to fully comply with all their commitments, including to voluntarily disarm, to respect the ceasefire and to disband," Reeker said.
While estimates vary on how many arms the NLA have, sources at NATO said an understanding had been reached to try to collect one third of the weapons by August 31st.
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