Serb forces sliced off limbs, split open skulls and gouged out the eyes of Kosovo Albanian villagers during a crackdown in Kosovo in 1998, a witness told Mr Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes trial today.
|
|
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic at the UN war crimes tribunal. Photograph: Reuters
|
Serb forces murdered and mutilated ethnic Albanians in September 1998 as Belgrade launched an offensive against the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) separatist guerrilla campaign in the disputed province, the Hague war crimes court heard.
"People were mutilated," said Kosovo Albanian human rights activist Mr Sabit Kadriu, who visited the site of atrocities in the north-western Cicavica region of Kosovo in September 1998.
Mr Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader charged with crimes against humanity in Croatia and Kosovo and genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s, listened impassively as the witness (41) spoke of grisly killings in the southern Serb province.
Among the atrocities Mr Kadriu discovered while working for the Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms, a local group which provided information on Kosovo's atrocities to the tribunal in 1998, were bodies of people whose skulls had been cracked open.
They had been hit on the head with a hammer and their brains were scattered all around, he said. In some cases it was difficult to identify the corpses found after such attacks.
Mr Milosevic is accused of spearheading the deportation of 800,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo between March and June 1999 as part of a grand strategy to create an ethnically pure Greater Serbia.
Prosecutors have asked witnesses to outline the build-up to NATO intervention against Serb forces in Kosovo and the 1999 mass expulsion of its majority-ethnic Albanian population.