As the Rambouillet peace conference between Serbs and ethnic Albanians continues into its fourth day today, a crucial question remains unanswered: will the negotiators address war crimes? Mrs Anne Gazeau-Secret, the French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, gave Albanian journalists who dared to ask short shrift. "That's covered by UN Security Council resolutions," she snapped, quickly changing the subject.
Indeed. Security Council resolutions 827, 1160, 1199 and 1207 empower the Hague International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to investigate war crimes in Kosovo, but Belgrade refuses to grant the tribunal access, although President Slobodan Milosevic specifically promised to do so last June.
When he opened the peace conference, President Chirac promised that "justice will have to be done and culprits will have to be tried". But the US-based group, Human Rights Watch, fears justice will be sacrificed in the interest of obtaining an agreement.
"The Contact Group (US, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Italy) should recognise that no political deal will last if atrocities are left unpunished," Mr Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said when he released a new report documenting Yugoslav government atrocities. "Settlements without justice for past crimes are inherently unstable," he added.
In "A Week of Terror in Drenica, Humanitarian Law Violations in Kosovo", the group provides chilling details of massacres in Kosovo last September. The international outcry raised by the killing of 21 civilians from the Delijaj family and the mass execution of 13 men in a neighbouring village led to a failed agreement the following month between the US envoy, Mr Richard Holbrooke, and President Milosevic.
The January 15th massacre of 45 ethnic Albanians at Racak was virtually a replay of the Drenica massacre of 34 people. In both cases, Human Rights Watch's inspection of massacre sites and dozens of interviews with survivors and international observers refuted Serb allegations that the dead - who included women, children and old people - were "terrorists" killed in combat or that they were murdered by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to discredit the government.
The report mentions KLA atrocities only in passing, noting that the guerrillas have "committed serious abuses, including the taking of hostages and extra-judicial executions". The vast majority of the estimated 2,000 people killed in Kosovo over the past year were ethnic Albanian civilians. Nearly a third of all homes in 210 Kosovo villages have been completely destroyed, the report notes. Three hundred thousand ethnic Albanians have become refugees.
The most haunting testimony in the report is that of Imer Delijaj, who admits being a KLA fighter. His story was corroborated by other witnesses, interviewed separately from him.
Two days after the September 26th massacre at Gornje Obrinje, Mr Delijaj returned to his family compound and the surrounding forest, where his wife, son, daughter and mother were among the dead. In a gully, he found his nine-year-old son, Jeton, with his throat slashed, and his 60-year-old mother, Hamide, with wounds in her head and chest. "I next found the body of my wife, Lumnije," Mr Delijaj continued. "She was lying on her right side, and the two girls were next to her, one in front and one behind.
"The mother's hand was on the baby (six-week-old Diturije). At that moment, she opened her eyes, not totally but half-way, and I realised she was alive. I was trying to clean the blood out of her mouth, and she stuck her tongue out a little. I left the bodies and took the clothes off the baby. It was a terrible smell. I checked her and saw she was not wounded. I dressed her again and covered her in my jacket."
Baby Diturije died last November, because of lack of medical care.
AFP reports from Pristina:
Five bodies have been found over the last two days in four locations in Kosovo, Serbian officials said yesterday. Three bodies were found in western Kosovo, one in the south, while another one was found south of Pristina, the Serb Information Centre said.
Earlier in the day, the Kosovo Verification Mission announced that four unidentified bodies had been discovered, three in the Djakovica area and the fourth near Pristina. Yet another man was found dead on Sunday, in a village near Kacanik, in the south, according to the KVM.