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Serbia’s Prosecutor Charges Men Behind Suva Reka Massacre

04 05 2006  Landmark trial of men linked to atrocity against Albanians shows country is confronting its past.

By Aleksandar Roknic in Belgrade (Balkan Insight, 4 May 06)

An important trial that is about to open in Belgrade of senior police officials charged with war crimes in Kosovo may influence proceedings in The Hague against seven former officials accused of the same crime.

Last week, the Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor's Office brought charges against eight police officers for offences committed against civilians in Suva Reka on March 26, 1999, when 48 members of the Berisha family were murdered.

Among the victims were six children aged between one and four, seven children aged between seven and 13, a woman aged 100 and a woman in her eighth month of pregnancy.

If the Belgrade District Court War Crimes Chamber finds the eight guilty, the incriminating evidence may be re-used in the ongoing trial of former high-ranking Serbian officials in The Hague over Suva Reka.

The men facing trial in Belgrade are Radoslav Mitrovic, now
assistant commander of the Gendarmerie but then commander of the police special units in Nis and a member of the Kosovo and Metohija police headquarters; Milorad Nisavic, former member of the State Security Service in charge of the Prizren area; Radojko Repanovic and Nenad Jovanovic, both former senior police officers in Suva Reka; and Sladjan Cukaric, Miroslav Petkovic, Zoran Petkovic and Ramiz Papic, also police officers from Suva Reka. They all denied the charges.

The Berisha murder charges are the first war crimes charges to be brought in any Serbian court against senior police officers in
connection with events in Kosovo.

The family was killed on March 26, 1999. One eyewitness, Vjolca Berisha, told journalists, now members of Balkan Insight, that police raided her house that day and killed six men and a woman after searching the premises.

She said other family members fled to the nearby Calabria pizzeria to hide, where the police found them, however, throwing in hand grenades and killing the survivors by opening fire from automatic weapons.

They then loaded the bodies onto two trucks and drove them to the Prizren army barracks. After, the corpses were transported for burial at the shooting range of the Special Anti-Terrorist Unit, SAJ, in Batajnica, near Belgrade.

Before it investigated the Suva Reka case, the Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor's Office took statements from about 200 witnesses. Most were Serbs who were then in Kosovo as members of police or military units, while around 50 were Albanians.

The Suva Reka case is likely to be the first in a series of war crimes proceedings that have followed the discovery of mass graves next to the interior ministry special units compound in Batajnica, from which about 900 Kosovo Albanian corpses have been exhumed, including bodies of Suva Reka villagers.

The Hague court has already said it expects Serbian courts to bring other war crimes charges connected with Kosovo after the Suva Reka case is completed.

The Hague tribunal, meanwhile, has indicted seven former senior officials over the same crime in Suva Reka.

They are Serbia's former president, Milan Milutinovic; the former federal deputy prime minister and Serbian prime minister, Nikola Sainovic; the retired general and former army chief of staff Dragoljub Ojdanic; generals Nebojsa Pavkovic and Vladimir Lazarevic and police generals Sreten Lukic and Vlastimir Djordjevic.

The indictment said that Serbian police units on or after the morning of  March 25, 1999 "were raiding one house after another, threatening, attacking and murdering the local Kosovo Albanian residents and took away many people at gunpoint from their homes".

The former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, was also charged in connection with the crime but he died on March 11 this year in the tribunal's Scheveningen detention unit.

Several witnesses who gave their testimonies in connection to the Suva Reka atrocity at Milosevic's protracted trial will probably give evidence before the Belgrade District Court War Crimes Chamber.

A source from the War Crimes Prosecutor's Office told Balkan Insight that the indictment has not yet come into force, as an appeal is still being heard.

However, the source said that when the appeal process is completed next week, and unless it is rejected, the indictment will then be made public.

The same source predicted that the Belgrade trial would have a
considerable impact on the trial in The Hague, as prosecutors in both processes were passing evidence back and forward between them.

At any moment, the source added, they in The Hague "may seek some material from us".

The source suggested the evidence to be produced before the District Court War Crimes Chamber was likely to be significant, as the Serbian prosecutors had enjoyed exceptionally good communication with the Serbian police in the process of collecting the evidence.

A Hague tribunal spokesman, Anton Nikiforov, also confirmed that the two prosecutors' offices were in constant communication over Suva Reka.

He said the Hague court had delivered to the Belgrade prosecutor all the documentation and information it possessed over the massacre.

Natasa Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Fund in Belgrade, said the approaching trial was important, as it would "reveal the pattern of ethnic cleansing, the expulsion of the population, as it was applied throughout Kosovo.

"The example of Suva Reka shows to what an extent the
expulsion operation was organised and institutionalised... and to what a degree the police took part in it."

Kandic said it was already clear that no police station could have conducted such a momentous operation on its own, independently of the chain of command.

"There was a system in place which specified how the decisions and orders within the police structures were to be distributed and acted upon," she said to Balkan Insight.

In her words, the Suva Reka case might reveal in detail more of the workings of this pattern and how the decisions were implemented.

Kandic maintained that the Suva Reka trial in Belgrade would be important for other reasons, too, as it would demonstrate to Serbs that no one could commit crimes in Kosovo with impunity.

"There is a problem with the way in which the Kosovo war crimes are perceived in Serbia, as if the message is that they were fortunate that 'we didn't slaughter all of them'," she went on.

"The Suva Reka case should show the monstrosity of this crime, as well as the wall of silence and the cover-up of what actually happened."

Andrej Nosov, of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, said he hoped the trial would shed light on the wider context of events in and around Suva Reka. "This was not only about the Berisha family murder," he said to Balkan Insight.

"The Serbian police cleansed all the villages around Suva Reka over four days... the whole area.

"It was strategically important because it was on the way to Prizren. If the prosecutors are ready to present all the
evidence about the police plan to cleanse Suva Reka of the Albanian population, this may have some bearing on the Hague trial of police and army generals."

Bruno Vekaric, spokesman for the War Crimes Prosecutor's Office, said to the media the approaching trial should send a clear message to the world that the Serbian state is ready to confront crimes committed by its own nationals head-on.

"This is a good sign that Serbia is ready to face up to its recent
past and deal with the perpetrators," said Vekaric.

Aleksandar Roknic is a regular Balkan Insight contributor and journalists working with Belgrade daily Danas. Balkan Insight is BIRN's online publication.