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Posted on 9/5/2001, 10:12:47 AM by konijn

September 5, 2001

Report Says Macedonians Killed Civilians in Revenge

By IAN FISHER

. That night's newscast showed Ljube Boskovski, the hard-line Macedonian minister of the interior, planted behind a stone wall in the village of Ljuboten, surrounded by soldiers and the sound of gunfire. He was there, the newscast said, as part of a military operation to sweep the village of the ethnic Albanian "terrorists" who had planted the antitank mines that had killed eight Macedonian soldiers two days before.

On the day of the newscast, Aug. 12, seven ethnic Albanians were killed in Ljuboten. But nearly a month later, no evidence has emerged that those people, or three others also killed from the village, were anything but civilians.

In a detailed report to be issued today, Human Rights Watch accuses the overwhelmingly Slavic forces of Macedonia's government of summary execution of civilians, arson and torture. The operation over that weekend, the report says, "had no military justification and was carried out for purposes of revenge."

By the standards of a decade of war in the Balkans, the number of dead around Ljuboten was not high. But the killings were the worst single loss of life in six months of low-level warfare in Macedonia. They were also the clearest and bloodiest example yet of the cycle of revenge that prolonged other Balkan wars. NATO recently embarked on what is intended to be a one-month mission to calm the Macedonian conflict.

In an interview, Mr. Boskovski, perhaps the most outspoken proponent of a military solution to the insurgency, sought to distance himself from what happened in Ljuboten. He said that he arrived only at 4 p.m. that Sunday, after the military operation had ended, and that he did not direct the operation.

But he also maintained that it was "stupidity" to think that the ethnic Albanian rebel force — which calls itself the National Liberation Army — was not in Ljuboten that weekend, even though he said he had no idea if those who died were fighters or civilians. He also attacked Human Rights Watch, which investigated the incident, calling it an "international mercenary organization."

"They accuse me of being present there and watching when civilians were murdered," Mr. Boskovski said. "That is a monstrous accusation."

"Who would bring a camera with him if he wanted to do something like that?" he asked.

The United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, charged with investigating allegations of war crimes in all of former Yugoslavia, has sent investigators to Macedonia to decide whether to begin a full investigation into what happened in Ljuboten and who might be responsible.

"It's important to understand that he doesn't have to witness the people being killed to have some responsibility for what happened," said Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch who wrote the group's report on Ljuboten. "It was done by troops under his authority in an action in which he was intimately involved."

Mr. Bouckaert said the killing of civilians in Ljuboten could be a dangerous precedent for Macedonia's future. The peace deal signed on Aug. 13 by the Macedonian and ethnic Albanian parties in Macedonia's government grants ethnic Albanians many of the greater civic rights the rebels say they have sought. NATO has 4,500 troops in Macedonia collecting arms from the ethnic Albanian rebels so that the political part of the peace deal can proceed. But no one is sure that the deal will hold, particularly, in Mr. Bouckaert's view, if a government minister like Mr. Boskovski is seen as condoning attacks on civilians.

"As in all guerrilla conflicts, the question of who is a civilian and who is a fighter is a thorny one. Many rebels live in Albanian villages, and government officials often argue that their status as combatants is a matter of putting on a uniform.

Ljuboten, home to about 3,000 ethnic Albanians and a handful of Slavic Macedonians, lies about five miles north of the capital, Skopje, and is surrounded on three sides by Macedonian villages and to the northeast by the Skopska Crna Gora mountain, where the rebel army is active.

It was on the mountain that on Friday morning, Aug. 10, the two antitank mines exploded a few miles from Ljuboten, killing eight Macedonian soldiers. Two days earlier, 10 Macedonian soldiers had been killed in another ambush. Emotions were running high among the nation's police officers, soldiers and reservists.

Almost immediately that morning, police checkpoints sealed off Ljuboten, and shelling began. The Human Rights Watch report says that Haxhi Meta Xhavit, about 70, died "apparently from shock or heart failure" when his home was hit by a shell.

Early that evening, after a lull, the shelling resumed. A villager, Fazil Duraku, 25, said he saw a panic- stricken boy, Erxhan Aliu, 6, die in the shelling. "There were two or three people in one spot, and this boy was trying to go toward them," he said. "The shell landed maybe the distance of one palm-width away from him, and it threw him into the air." On Friday evening, he said, "We went to our basement because the shooting didn't stop all night."

On Saturday, villagers said, the government continued its shelling, and many villagers were blocked by the police from fleeing Ljuboten. But it was not until Sunday that Macedonian soldiers swept into the village in search of what the government said were terrorists in the area.

In a house across from a Macedonian Orthodox Church, the Jusufi family heard an explosion and crash at the front metal gate about 8:20 a.m. Rami Jusufi, 33, went to lock the door. A burst of machine gun fire bored through as he clicked the lock. The rest of the family — including his 58-year-old father, Elmaz, confined to a wheelchair — could do nothing but pour iodine on the three bullet wounds of Mr. Jusufi, who spent the next several hours bleeding to death. "In the last half-hour, he started breathing slower and slower," his father said. "And then he just faded away."

One man, Aziz Bajrami, 66, was himself shot and lost two sons on that Sunday. Sitting with his left hand bandaged in a house in the Albanian quarter of Skopje two weeks later, Mr. Bajrami described an atmosphere of chaos and fear as the soldiers entered the village, firing into houses and setting cars, houses and barns ablaze. He said he hid in the basement of a neighbor, along with three of his sons and eight female relatives. The police found them, he said, shot into the basement, stole jewelry from the women and marched the men to a spot where perhaps 10 other Albanian men, most of them young, lay on their stomachs.

"I heard one soldier go up to my son and kick him in his head," Mr. Bajrami said. "When they kicked him in the head, they shot me in the hand. Then my son stood up because of the pain. He tried to run, and they all opened fire on him."

He said the police shot his son, Sulejman, 22, at least twice more before ordering Mr. Bajrami and his cousin, Muharrem, 68, to leave.

"They said, `You old men go home,' " Mr. Bajrami said. "We got up, quickly, and I ran into a little door. Then I heard two shots. I was behind the wall and went into the garage. They killed my cousin. It was only me left."

Two days after the attack, foreign journalists went to Ljuboten, where the bodies of Sulejman and Muharrem Bajrami still lay, each shot repeatedly, in the back and in the head. On a nearby ridge lay three more bodies, including another of Mr. Bajrami's sons, Xhelal, 24, along with the Jashari brothers, Bairam, 33, and Kadri, 31, who had arrived on vacation from Austria 10 days before.

The three had been shot, witnesses said, fleeing a house that Macedonian forces had fired at with rocket- launched grenades.

Later that week, a plumber named Bejtullah Qaili, 43, ended a search for his missing brother at the Skopje morgue. His brother, Atulla, 32, one of more than 100 men arrested in Ljuboten on that Sunday, had apparently been beaten to death, his skull crushed, eyes black and swollen shut, cigarette burns on his arm, his testicles blackened from blows. Most of the arrested were released and all are now accounted for, though roughly a dozen remain in prison, including a 13-year-old boy.

"I wouldn't feel as bad if he was one of the guys who fought," said Mr. Qaili, who added that he had to pay $670 in bribes to have the body released. "If he was a soldier, he would have died for a cause."

Family members of the dead contend that none of them belonged to the rebel army. None were armed, and none wore a uniform or combat boots.

"It is significant that the government has not presented any credible evidence that there was an N.L.A. presence in Ljuboten, such as confiscated N.L.A. weapons or uniforms," the Human Rights Watch report says.

Guerrillas held positions in the mountains outside Ljuboten in August, and had been in the village as recently as June, meeting with foreign reporters. One explanation put forward by outside monitors of what happened in Ljuboten is that government forces saw firing from the mountain and believed that it came from inside the village.

Mr. Boskovski, the interior minister, said he had no doubt that the rebels were in Ljuboten, and that they had attacked Macedonian civilians, a contention that has been widely reported in the Macedonian press.

"It is the easiest thing to make accusations today and to put an equal sign between the aggressor and the victim," he said.

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