World

NATO Investigates Mass Grave

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

August 12, 1999 / 6:28 AM EDT / CBS

NATO troops and Canadian forensic experts congregated in a Kosovo village Saturday to investigate reports of a newly found mass grave containing victims of Serb-Albanian ethnic bloodshed.

A statement by the NATO-led Kosovo peacekeeping force said U.S. troops and the forensic team were at Donja Stubla, a village near Vitina, about 25 miles south of Pristina, the provincial capital.

"At this time, it is unclear whether the grave site is Serbian, Albanian or other," the statement said.

Most victims found in mass graves have been Albanians, killed during the pinnacle of the more than yearlong Serb crackdown on Kosovo's Albanian majority that ended in June after NATO's bombing campaign led to a pullout of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's forces.

An estimated 10,000 ethnic Albanians are believed to have been killed by his troops.

But Serbs also have been targeted, either during the fighting by the Kosovo Liberation Army or afterward in revenge killings. And the retaliation by ethnic Albanians also has encompassed Gypsies, or Roma.

Ethnically-motivated violence and generally rampant criminality is hurting attempts by the more than 35,000 peacekeepers and a fledgling force of international police to establish order in the wake of Kosovo's upheaval.

NATO's supreme commander in Europe vowed to keep Kosovo open to all ethnic groups.

AP
Ethnic Albanians shout slogans during a demonstration in Kosovo.

"People of every ethnic group and religious persuasion have to be given the right to live here," U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark said.

U.N. officials estimate that that as little as five percent of the pre-war Serb population remains in the provincial capital, Pristina, reports CBS News Correspondent Allen Pizzey.

"Many of those who remain are the mostly vulnerable of the pre-war population," said U.N. High Commission for Refugees spokesman Ron Redmond.

Aid workers must now deliver food to Serbs too frightened to leave their homes, and even that requires a NATO escort. Any security gap gives the ethnic Albanians a chance to pay Serbs back in kind for what was done to them during the war.

In the latest killings possibly rooted in ethnic hatreds, an ethnic Albanian man and woman were found shot to death on Friday in Pristina, according to the peacekeepers' statement.

NATO-led troops found 120 pistols and other weapons in a van near Orahovac, about 37 miles southwest of Pristina. Three ethnic Albanians were being questioned.
In an attempt to curb such incidents, the U.N. mission to Kosovo announced ne regulations authorizing peacekeepers and U.N. police to detain or remove anyone at any time, if such a move is deemed in the interest of maintaining order.

The regulations would also allow peacekeepers to expel people from the province, U.N. legal officials said.

The KLA has been blamed for many of the attacks, but its leader, Hasim Thaci, has repeatedly denied the group's involvement.