British journalist John Sweeney found evidence about a massacre in Kosovo in 1999 that was used at the trial of senior Serb officials – then two decades after the war, his testimony helped convict another man of dumping the bodies.
When a court in the Kosovo town of Prizren convicted former Serbian reservist policeman Darko Tasic of war crimes last month for his involvement in the massacre of more than 100 ethnic Albanians in the village of Krushe e Vogel/Mala Krusha in March 1999, one of the people who felt a sense of satisfaction was British investigative journalist John Sweeney.
Tasic was sentenced to 22 years in prison for burning and dumping the dead bodies of the massacre victims in a river, as well as for stealing and destroying ethnic Albanian villagers’ property.
Sweeney, who won an Emmy award for his reporting on the Krushe e Vogel/Mala Krusha massacre, was one of the witnesses who testified at Tasic’s trial.
“When I heard that they arrested someone in Kosovo, I said yes, I will be a witness. It’s my job as a reporter and my duty as a human being,” he told BIRN.
Back in 1999, just after the end of the Kosovo war, Sweeney went to Krushe e Vogel/Mala Krusha and reported on what he found there for the ‘Dispatches’ programme on Britain’s Channel 4 Television and The Observer newspaper.
His reports about the massacre in the village, where more than 100 men aged from 13 to 72 were machine-gunned by Serb fighters in a barn, laid bare the horror of the crimes committed by Slobodan Milosevic’s forces in Kosovo, which he described as “systematic, orchestrated evil”.
Several years later, he appeared as one of the witnesses at the trial of Yugoslav and Serbian officials at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, testifying in the case against former Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic, Yugoslav Army chief of staff Dragoljub Ojdanic, Yugoslav Army generals Nebojsa Pavkovic and Vladimir Lazarevic, and Serbian police general Sreten Lukic.
Milutinovic was acquitted but all the others were convicted of bearing responsibility for wartime crimes in Kosovo, including the Krushe e Vogel/Mala Krusha massacre.
The man with the burnt hands
Sweeney and his colleagues entered Kosovo from Albania on June 12, 1999, two days after the end of the NATO bombing campaign that forced Milosevic to pull his forces out.
Prior to that, a group of men had stopped their car at the Albanian side of the border because they were exhausted from walking for days. “Who could those guys be?” Sweeney asked himself, before being told that they were relatives of men who were killed in a massacre in a village called Krusha e Vogel/Mala Krusha.
The first report that Sweeney did was based on interviews given by these men and other Kosovo Albanian refugees about the machine-gunning of civilians in Krusha e Vogel/Mala Krusha on March 26, 1999.
The men that Sweeney interviewed also told him about someone called Mehmet Krasniqi, “the man with the burnt hands”.
Krasniqi had managed to survive the mass shootings in a village barn by hiding under the dead bodies. After killing nearly all the male villagers, the Serb fighters set the barn on fire, but Krasniqi escaped being burned alive by jumping through a window. His burnt hands still bear witness to what happened that day, however.
When Sweeney arrived in the village to film his next report, he discovered that “all the Albanians houses’ had been burned down”. The Serb inhabitants of the village had also fled after Milosevic’s forces withdrew to Serbia.
The only person he could see was a 14-year-old boy, wearing a “military beret” and holding a gun. “He was too small for a gun!” Sweeney recalled.
He also recalled the screams of the women who were then returning to the village and finding out that their loved ones did not survive the shootings back in March: “They realised the horror – their men were dead.”
In one of the houses, Sweeney saw the remains of a wheelchair that had been used by a paralysed 35-year-old man, Sait Hajdari, who was taken away with all the other men from the village to be shot – “carried to his death on the back of another doomed man”, as Sweeney reported for The Observer and Channel 4’s ‘Dispatches’ programme.
He also managed to find the survivor Krasniqi, who his harrowing story, explaining “how he had ducked just before the machine-gun opened up, how he hid underneath the dying. He remembered them groaning in agony, and how he smelled smoke and realised that the Serbs had set fire to the barn,” as Sweeney wrote later.
“He endured the flames for as long as possible, and then he ran for it, thinking better be shot than be burnt alive.”
The returning ethnic Albanian villagers told Sweeney which local Serbs had been involved in the mass shooting, so he went to one of the Serbs’ house and found documents and photographs confirming their identities, which he then passed on to the UN war crimes tribunal.
This became significant evidence at the subsequent trial in The Hague, as investigators had found that these same men had been paid by the Serbian Ministry of Defence.
A truckful of bodies
There was yet more evidence still to be found in Krusha e Vogel/Mala Krusha – evidence that would eventually be cited two decades after the massacre at the trial of Darko Tasic, who was convicted last month.
“Towards the end of our time in Prizren, we heard the story that Darko Tasic had dumped this truck with bodies in the river,” Sweeney explained.
“I went for a swim in the river and the truck was half in the river and half out,” he said.
The bodies were no longer in the truck, but “there was a blood stain on the side of the truck, and a bone”.
However, he said that he found it upsetting that “the investigators came [to the village] months or years later”, making it difficult to secure the evidence, a lot of which was already long gone.
“They should have gone and seized the truck and taken photographs of the blood stain,” he argued.
Witnesses later testified in court in Kosovo that they saw Tasic and his father driving the truck that was transporting the dead bodies, setting it on fire and pushing it into the river after the massacre in March 1999.
Sweeney still hopes that more will be done to find the bodies that were in the truck, which he believes were swept away by the water and may still lie buried in the riverbed.
The fact that evidence has disappeared over time that could have convicted more perpetrators shows that “the energy has gone” in the quest for justice for wartime crimes, he argued: “Justice is being forgotten about.”
At the Serbian officials’ trial in The Hague, their defence lawyers tried to question Sweeney’s impartiality, claiming that his reports had been biased. However, these claims were undermined by the fact that his reports also included accounts of Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA fighters burning down Serbs’ houses in revenge.
“We were showing the evidence that the Serb militia had killed the people but also the KLA could do bad things as well, like burning down homes. So we were fair,” he said.
Sweeney spoke to BIRN in the week that prosecutors in The Hague revealed they have prepared war crimes indictments for senior ex-KLA officers including Kosovo’s President Hashim Thaci.
He said that the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, the Hague-based court set up five years ago to try former KLA members for wartime and post-war crimes, make him feel uneasy.
“They cannot prosecute the Serbs because they are in Serbia, so it seems unfair. It is wrong that only one side is being prosecuted,” he said.
He suggested that the EU, which Serbia is seeking to join, should put pressure on Belgrade to “hand over the people who committed the crimes”.
“Kosovo is saying we will hand over our war criminals and it is a good thing,” he said. “If there is evidence against people, they should be prosecuted.”