Final report from Truth-Commission Serbia – Kosovo 2013/2018
Hello friends and visitors of our web page. Hope you all are doing well. Here comes the last document so far concerning TRUTH COMMISSION SERBIA KOSOVO. It is a five year final report (2013-2018) regarding my presentation publicly in Belgrade about war crimes committed in Kosovo 1998/99 by Serbian military, police and para military units. The circumstances and political attitudes concerning an approach to find the still missing victims and mutual ground for reconciliation and peace in both Serbia and Kosovo seem at present time beyond reach. Efforts recently to come together to find common ground for exchange of victims seems to be a play for the gallery. The families of the victims are suffering 20 years after the conflict/war while the politicians’ supposedly efforts to do something are unfolding?
Josef Martinsen
Final report from
Truth-Commission Serbia – Kosovo 2013/2018
A personal account from
Josef Martinsen
Introduction
I first came to Serbia and Belgrade from Kosovo autumn 2013 and with me I had a full documentation regarding war crimes committed towards civilian Kosovo Albanian women, children and men in Kosovo from January1998 up to June 1999 by Serbian military, police and paramilitary units, references:
- see convictions 26th of February 2009 by Trail Chamber III of the International Crime Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo 1999.
- see The Kosovo Trilogy by Josef Martinsen – kosovotrilogy.com containing war crime documentation – two books and a film for free download (Serbian, Albanian, English)
- Documentary by BIRN / Belgrade about war crimes committed in Kosovo by Serbians – (Trailer) https://vimeo.com/ondemand/theunidentified/162552335?autoplay=1
My purpose for visiting Belgrade
After finishing my documentation back in 2010 it came apparent to me that the Serbian government did not address its population concerning war crimes committed in Kosovo by Serbian police, paramilitary and military in 1998-99 and the connection it had to the military response in 24 of March 1999 when NATO initiated by the US and the UK started to bomb Serbia and Montenegro for 78 days in order to force president Milosevic and his regime to stop murdering Albanian civilian women, children and men all over Kosovo and forcefully expelling Albanians out of Kosovo, then looting and burning their properties-see documentation www.kosovotrilogy.com .
I decided to travel to Belgrade and present my documentation called The Kosovo Trilogy for the population in general and the younger generation in particular. I set up the web page www.truth-commission.com and gave lectures based on my war crimes documentation at “Medija Centar” in Belgrade in 2015, 2016 and 2017. The lectures were filmed and put on web page www.truth-commission.com in Serbian, Albanian and English.
We invited on our web page people to contact us, especially those who had witnessed and/or taken part in war crimes in Kosovo and thus suffered psychologically and physically from the impact of the war crimes that the government at the time forced them take part in.
There are still missing 1658 people: 1097 Albanians, 561Serbs and Roma from the 1998/99 conflict in Kosovo, see www.balkaninsight.com article of 10/10-18. The families of the victims wish to find their loved ones and have them buried home and not in a mass grave somewhere around in Kosovo or Serbia.
Internal obstacles in Serbia for a solution regarding reconciliation, truth, peace and the still missing victims.
The leading political environment as I experienced it in 2013 and up to 2018 is driven by the remnants from Milosevic regime personified by Aleksandar Vučić who back in 1998/2000 was Minister of Information and a driving force as minister to establish an impression in the Serbian population that Kosovo’s unarmed Albanian population was a major threat to Serbia. He was Minister of Defence and First Deputy Prime Minister (2012–2014) and Prime Minister (2014–2017 and President (2017–present).
Aleksandar Vučić has over the years from 1998 probably had a huge impact on the prevailing political views that the population in Serbia obtains from the government as the only source of information. At that time it was near total control of the media and censorship was in force. Aleksander Vučić allowed in 2017/18 a former war crimes convicted general to teach new young officers at the military academy, a general that had not repented or admitted wrong doings against Albanian civilians, showing that Vučić hasn’t learned from history.
Internal obstacles in Kosovo for a solution regarding reconciliation, truth, peace and the still missing victims
There is an expression saying “it takes two to tango” and my experience from the Balkans and Kosovo and Serbia in particular is that they are unfamiliar with “tango”. If Kosovo and Serbia ever should solve their mutual problems they need to understand the expression “it takes two to tango”. Back in summer 1999 when I came to Pristina from Skopje it looked like a mess, the landscape I drove through in order to reach Pristina from Macedonia looked terrible, many places had been looted and torched. Pristina is located in a valley and all around in the hillsides houses were burning in the late evening for many days; Kosovo Albanian citizens were taking revenge on former civilian Serbian neighbours by looting and torching their homes. The British KFOR in charge after the Serbs left Pristina had banned this activity without success.
United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) took over the responsibility for necessary practical and political activity since Kosovo now had become a UN-Protectorate under UN in New York. Together with KFOR, UNMIK had to grant law and order. It was a unique and unprecedented situation for all involved – UNMIK’s responsibility was to train and set up “municipalities” and “state” institutions in Kosovo covering health, education, law system, judges, police and a host of other areas like political parties and constitutional bodies. The then UN secretary-General Kofi Anan appointed a special representative as head of UNMIK (SRSG) with executive power unfortunately without appointing any entity to control the SRSG himself. Each of SRSG’s normally functioned for a couple of years, up to now there have been nine SRSG appointed because Kosovo is not accepted as member of UN so Kosovo is still a UN-protectorate and incumbent SRSG is Zahir Tanin from Afghanistan.
In 1999 the 15 of July Bernhard Kouchner from France was appointed as first SRSG in Kosovo by Secretary-General Kofi Anan. SRSG Bernard Kouchner, had a unique chance to set the stage for building up a so called democratic “state” from scratch following Western Europe’s democracy values but he failed to deliver. One of Bernard Kouchner’s most important and destructive executive orders was in connection with the laying out for public bid for Kosovo’s first mobile license without following the rules for assessing the incoming bids and choosing the best for Kosovo. The Mobile license was given by Bernhard Kouchner to Monaco in France which had a decisive negative effect on the population that thought that democracy and law and order should be the leading principles. On August 18th 2000 an executive order with far more dangerous and far reaching consequences was issued by Bernard Kouchner and given effect as law also retroactive – “all UN institutions in Kosovo, including employees and their families and soldiers, all in all 60,000 persons over the years were placed above the law”. They could not be sued, prosecuted, arrested or even interrogated by a local legal body, see
(Dagens Nyheter (Newspaper in Sweden) 2007-06-25, Journalist Maciej Zaremba “Report from UNMIKISTAN Land of the Future” Part 1-4)
This opened up for massive corruption and caused problems for hundreds if not thousands of Kosovo Albanian civilians who were trapped with “criminals” working for and inside UN.
The other SRSG that messed-up as head of UNMIK and made life miserable for ordinary citizen years to come was Søren Jessen-Petersen (2004-2006).
(Former SRSG and head of UNMIK Søren Jessen-Petersen – Prishtina Insight June 4-17,2010, page 13. See also www.balkaninsight.com)
ICTY Kosovo had over the years from 1999 up to 2005 gathered information concerning local and international criminals influencing politics and politicians meddling with criminals and in 2005 it was set for a major operation arresting corrupt politicians and local and international criminals. It was said that more than 4000 files were the base for the planned indictments. The night before the arrests should take place SRSG Søren Jessen-Petersen stopped the whole operation because someone made a phone call to him? This was discovered five years later in 2010 when Jessen-Petersen made a short visit to Kosovo (SRSG and head of UNMIK Søren Jessen-Petersen – Prishtina Insight June 4-17,2010, page 13).
SRSG Søren Jessen-Petersen never disclosed who called him that night that made him stop this major plan to “wipe-out” the criminal politicians and their accomplices. All the files that were gathered as evidence to take out the criminal politicians disappeared?
The 2008 Kosovo declaration of independence was adopted on 17 February 2008 by the Assembly of Kosovo. In a meeting attended by 109 of the total 120 members, the assembly unanimously declared Kosovo to be independent from Serbia, while all 11 representatives of the Serb minority boycotted the proceedings. It was the second declaration of independence by Kosovo’s Albanian-majority political institutions; the first was proclaimed on 7 September 1990.The legality of the declaration has been disputed. Serbia sought international validation and support for its stance that the declaration was illegal, and in October 2008 requested an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice. The Court determined that the declaration did not violate international law. At last I’ll focus on the topic “pensions for veterans” I’ll advice you to carefully read this article I cut from Balkan insight regarding fake veteran pensions: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/page/balkan-transitional-justice-home
which shows how leading political figures screwed up the war pension system and allowed 18,000 fake KLA veterans to receive pension related to service during the conflict.
In comparison, it wasn’t until May 2018, after massive protests over the years a small pension was granted for female war victims. For the eighteen years in waiting for justice there was not given any pension or compensation to female victims of the war, i.e. women that looked after family and house that were raped and abused by Serbian military, police and paramilitary people because the Albanian men could not protect their families. The men fled into the forests and mountains hiding.
What comes next?
In the beginning of the twentieth century a window of opportunity emerged for the population in Serbia and Kosovo after being witnesses to a ten year long and painful destruction of former Yugoslavia. The leading politicians in the ninety nineties had Europe’s fifty-years of experience in how not to act.
Poor people in Serbia and Kosovo are stuck with incompetent and greedy politicians with a huge personal ego, without empathy and vision for people and land.
The professional UN-workers take out their high salaries and benefits for a year or two and then move on with excellent testimony papers competing for a higher position in the UN hierarchy. No one has ever been held accountable in the UN-system as far as I know. The responsible UN leaders in UNMIK destroyed Kosovo’s possibilities as a future democratic “state”, the old clan system is intact and the women are not equal individuals despite the fact that the law say there should be equality.
Necessary to clean up the whole political system that is infected by corrupt politicians i.e. KLA commanders and alike who have thought their protégés the same corrupt behaviour.
The younger generation in Serbia and Kosovo have to take charge and find out how to do “a tango”.
Josef Martinsen
Writer
Links:
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/page/balkan-transitional-justice-home