Serbs destroyed Yugoslavia - The Death of Yugoslavia

Hey What are you falsely accusing me of just being Serb when I have croatian in me as well???

LOL - HAHAHAHAAHA


ALBANIANS NEVER SAVED JEWS IN WWII ...DO YOU WANT ME TO POST AN ARTICLE ON IT ?

 

Do you think serbs are responsible for every bloodshed in ex-Yu wars ?

Stick to the thread !

 

"Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) women were raped by the Serbs as part of a methodical and concentrated campaign of ethnic cleansing. For instance, the girls and women selected by the later convicted war criminal Dragoljub Kunarac or by his men, were systematically taken to the soldiers' base, a house located in Osmana Djikic street no 16. There, the women and girls (some as young as 14) were repeatedly raped. Serb soldiers regularly took Muslim girls from various detention centres and kept them as sex slaves."

..............

Bosniak women were kept in various detention centres where they had to live in intolerably unhygienic conditions and were mistreated in many ways including being repeatedly raped. Serb soldiers or policemen would come to these detention centres, select one or more women, take them out and rape them. All this was done in full view, in complete knowledge and often with the direct involvement of the Serb local authorities, particularly the police forces. The head of Foca police forces, Dragan Gagovic, was personally identified as one of the men who came to these detention centres to take women out and rape them. There were numerous rape camps in Foca. "Karaman's house" was one of the most notorious rape camps. The women kept in this house were raped repeatedly. Among the women held in "Karaman's house" there were minors as young as 15 years of age.

Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) women were raped by the Serbs as part of a methodical and concentrated campaign of ethnic cleansing. For instance, the girls and women selected by the later convicted war criminal Dragoljub Kunarac or by his men, were systematically taken to the soldiers' base, a house located in Osmana Djikic street no 16. There, the women and girls (some as young as 14) were repeatedly raped. Serb soldiers regularly took Muslim girls from various detention centres and kept them as sex slaves.

The other example includes Radomir Kovac, convicted also by ICTY. Radomir Kovac kept four young Muslim girls in his apartment, sexually abusing and repeatedly raping them. Kovac would also invite friends to his home and allow them to rape the girls. Kovac also sold three of the girls. Prior to selling them, Kovac gave two of his Muslim sex slaves to other Serb soldiers who gang raped them for more than three weeks. The girls were then taken back to Kovac, who immediately sold one and gave the other away as a present to his friend.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Karaman's_House.jpg
"Karaman's House", a location where women were tortured and raped near Foča, Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Photograph provided courtesy of the ICTY)

 

Why are you spamming news from the 1990s? Maldic and Karadzic are already captured and nobody cares about those news events anymore??????????



ITS NOT GOING TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE FOR ALBANIANS IN KOSOVO ANYMORE IN 2011.

BESIDES YOU ALBANIANS COMMITTED RAPES AGAINST SERBIAN NUNS ...

AND NASER ORIC BOSNIAN MUSLIMS COMMITTED RAPES AGAINST NON-BOSNIAN MUSLIM CIVILIANS.

THIS IS WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT...

YOU ALBANIANS USE THE UNFORTUNATE EVENTS HAPPENING TO BOSNIAN MUSLIMS TO FURTHER YOUR OWN POLITICAL ALBANIAN PROPAGANDA WHICH IS NOT WORKING ANYMORE.......

LOL....


IT HAPPENED TO BOSNIAN MUSLIMS AND NOT ALBANIANS IN KOSOVO WHERE YOU CAN PLAY VICTIM SO SOME COUNTRY CAN USE THEIR ARSENAL AGAINST YOUR RIVALS ANYMORE ??????? LOL ...

 

at the Mona Lisa just slovestnosti diarrhea

 

Doesn't anyone find it strange how the mainstream media was reporting that Serbs were ethnically cleansing Kosovo Albanians? Years later to present day, Albanians are the vast majority and Serbs are being ethnically cleansed only this time no media reports on this subject?

 

There are 3 screen names: frozy, spt5, and davinci.

Davinci and spt 5 are the same person. I am 100% sure.

Frozy identifies her/himself as bosnian muslim but can't even speak a word of bosnian so they report me for writing the language.

serbian-croatian-bosnian are 3 intelligeble languages meaning they can communicate together with one another . And there differences only lie with the dialect and the loan words taken from other foriegn languages.

Otherwise I can talk to all three and I know the different dialect.

From my croatian part, I know the language in dalmatia very well and the difference how serbs and bosnian speak...

However frozy cannot even speak bosnian. BTW.

Davinci reported me and I am now thinking one person may have all three screen names... hmmm ..Davinci acknowledged reporting me for writing the bosnian muslim word for whats up "Dje"? or Dje se ? you can say Jesse in english how bosnian muslims write "Whats up"?

Does someone here have alot of time in their hands?

And they must not have a job as well ...

They report me for writing another language because they don't want to reveal their fake profiles may come from an albanian roman catholic female who can't get a date????

 

Well the mainstream media has ties with political lobby groups that fund their news reporting and call it private enterprise ..Besides the military had an interest putting a military base in kosovo probably sponsored by albanian propaganda groups like the albanian american league headed by congressman ethnic albanian joe dioguardi...

they have put so much pressure and propaganda about the unique nature of kosovo when kosovo doesnt even have a strategic purpose in the balkans for NATO...


I would see Bulgaria or Montenegro as strategic military locations for a US base...

Kosovo is surrounded by mountains and very difficult for the military to get out of the mountains and come in ...

Kosovo is LANDLOCKED.... why put a base in a landlocked province?

Its coming from albanian groups in america... that propagandize the specialty of the place....

the albanians in the US..

 

You act as if they aren't building a vast military base in Kosovo. News flash, they are. They don't need to move their forces by ground when they have air superiority.

 

I know they are building a vast military base in kosovo...but having one in kosovo isnt a strategic one...


They need a connection to the sea... How are they going to supply the base if its not self sufficient by surroudning mountains?


pretty soon they will have technology will they will just micro wave everything moving in the air ...Tesla technology and air superiority will be useless..

 

Seems that Muslims can commit crimes against others completely unnoticed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo

 

Air superiority will be a thing of the past... As you can see countries are building up defense against bombings with microwave technology ....

Something you see come out of cell phone towers will be a new defense against bombing campaigns..

 

I think that you do not have a clue regarding Kosovo war which lead to the greatest momentum Albanians have been waiting for... The Republic of Kosovo !

serbs were celebrating 9/11 attacks :
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kuw3ONe4aKM&feature=player_embedded"]Serb Terrorist IDIOTS Celebreated Bin Laden attack 9/11 New York , Stupid Serb Terrorist - YouTube[/ame]

as for other things, you should do a bit of research regarding disgraceful serbian history, which is full of attacking christian countries.. furthermore, serbs were Turkish vassals against Western Crusaders !

 

Using caps won't make you smarter
Still, you refuse to answer my question:

Mlabich, war criminal, should be hanged or executed ?

 

western crusaders SACKED CHRISTIAN ORTHODOXY CONSTANTINOPLE IN THE 4th CRUSADE...MAJOR EPIC FAIL FOR ROMAN CATHOLICISM ON GAINING ECONOMIC STRATEGIC TRADE VIA VENICE...LOL...

 

Listen Mona Lisa....

You Still Haven't Answered My Question About The Rapes Committed By Albanian Muslims Against Serbian Orthodox Christian Nuns. ????? In The Devic Monastery...

Reported By Cnn News!!!

 

There was no rape, it is a complete fabrication by your side. But please do contribute do the thread...
You think that serbia should have been punished more ? And what do you think about the Republic of Kosovo ?

 

I refute your statement because I already supplied a NON-BIASED LINK REPORTED BY CNN NEWS OF THE RAPE AGAINST SERBIAN NUNS IN DEVIC MONASTERY and your denial is just an insult.

 

your country committed genocide, serb !

 

What is gendercide ?

Gendercide is gender-selective mass killing.

Gendercide is gender-selective mass killing. The term was first used by Mary Anne Warren in her 1985 book, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection. Warren drew "an analogy between the concept of genocide" and what she called "gendercide." Citing the Oxford English Dictionary definition of genocide as "the deliberate extermination of a race of people," Warren wrote:

By analogy, gendercide would be the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex (or gender). Other terms, such as "gynocide" and "femicide," have been used to refer to the wrongful killing of girls and women. But "gendercide" is a sex-neutral term, in that the victims may be either male or female. There is a need for such a sex-neutral term, since sexually discriminatory killing is just as wrong when the victims happen to be male. The term also calls attention to the fact that gender roles have often had lethal consequences, and that these are in important respects analogous to the lethal consequences of racial, religious, and class prejudice.

 

Summary
*******
Atrocities were committed by all sides and against all sectors of the population in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. But the Serb strategy of gender-selective mass executions of non-combatant men was the most severe and systematic atrocity inflicted throughout. The war in Bosnia can thus be considered both a genocide against Bosnia's Muslim population, and a gendercide against Muslim men in particular.

The background
************

The Yugoslav ("Southern Slav") federation, cobbled together from the disintegrated Ottoman Empire after World War I, was torn apart by combined Nazi invasion and ethnic conflict during the Second World War. Indeed, the slaughter of Serbs, Jews, Muslims, Croats, and Roma (Gypsies) constituted one of the most genocidal theatres of that war; the Jewish population was nearly exterminated. A partisan movement led by Josip Broz Tito (a Croat) seized power with Allied help, massacred its enemies, and established a comparatively liberal socialist state, creating an atmosphere for a sense of Yugoslav nationhood to flourish (an idea that lives on today in "Cyber-Yugoslavia"). The federation began to unwind after Marshal Tito's death in 1980, with economic crisis and foreign debt speeding the dissolution of the union. A new generation of extreme-nationalist politicians arose to fan the flames of ethnic hatred as a springboard to personal power. In Serbia, President Slobodan Milosevic consolidated his highly authoritarian brand of rule after 1987, imposing a police state on the restive province of Kosovo and its ethnic-Albanian majority in 1989. Franjo Tudjman, meanwhile, won presidential elections in Croatia by reviving the symbolism and rhetoric of the fascist Ustashe, Croatia's Nazi collaborationists, who fifty years earlier had inflicted genocide on the Serbs, Jews, and Roma within their reach.

While Tudjman and others played an important role in ensuring that the breakup of Yugoslavia would be violent, it was overridingly Milosevic's ambitions of a "Greater Serbia" that sparked the onset of fullscale war in both Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Using its dominant control over the Yugoslav army, the Serb regime shelled large parts of Croatia into submission in 1991 (including the destruction of the Danube city of Vukovar and the subsequent genocidal massacre: see below). The Bosnian government, almost defenseless, desperately sought to stay out of the widening conflict. But the following year, in Spring 1992, Milosevic -- in alliance with Radovan Karadzic's breakaway Bosnian Serbs -- launched the genocidal and gendercidal "ethnic cleansing" of those parts of Bosnia intended for "Greater Serbia." Sarajevo's time-honoured ethnic harmony was shattered by a protracted Serb siege. Meanwhile, the outside world dithered ineffectually, imposing an arms embargo on the Bosnian Muslims equal to the one it imposed on the well-armed Serbs. Europe's worst conflict since the Second World War was underway, and the military imbalance placed Milosevic's genocidal ambitions within reach.

 

The gendercide
***********

In the light of long-established and heavily "gendered" strategies of intercommunal conflict in the Balkans, it was hardly surprising that the gender-selective massacre of non-combatant males would emerge as the dominant and most severe atrocity inflicted on the civilian population in the modern Balkans wars. Regardless of their often-atrocious maltreatment of other population groups (including the destruction of entire cities and the mass rape of women), Serb forces -- and to a lesser extent Croats and Muslims -- concentrated their attention systematically on "battle-age" men. As the Bosnian Prime Minister Hasan Muratovic described the Serb strategy in 1996, "Wherever they [the Serbs] captured people, they either detained or killed all the males from 18 to 55 [years old]. It has never happened that the men of that age arrived across the front-line." Citing Muratovic's comment, Mark Danner summarized the Serbs' modus operandi as follows:

1. Concentration. Surround the area to be cleansed and after warning the resident Serbs -- often they are urged to leave or are at least told to mark their houses with white flags -- intimidate the target population with artillery fire and arbitrary executions and then bring them out into the streets.
2. Decapitation. Execute political leaders and those capable of taking their places: lawyers, judges, public officials, writers, professors.
3. Separation. Divide women, children, and old men from men of "fighting age" -- sixteen years to sixty years old.
4. Evacuation. Transport women, children, and old men to the border, expelling them into a neighboring territory or country.
5. Liquidation. Execute "fighting age" men, dispose of bodies.

All of the largest atrocities of the Balkans war were variations on this gendercidal theme -- targeting males almost exclusively, and for the most part "battle-age" males. The five worst acts of mass killing in the modern Balkans wars were also the worst in Europe since the killing of tens of thousands of disarmed enemy men by Tito's partisan forces in 1945-46. At Vukovar in November 1991, between 200 and 300 Croatian men, "mostly lightly wounded soldiers and hospital workers," were pulled out of the hospital surroundings -- some with the catheters still dangling from their arms -- executed, and buried en masse outside city limits.

The story of Vlasic (Ugar Gorge) is that of another ruthless act of gender-selective mass killing. On 21 August 1992, a convoy of prisoners from the Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp were driven to Muslim and Croat territory. En route, men were separated from women, driven off in separate buses, and executed at the edge of the ravine. Some 200-250 men are believed to have died.

But neither Vukovar nor the Ugar Gorge could hold a candle to a more obscure slaughter -- at Brcko during the Serb offensive of 1992. Although much about the incident remains shadowy, Brcko, a strategic "choke point" on the Drina River, appears to have been the target of a systematic gender-selective slaughter that strongly foreshadowed the nightmare at Srebrenica three years later. Mark Danner, who has investigated what little is publicly known about the events, summarizes them as follows:

During the late spring and early summer of 1992, some three thousand Muslims ... were herded by Serb troops into an abandoned warehouse, tortured, and put to death. A U.S. intelligence satellite orbiting over the former Yugoslavia photographed part of the slaughter. "They have photos of trucks going into Brcko with bodies standing upright, and pictures of trucks coming out of Brcko carrying bodies lying horizontally, stacked like cordwood," an investigator working outside the U.S. government who has seen the photographs told us. ... The photographs remain unpublished to this day. (Danner, "Bosnia: The Great Betrayal," New York Review of Books, 26 March 1998.)

The vast majority of mass killings and gender-selective slaughters between 1991 and 1994 were smaller in magnitude, and went virtually unrecorded. The best place to find accounts of them, in English at least, is the Helsinki Watch/Human Rights Watch report, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The litany of atrocities in a narrow stretch of Volume II alone makes clear the pervasiveness and systematic character of the gendercide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in a way that the more epic mass killings perhaps do not:

In my village, about 180 men were killed. The army put all men in the center of the village. After the killing, the women took care of the bodies and identified them. The older men buried the bodies. (Trnopolje)

We were met by the Cetniks [Serb paramilitaries], who were separating women and children from the men. Many of the men were killed on the spot -- mostly over old, private disputes. The rest of us were put on buses and they started to beat us. (Kozarac)

The army came to the village that day. They took us from our houses. The men were beaten. The army came in on trucks and started shooting at the men and killing them. (Prnovo)

The army took most of the men and killed them. There were bodies everywhere. (Rizvanovici)

The shooting started at about 4:00 p.m., but we were surrounded and could not escape. They [Serb troops] finally entered the village at 8:00 p.m. and immediately began setting houses on fire, looking for men and executing them. When they got to our house, they ordered us to come out with hands raised above our heads, including the children. There were four men among us, and they shot them in front of us. We were screaming, and the children cried as we were forced to walk on. I saw another six men killed nearby. (Skelani)

Our men had to hide. My husband was with us, but hiding. I saw my uncle being beaten on July 25 when there was a kind of massacre. The Serbs were searching for arms. Three hundred men were killed that day. (Carakovo)

We came out of the shelter. They were looking for men. They got them all together. We saw them beating the men. We heard the sounds of the shooting. One man survived the executions. They killed his brother and father. Afterwards the women buried the men. (Biscani)

The crowning act of gendercide in the Balkans wars -- at least until "Operation Horseshoe" in Kosovo in 1999 -- came at Srebrenica between July 12 and 17, 1995. After the atrocities of 1992 and further fighting in 1993, Srebrenica had been declared one of five "safe areas" under UN protection. Tens of thousands of desperate Muslims sought protection there. Despite privations and squalor, the safety held -- until July 1995, when Serb forces overran the enclave. As Dutch U.N. troops and the international community looked on, the Serbs separated the men, most of them elderly and infirm, from the children and women. While the other members of the community were bused to safety in Muslim-held territory, thousands of Srebrenica's men were taken out to open fields, executed, and buried in mass graves. Thousands of other unarmed men were rounded up and hunted down in nearby forests, in what Serb commander Ratko Mladic called a "feast" of mass killing.

 

How many died?

"As of December 1994," writes Sabrina Ramet in Balkan Babel (p. 267), "between 200,000 and 400,000 people had died since June 1991 as a result of the war between Serbs and non-Serbs, and at least 2.7 million people had been reduced to refugees. An estimated 20,000-50,000 Bosnian Muslim women had been raped by Bosnian Serb soldiers in a systematic campaign of humiliation and psychological terror." Most authorities, while accepting that the death-toll from the Bosnian conflict alone reached six figures, would tend towards the lower end of Ramet's casualty estimate. But to this must be added the further slaughter during the "endgame" of the war in mid-1995, including the gendercidal massacre at Srebrenica and the Croat invasion of the Serb-held Krajina region later in the summer.

No reliable statistics exist for the number of male versus female casualties in the Bosnian or Croatian wars. All members of the civilian population suffered in the protracted and bloody sieges of cities such as Vukovar and Sarajevo. But the overwhelming weight of testimony and recorded evidence suggests a heavy preponderance of "battle-age" males among the dead -- probably over 80 percent. One clue can be gleaned from the lists of missing persons from the Bosnian conflict. The International Committee of the Red Cross has noted that "the majority of missing persons [in Bosnia-Herzegovina] are men ... Of the approximately 18,000 persons registered by the ICRC in Bosnia-Herzegovina as still missing in connection with the armed conflict that ended there in 1995, 92% are men and 8% are women." (ICRC, "The Impact of Armed Conflict on Women", 6 March 2001.) This apparent disproportion, combined with the systematic gender-selective strategies pursued in the individual massacres and "ethnic cleansing" campaigns, warrants the designation of Bosnia-Herzegovina as one of the worst gendercides in recent decades. Especially in 1992-93, atrocities were also inflicted in the brutal concentration camps operated by the Serbs (e.g., Omarska, Trnopolje), and to a lesser extent by the Croats (Dretelj). The inmates of these camps were overwhelmingly Muslim males (95 percent or more); many thousands died from torture, beatings, and summary executions.

Who is responsible?

Bosnia War CrimeAlthough crimes have been committed by all sides in the Balkans conflict, the vast majority of the mass killings and other atrocities were inflicted by the Yugoslav regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic himself now numbers among those indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), on the basis of his genocidal actions in Kosovo. He is presently the only sitting head of state to be so indicted. Four top aides were indicted alongside him. Among Milosevic's key co-conspirators is his wife, Mirjana Markovic, a leading party ideologue.

The Yugoslav power structure is extensively penetrated by criminal and paramilitary elements, most notably those under the control of Zeljko Raznatovic ("Arkan") and Vojislav Seselj. Both of these paramilitary leaders were deeply involved in the ground-level killing at the major massacre sites. Radovan Karadzic, Prime Minister of the self-declared "Republika Srpska" (the Serb statelet in Bosnia-Herzegovina), has also been indicted on war-crimes charges. He was intimately involved in planning and preparing the genocidal actions against the Muslim population of Bosnia. His top general, Ratko Mladic, supervised the gendercide at Srebrenica and numerous other acts of mass killing, and is also under indictment.

One must not overlook the men and occasionally women who slaughtered the defenseless victims and buried them in the mass graves, or killed them in their houses and streets. Again, although extreme nationalism was evident in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, it is the ordinary citizens of Serbia who have overridingly supported their regime in its campaign to build "Greater Serbia" over the graves of Muslims, Croats, and Kosovars.

The aftermath

The slaughter at Srebrenica, which seemed to mark the apogee of "Greater Serbia," was quickly followed by its demise. A Croat-Muslim alliance, now rearmed with tacit U.S. assistance, went on the offensive. "On August 4 [1995], with clear U.S. backing, Croatia's army attacked and overran Knin, the symbolic capital of the rebel Serbs who, at the instigation of Slobodan Milosevic and the Yugoslav army, had seized a quarter of Croatia's territory and driven out their Croat neighbors in 1990 and 1991. Within hours, the tide of the wars in Yugoslavia had shifted. The rebel Serbs' leaders abandoned the civilian Serb population in Croatia. The Croatian army sent tens of thousands of these Serbs fleeing across the Croatian border into Serb-held districts in Bosnia." (Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance, p. 324.) Many thousands of Serbs, especially the elderly and infirm, were killed by Croat forces in these new vengeful "cleansings." Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb allies were forced to the negotiating table. In November 1995, at Dayton, Ohio, they signed a peace treaty with Muslim and Croat representatives that saw Bosnia-Herzegovina formally preserved as an independent country, though with clear areas of predominance for Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. The pact was secured by 60,000 NATO peacekeepers -- but Milosevic's "Greater Serbia" dream remained. It would turn its attentions next to the territory it had first focused upon -- Kosovo, with its rebellious ethnic-Albanian majority. The result was a renewed bout of "ethnic cleansing" and gendercide in the Balkans, in 1998-99.

 

Summary

The genocidal assault launched against Kosovo's civilian population in 1998-99 bore many of the hallmarks of the earlier Serb campaigns in Bosnia. From a gender perspective, a strong trend was evident in the expulsion of women, children, and the elderly, the sexual assault of younger Kosovar women, and the systematic targeting of the "battle-age" male population for mass execution, detention, and torture.

The background

Kosovo, like Bosnia, historically demarcated a boundary between the Orthodox Christian and Ottoman Muslim populations of the Balkans. In a campaign of extraordinary brutality, the Serbs wrested Kosovo from the decaying Ottoman Empire in the wars of 1912-13. These earlier conflicts evinced a pattern of both gender-selective mass exterminations and the mass targeting of other members of the community. "The city [Prizren] seems like the Kingdom of Death," wrote Lazer Mjeda, the Catholic Archbishop of Skopje, in a report to Rome in January 1913. "[The Serbs] knock on the doors of the Albanian houses, take away the men, and shoot them immediately. In a few days the number of men killed reached 400." In his now-standard history of Kosovo, Malcolm includes mention of another massacre at Feriza, "where the Serbian commander had invited the Albanian men to return to their homes in peace, and where those who did so (300-400 men) were then taken out and shot." (Both quotes in Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History, p. 254.) Tens of thousands of men likely died in this fashion, as did thousands of other victims of indiscriminate atrocities. Both strategies are amply familiar to students of the recent, supposedly more modern era of Serb foreign policy.

The authoritarian Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic made Kosovo the cornerstone of his rise to power in 1987-89. As the Yugoslav federation disintegrated, Milosevic saw the opportunity to take control by inflaming nationalist sentiments, and eventually by "ethnically cleansing" territories where Serbs constituted a majority or a large minority. Kosovo was inflated in the Serb national consciousness as essential to the nation's identity. This clashed with the aspirations of the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo, some 90% of the population, who had enjoyed considerable autonomy within Marshal Tito's socialist federation, and now watched as that autonomy was stripped away. In 1989, Milosevic arranged for Kosovo's "provincial" status within the Yugoslav federation to be cancelled, and closed down the provincial assembly and government. A police state was imposed, and ethnic Albanians were fired by the tens of thousands from state and private positions alike. These jobs now went to Serbs, and the migration, especially of young ethnic-Albanian men, was strongly "encouraged." Hundreds of thousands did indeed pour as refugees and economic migrants into Western Europe and North America, creating one of the largest diaspora communities in the world. At street level, the pattern was one of constant surveillance, harassment, and detention of Kosovar men. Julie Mertus noted shortly before the outbreak of the war that "police routinely stop ethnic Albanian men"; she cites the astonishing statistic that between 1989 and 1997, "584,373 Kosovo Albanians -- half the adult population -- [was] arrested, interrogated, interned or remanded." Eventually, after nearly a decade of repression that many commentators have compared to South African apartheid, an armed guerrilla movement (the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA]) arose in 1997. The Milosevic regime seized the opportunity, and began to plan for an epic act of genocide and population transfer that would extinguish ethnic-Albanian culture in Kosovo once and for all

As tension and violence increased in Kosovo over the course of 1998-99, there were signs that reprisal killings of males would be an essential Serb strategy in any fullscale conflict. The outbreak of mass killings in 1998 included a substantial number of women, elderly, and child victims -- nearly always according to the variable of family affiliation. The assault on the Deliaj clan in September 1998, for example, left "the bodies of 15 women, children and elderly members" of the clan "slumped among the rocks and streams of the gorge below their village ... shot in the head at close range and in some cases mutilated as they tried to escape advancing Serbian forces." Among the cases of mutilation was that of a 30-year-old woman, Lumnije Deliaj, "who relatives said was seven months pregnant. Her abdomen had been slit open." Six more elderly people (at least four of them male) were shot or burned to death elsewhere in the village of Gornje Obrinje. But four miles away from this clan killing, at Golubovac, a mass murder was being carried out, with the victims selected according to a different and more typical standard. The gendercidal atrocity that ensued was related by one man, Selman Morina, who miraculously survived.

It was this pattern of gender-selective atrocity that again predominated prior to the outbreak of fullscale war (see the Background Information on gender-selective atrocities during this period). The crowning prewar act of mass killing -- depicted by some as "The massacre that forced the West to act" -- occurred at the village of Racak on January 16 1999. What happened was succinctly captured by Peter Beaumont and Patrick Wintour: "As the [Serb] forces entered the village searching for 'terrorists' from the Kosovo Liberation Army they tortured, humiliated, and murdered any men they found." (The Guardian, July 18 1999.) The international monitors who investigated the slaughter provided the most detailed accounting of the Racak victims:

Twenty-three adult males of various ages. Many shot at extremely close range, most shot in the front, back and top of the head. Villagers reported that these victims were last seen alive when the police were arresting them. ... Three adults [sic] males shot in various parts of their body, including their backs. They appeared to have been shot when running away. ... One adult male shot outside his house with his head missing. ... One adult male shot in head and decapitated. All the flesh was missing from the skull. One adult female shot in the back. ... One boy (12 years old) shot in the neck. One male, late teens (shot in abdomen). (Excerpts in The New York Times, January 22 1999.)

After Racak, the international community, led by the United States, stepped up the pressure on the Milosevic regime, convening a conference at the French chateau of Rambouillet in an effort to strike a peace accord that would give Kosovo autonomy, though not fullscale independence, as the vast majority of ethnic Albanians were now demanding. The abortive negotiations at Rambouillet are one of the most hotly-debated aspects of the Kosovo war (for a critical perspective, see Chomsky, The New Military Humanism). Regardless of the causes, the Serbs refused to sign the terms offered them, and withdrew to implement their "final solution" for the ethnic-Albanian "problem" in Kosovo -- Operation Horseshoe.

 

The gendercide

Operation Horseshoe was apparently the name given to the Serb offensive concentrated along, but not limited to, the semi-circular swath of western Kosovo adjoining Albania, which had been the heartland of KLA resistance. Beginning on March 19 1999, and then escalating with the onset of NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia on March 24, the Serbs implemented a classic "ethnic cleansing" campaign focusing upon the expulsion of most of the population, the sexual assault of hundreds of Kosovar women, and above all the gender-selective mass execution of "battle-age" men who had been unable to escape to the hills or surrounding countries. Some of the first eyewitness testimony to the gendercide was brought to western attention by Selami Elshani, a Kosovar man who survived the massacre of more than 100 non-combatant men at the village of Velika Krusa on March 26 1999. Severely burned by the fire the Serbs set to "finish off" their victims, Elshani was eventually smuggled across the border to Albania, where a Washington Post reporter interviewed him in his hospital bed.

Among the testimonials gathered by Human Rights Watch was that of a 20-year-old woman at Izbica, the site of another act of gendercide shortly after Velika Krusa. Her account made clear the ruthless gender-selectiveness that usually prevailed in the Serbs' "cleansing" campaigns:

When the Serbs arrived, almost all of the young men left the village. They went into the mountains to hide or fight. ... By 10 a.m. [the next morning] everyone was in the field. There were thousands of people, almost all women, children, and old people. Only about 150 men were among us. ... At about 11 a.m. they separated the women from the men. We asked them why they were doing this and they told us, in a very scary voice: "Shut up, don't ask, otherwise we'll kill you." The children were terrified. The Serbs yelled: "We'll kill you, and where is the United States to save you?" All the women had covered their heads with handkerchiefs out of fear of [rape by?] the Serbs, hiding their hair and foreheads. The Serbs called us obscene things, saying "(*)(*)(*)(*) all Albanian mothers," and "All Albanian women are (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)es." They took the men away and lined them up about twenty meters away from us. Then they ordered us to go to Albania. They said: "You've been looking for a greater Albania, now you can go there." They were shooting in the air above our heads. We followed their orders and moved in the direction we were told, walking away from the men. About 100 meters from the place we started walking, the Serbs decided to separate out the younger boys from our group. Boys of fourteen and up had already been placed with the men; now they separated out boys of about ten and up. Only very small boys were left with us, one old man who had lost his legs, and my handicapped brother, who can't walk because of spinal meningitis. So they took the ten to fourteen-year-olds to join the men. The boys' mothers were crying. Some even tried to speak to the Serbs, but the Serbs pushed them [away]. We were walking away very slowly because we were so worried about what would happen to our men.

We stopped moving when we heard automatic weapon fire. We turned our heads to see what was happening, but it was impossible to see the men. We saw the ten-to-fourteen-year-olds running in our direction; when they got to us we asked them what was happening. They were very upset; no one could talk. One of them finally told us: "They released us but the others are finished." We stayed in the same place for some twenty minutes. Everyone was crying. The automatic weapon fire went on non-stop for a few minutes; after that we heard short, irregular bursts of fire for some ten minutes or so. My father, my uncle and my cousin were among the men killed. Kajtaz Rexha and Qazim Rexhepi were also killed, as were many other members of the Bajraj, Bajrami, Rexhepi, and Aliu families. Then ten Serbs caught up with us. They said lots of obscenities and again told us: "Now you must leave for Albania -- don't stop, just go." We had to leave. ... My father had given me his jacket because I had been wearing another jacket that said "American Sport" on it and he was afraid; he wanted to cover that up. Because I was pushing the wheelbarrow and wearing a man's jacket, they thought I was a man. They told me to stop and then to come over to them, but I was too afraid. It was the scariest moment of my life. Then they shined a flashlight in my face and saw that I was a woman. One of them said, "Let her go." (Human Rights Watch, "Witness to Izbica Killings Speaks: Possibly Largest Massacre of Kosovo War," Kosovo Human Rights Flash #39, May 19 1999.)

Gendercidal massacres continued throughout the war, including the largest known mass killing, at Meja on April 27. Sebastian Junger describes the grim events:

Shortly before dawn ... according to locals, a large contingent of Yugoslav army troops garrisoned in Junik started moving eastward through the valley, dragging men from their houses and pushing them into trucks. "Go to Albania!" they screamed at the women before driving on to the next town with their prisoners. By the time they got to Meja they had collected as many as 300 men. The regular army took up positions around the town while the militia and paramilitaries went through the houses grabbing the last few villagers and shoving them out into the road. The men were surrounded by fields most of them had worked in their whole lives, and they could look up and see mountains they'd admired since they were children. Around noon the first group was led to the compost heap, gunned down, and burned under piles of cornhusks. A few minutes later a group of about 70 were forced to lie down in three neat rows and were machine-gunned in the back. The rest -- about 35 men -- were taken to a farmhouse along the Gjakove [Djakovica] road, pushed into one of the rooms, and then shot through the windows at point-blank range. The militiamen who did this then stepped inside, finished them off with shots to the head, and burned the house down. They walked away singing.

A more recent estimate claims that as many as 500 men may have been killed at Meja (see Joshua Hammer, "On the Trail of the Hard Truth," Newsweek, July 9, 2000). Another largescale massacre followed near Vucitrn on May 2-3.

In the closing days of the war, grim and independently-sourced accounts circulated in British and U.S. newspapers of a Serb "factory of death" in Kosovo. It was alleged that the Serbs were using industrial sites such as the Trepca mines in northwestern Kosovo for the mass destruction and disposal of corpses (see below, "How many died?"). Perhaps the final gendercidal blast came at the Istok prison on May 20, where after a NATO airstrike, paramilitaries seized the opportunity to massacre over 100 ethnic-Albanian prisoners, all male.