There is no doubt that the rendition controversy has damaged the United States’ working relationship with the EU in the war on terrorism. However, despite the fact that Europe’s governments have repeatedly denied their collaboration in the US programme of renditions, as evidence of the practice has come to light it has become clear that many European governments have adopted a ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ approach when it comes to rendition flights using their territory.
Genocide in Kosovo
Kosovo is a province in southern Serbia that borders Montenegro, Albania and the Republic of Macedonia. It has an ethnic population of about two million people, predominantly Albanians, with smaller proportions of Serbs, Turks and Bosniaks. The province has been under United Nations administration since 1999, and it has been the subject of long-running and territorial disputes between the Serbian government and Kosovo’s Albanian population.
In the late 1980s, a new, authoritarian leader emerged, a Serbian named Slobodan Milosevic. He was a former communist who had turned to nationalism and religious hatred in his efforts to gain power. As the Yugoslav federation started to collapse, Milosevic saw the opportunity to take control by inciting the long-standing tensions that were already present between the Serbs and Muslims in Kosovo. The Orthodox Christian Serbs, who were in the minority, claimed they were being downtrodden by the Albanian Muslim majority and Milosevic played on the dissent within the population. Under Josip Tito, the Muslims had enjoyed considerable independence, however, under the power of Milosevic, this autonomy would soon be taken away.
In 1989, Milosevic closed down the regional assembly and government and imposed a police state on Kosovo. Tens of thousands of Albanians lost their positions in government and private institutions alike, and Serbs were put in their place. Milosevic, who was trying to ethnically ‘cleanse’ the province, encouraged the migration of young Albanian men. Fearing for their own safety and now finding it difficult to earn a living, this is exactly what happened. Literally hundreds of thousands of Albanians fled Kosovo for Western Europe and North America, which created one of the largest migrant communities in the world.
Back in Kosovo, conditions for the remaining Albanians deteriorated as they were the subject of constant surveillance and harassment. Dr Julie Mertus, who was a member of Human Rights Watch, later reported that between the years 1989 and 1997, almost half the adult Albanian population in Kosovo was either arrested, interrogated, interned or remanded for no particular reason other than the fact they were not Serbs.
After nearly a decade of repression, the Albanians were no longer prepared to take a back seat and in 1966 they formed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The KLA started off as a small guerilla organization that fought for independence from Serbian rule. Their initial attacks were aimed at the Serbian police, government officials and refugee centres in western Kosovo. Their aim was to provoke an open conflict in which they believed the West would be forced to intervene. Milosevic seized the opportunity and his regime started to plan a way of ridding Kosovo of Albanian culture once and for all – by acts of genocide.
By 1997, the KLA’s access to weapons was boosted by the eruption of civil war in neighbouring Albania. The country’s armouries were raided by many different factions, and many of the automatic weapons found their way into the hands of the KLA.
The first major military assault by the KLA took place in September 1997, with the use of anti-tank weapons over a quite a large area of Kosovo. In February 1998, their attacks took on a more sinister tone when they started to attack Serb houses in the villages of Klina, Decani and Djakovica. They attacked a Serb refugee camp at Baboloc and ambushed several Serb policemen on the road between Glogovac and Srbica. Their actions provoked a major counter-offensive by Yugoslav security forces against the KLA strongholds, which resulted in one of the worst massacres in the history of Kosovo. Approximately 80 Albanians, including many women and children, were killed in the central Drenica region of Kosovo.
For two days the Serb police massacred the Albanians, either shooting them with shotguns or hitting them with other hard or sharp objects. Everywhere you could see the evidence of heinous carnage that had taken place. Bodies, many of which had been badly mutilated, lay on the ground and slumped across the thorny bushes that lined the roads.
Reprisal killings continued into 1998, including the massacre of the Deliaj clan in September of that year. After the massacre the bodies of 15 women, children and elderly members of the clan lay in grotesque positions among the rocks and streams of the gorge just below their village. Some had been shot at close range, others had been mutilated as they tried to escape the Serb forces. One of the cases of mutilation was a 30-year-old woman, Lumnije Deliaj, who was seven months pregnant. Her abdomen was slit open. Many of the houses had been burnt to the ground with the inhabitants still inside, too afraid to run outside for fear of being shot. Down a dirt track, just a few miles from the village lay the bodies of three elderly people, who had been shot in the head as they apparently came out to plead for their lives. However, the massacre that actually forced the West to get involved took place at the village of Racak on 16 January, 1999.
In the early hours of 15 January, 1999, members of the Serb police force surrounded the village of Racak, in the district of Stimlje. They were searching for a group of terrorists from the KLA, who had killed a policeman, Svetislav Przic, five days earlier. They were notorious for having carried out multiple criminal acts of murder and torture and the security forces were eager to stop them doing any further damage.
The Serbs started by shelling the village in the early hours of morning, then stormed in and rounded up a group of around 40 men and youths. Most of them were severely beaten before being led down a steep path which went into a gully. The bodies of 45 ethnic Albanian civilians were later discovered outside the village by residents shortly after the government forces withdrew. The gully was filled with a mass of tangled bodies, there was blood everywhere and many corpses showed horrific signs of mutilation.
Following an international outcry, the Serbian government orchestrated a cover-up story by saying that Racak village was a base for KLA fighters. Appalled at what was happening in Kosovo, after the Racak massacre the international community, led by the USA, stepped up pressure on the Milosevic regime. They arranged a conference at the French chateau of Rambouillet to try and negotiate a peace settlement that would give Kosovo partial autonomy, not the full scale independence that the Albanians were demanding. The conference was a disaster, and the Serbs refused to sign any form of peace agreement. Instead, they withdrew to make their own plans to deal with the ethnic-Albanian problem. Their solution was ‘Operation Horseshoe’.
The existence of the operation was immediately denied by the Yugoslav and Serbian governments, and by Milosevic himself, but it remains a subject of controversy right up to the current day. There is no doubt that there was some form of systematic ethnic cleansing, which produced the refugee crisis in Kosovo. It is estimated that a village a day was hit during 1998–99, targeting homes, shops and businesses owned by Albanians. Serb police used ruthless tactics to wipe out the villages neighbourhood by neighbourhood. The Albanians were literally ear-marked for destruction, solely because of their racial identity.