Serbs slaughter fleeing Muslim families

Electronic Telegraph, 30th September 1998 

SLOBODAN Milosevic claims the Serb   offensive in Kosovo has ended, but villagers say they have seen his troops murdering women and children.

 PhilipSmucker reports from Donje Obrinje, 30th September 1998

 The Albanian women lay alongside their children in a line along the narrow ravine they had run down in a futile attempt to escape their killers. Even in death the fear was still visible on their faces.

One boy had his throat cut. A woman had her stomach ripped open. A pregnant mother lay with a dead child at her feet. Villagers huddled beneath the treeline with blank, stunned faces and told a tale of slaughter more harrowing than any other heard or seen in Kosovo's seven-month guerrilla conflict.

From the evidence at hand, it was clear that the refugees, who had been living under plastic sheeting since being driven from their homes by Serb shelling, had been deliberately murdered. Most of them had been shot in the head at close range.

The villagers had no doubt who was responsible for the bloodbath. It was the work of Serbian security forces, as the killers were dressed in police and army uniforms, they said.

We found the first bodies under the green tarpaulins the refugees had stretched over branches in a little encampment near the village of Donje Obrinje. It would have been their only protection against the advancing winter.

A man of about 65, apparently too weak to flee, lay sprawled on his back with the top of his head blown away by a bullet. A women, presumably his wife, lay next to him, with a deep stab wound to her chest. One of her feet had been hacked off.

A little way off, along a narrow ravine, lay the bodies of five women and four children who appeared to have been fleeing along the defile to escape the murderers. The heavy brush had hampered them. Their corpses lay in a straggling line amid the undergrowth in the hot, morning sun.

The villagers said that the refugees had set up the camp the day before. Further along the ridge two elderly Albanian men lay in a smashed swathe of trees demolished by a Serb tank. They had been shot in the head at close range. This massacre gave the lie to Serbia's claims that its forces were acting with restraint in their war with the Albanian separatist guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

The slaughter took place on Saturday, the day that Sadako Ogata, the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees, visited the area and then complained to Western reporters that she had gained "no guarantees" from President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia that "repressive measures" would be ended in Kosovo.

The killings also came shortly after a Nato defence ministers' meeting that warned Serbia of possible air raids if its security forces did not end their offensive in Kosovo. Members of the six-nation Contact Group for Kosovo visited the region yesterday, a day after American observers discovered the scene of the massacre.

Western powers are trying to decide how to put an end to the grinding guerrilla conflict in Kosovo, which pits small bands of lightly-armed ethnic Albanian separatists against the Serbian security forces commanded by President Milosevic.

Near the ravine lay the body of an old man, shot in the back of the head and with his throat slit. His son crept down from the forest to explain how his father had been killed. "The Serb forces took him down from the village at gun point to show them the refugees," he said.

"When they had discovered the group, they shot him and slit his throat," he said, as he closed his father's eyes. A rusty blade lay across the dead man's chest.

Another man said that Serbian security forces had - by constant shelling - pushed the victims out of a refugee encampment only a day before and in the direction of the homes from which they had fled. "We couldn't return, though, because they were shelling the village," said Sadri Delije.

"We were turned back here," he said, pointing to the encampment in a wooded area at the base of a small hill. "We couldn't move all day on Friday because of the shelling and then on Saturday at 10am the Serbs came." Mr Delije said that the Serbian forces had been mixed. Some of them had worn green military uniforms and others were in blue police uniforms.

There were no direct eyewitnesses to the massacre. One man who had fled up the side of the hill had been chased by machine-gun fire and had crouched in the mud to escape it. A villager said: "Everyone who could have told you more is dead."

As the sun began to climb in the sky, the villagers began to bundle the bodies into blankets and carry them away on wooden stretchers for burial.

[Note:  While the Serbs continue to slaughter Muslims just as they did in Bosnia, the international community continues to sit idly by and simply 'talk' of 'tough measures'.

Compare this reaction with their reaction to the (unjust) Iraaqi invasion of Kuwait, where the West wanted to gain control and mastery of the Muslim Land and its Oil.

So in reality, they do not wish to take any 'tough measures' against the Serbs. The Serbs are doing exactly what they want ... destroying the possibility of an Islaamic State in Europe.

But remember, "They (the disbelievers) plan, and Allaah plans, and Allaah is the best of Planners".]