Detainees Lost in Maze of Yugoslav Prison System

When they boarded the Fati Tours bus from Slovenia to Kosovo last July, Baljaj Naim, Zogaj Enver and Hrecaj Haljit were much like the 51 other ethnic Albanian passengers.

Like the others, the three men were contract workers going home--their pockets full of hard-earned construction wages--to wives, children and parents they hadn’t seen for months.

But nearly a year after all the workers were detained at a Serbian police checkpoint in Kosovo on suspicion of being terrorists, the three men and 12 others still haven’t made it home.

After a torturous eight months of trials and appeals that moved them from prison to prison, the 15 men--who were convicted on vague terrorist charges just weeks before NATO launched its air war March 24--personify the problem now known simply as “the prisoners.”

They are among an estimated 2,000 ethnic Albanian detainees and convicts who, the Yugoslav government acknowledges, were in Kosovo’s prisons during NATO’s air war. An undetermined number of those prisoners were moved to jails elsewhere in Serbia during the final weeks of the conflict.

The fate of imprisoned ethnic Albanians is moving to center stage in the aftermath of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia. And the saga of the men from the bus, say their lawyers here, epitomizes their advocates’ frustrated search for justice.

Eight of the 15 passengers, missing since May, finally turned up this week in a Serbian prison in Nis. The other seven--including Naim, Enver and Haljit--simply vanished in the chaos and killing that was Kosovo during and after NATO’s 11-week air war. They are among hundreds of prisoners whose fate is unknown.

On Thursday, the head of an International Committee of the Red Cross delegation, which interviewed its first 330 ethnic Albanian prisoners in Serbia this week, said tracing the rest and resolving their cases rank among the most enduring and confounding problems of the postwar period.

“It’s Benedictine work,” Dominique Dufour said. “This will probably keep us busy for many, many years to come.”

Compounding the problem, he and other Western officials said, is the fact that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Yugoslav officials never addressed the issue of the ethnic Albanian prisoners when they negotiated the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops from Kosovo last month.

“The attitude of the Serbian government about these Albanian prisoners is, ‘We are holding a number of Yugoslav citizens detained within Yugoslavia and still being detained within Yugoslavia for crimes committed in Yugoslavia,’ ” explained Dufour, who stressed that the Justice Ministry of Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia, has been cooperating in the effort to trace them.

“So now, in their eyes, you’re talking about some form of amnesty,” Dufour said. “But there was no agreement reached between the Western powers and Yugoslavia regarding these prisoners, and there probably needs to be.”

Human rights workers in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia say that, in addition to prisoners who were formally charged before and during the air war, Serbian authorities searching for members and supporters of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, plucked hundreds of ethnic Albanian refugees out of the columns of those fleeing last spring and detained them despite having little or no known documentation of a crime.

Serbian authorities have, in fact, released about 1,000 of those prisoners in recent weeks: About 800 were freed near the Albanian border last month as Yugoslav troops withdrew from the province, and 166 prisoners were turned over to the Red Cross here this month.

The Yugoslav government says the issue is further complicated by the rapid withdrawal from the province last month of Yugoslav troops, court personnel and judicial staff, which left prisoners’ court files in disarray.

But Dufour and others working to resolve the issue say that, in most of the cases involving ethnic Albanian prisoners who were removed from Kosovo or are missing, Serbian authorities kept detailed records of court proceedings and prisoner transfers. Justice Ministry officials, defense lawyers and the Red Cross are working to reconstruct the records.

Extensive court records exist in the case of the 15 “terrorists” seized from the Fati Tours bus.

The records, obtained by The Times, help illustrate just why so many ethnic Albanians landed in prisons in the first place. Combined with witness accounts during the war and other documents here, the records also indicate that NATO might have helped obscure the fate of those prisoners and hundreds of other missing ethnic Albanians when its warplanes bombed Kosovo’s largest prison, in the town of Istok, at the height of the air war.

For the Fati 15, returning last year to the province with pockets filled with wages, the nightmare began when they reached a Serbian police checkpoint in the city of Podujevo on July 20 during heavy fighting between Yugoslav forces and KLA rebels.

Here’s how the Serbian judge, who found all 15 guilty after a four-day trial in February, described in his final judgment what happened next:

“Police stopped them. They checked the passengers and luggage and found on them the hard currency. [Police] immediately understood that it was being carried to Kosovo, that they were bound to join the terrorist organization [KLA] to buy arms and ammunition for the hard currency. They were escorted to Pristina . . . and arrests ensued.”

After an investigation that lasted months--during which Serbia’s justice minister labeled the 15 passengers “terrorists” in an article that appeared in a state-run newspaper months before the trial--prosecutors dropped all charges against 39 other passengers and released them.

For the remaining 15, the court record shows, not a single witness testified against them during their trial in the Serbian city of Prokuplje, about 120 miles southeast of Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia and Serbia. No hard evidence was introduced linking them to the KLA, and the judge wrote that his guilty finding was based on the $56,000 worth of German marks the men carried, the fact that they were construction workers who left Slovenia at the height of that former Yugoslav republic’s building season, and that they were “smuggling” the money into Yugoslavia “in their pockets.”

In his appeal to Serbia’s Supreme Court in April, the passengers’ Belgrade-based ethnic Albanian lawyer, Husniya Bitic, called the verdict “totally upside down . . . an attack on the legal system and the state . . . a political pamphlet or a speech of some political leader at one of his [Serbian] nationalist rallies.”

Bitic stressed in his Supreme Court brief that few of the 54 passengers knew each other when they boarded the bus; that witnesses told the court that the cash was for the workers’ families and for the families of their co-workers; that the money had come from performing legitimate construction work; and that the bus was on a regularly scheduled, twice-weekly route.

“Had such a verdict been delivered somewhere in Afghanistan [or] Papua New Guinea . . . perhaps it may be said this was being done by people who know nothing of the law,” Bitic stated in the appeal. “But for such a verdict to be passed in the middle of civilized Europe . . . this we could not expect.”

That was in April, after NATO had begun bombing Yugoslavia. The court rejected the appeal, and the 15 men continued to serve sentences ranging from 3 1/2 to 4 years.

Then the real trouble started.

“Until April 23, those 15 people were in Prokuplje,” Bitic said here Wednesday. “On April 26, they moved them to Istok. And on June 10, all prisons in Kosovo were deserted. Until today, I’ve only found eight of them in prison in Nis. I’m still searching for the others.”

Given what happened at Istok’s Dubrava penitentiary on May 19, it’s a miracle Bitic managed to find the eight. NATO bombed the prison several times that day, and foreign journalists who visited the scene between bombing runs described tense, hellish scenes of prison guards struggling to control about 1,000 inmates after the bombs killed 19 inmates and guards, breached the prison wall and left the facility’s records in ruin.

When asked that day why NATO had bombed the modern, Swedish-built prison complex, which was widely known throughout Europe as one of the continent’s largest such facilities, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea replied: “That was a military barracks, and we attacked it twice. . . . Whether the Serbs were using it to house other people--that’s a different thing.”

But the overwhelming majority of the 1,004 inmates that Serbian authorities and the Red Cross say were being held in Dubrava when the bombs fell were ethnic Albanians. Most of them were like the Fati 15, charged or convicted under counter-terrorism laws. Western reporters and camera crews who visited the abandoned prison after the Yugoslav withdrawal found bullet-pocked walls, bloodied bedclothes and other signs of possible reprisals by prison guards.

An Italian film crew also found 94 fresh, unmarked graves a few miles from the prison, where unconfirmed reports persist among villagers of an unsuccessful prison break and a massacre of inmates after the NATO bombardment.

For Bitic, who is in touch almost daily with relatives of the missing seven, their case is “a tremendous weight on my back. What will I tell the family? Well, at least for now, we’re still looking.”

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* MORE PROTESTS IN SERBIA: Opposition leaders and Milosevic supporters take to the streets of Yugoslavia. A8