Empty Graves a Sign of Crime After Crimes

The graves of about 150 victims of the Serbs’ worst alleged massacre in Kosovo are empty, and whoever dug up the bodies obviously had a lot to hide.

All that’s left of the three neat rows in a hillside cemetery in this remote village are mounds of turned earth, toppled grave markers, discarded latex gloves and a few shovels.

There are also two pieces of bone, which look like fragments of a skull, near long tresses of a woman’s highlighted brown hair, and a man’s blue beret with patches of skin and hair stuck to the inside.

In two places, on a hilltop above the graves and on a dirt track passing beside it, there are scattered shell casings from assault rifle or machine gun bullets.

In late March, Serbian forces drove about 10,000 ethnic Albanians from nearby villages into the valley next to Izbica, survivor Gani Rama, 54, said Tuesday. As armored vehicles approached on March 27, he said, people held up white flags in surrender.

But about 50 Serbs in green uniforms arrived in a heavy rainstorm around midnight and started shooting over people’s heads, Rama said. Later, two Serbs came forward and demanded 1,000 German marks (about $535) per family to spare their lives, he said.

When the collection came up short, the Serbs returned around 10 a.m. on March 28 and separated the men from the women and children, he added.

The villages’ fighting-age men had already fled into the forested hills, so the only males left were elderly, including a paralyzed man named Hetem Tahu, Rama said.

They were split into two groups of about 60 each, in double lines, said survivor Sheremet Krasniqi, 70. One group was force-marched up the hill where the empty graves are today and the other toward a valley on the edge of Izbica, he said.

“They asked, ‘Where are your KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] boys to help now?’ ” Krasniqi said.

Krasniqi said that he was in the group at the top of the hill and that around 11 a.m., a Serb with a machine gun opened fire from close range. He said he survived by placing his hands next to his head and acting dead.

Sometime around June 5, when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was making moves to accept the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s conditions for an end to the war over Kosovo--a southern province of Serbia, the main republic in Yugoslavia--Serbian forces began to shell Izbica again.

They forced already displaced villagers, and KLA fighters, deep into the woods to be sure there were no witnesses when they emptied the graves, villagers said here Tuesday after a Times reporter and photographer were the first foreigners to reach Izbica.

Krasniqi said that when the security forces pulled back and local people returned to Izbica about a week after being forced out, the bodies of the buried dead had been removed.

“For six days, they shelled the village in order to do it,” Krasniqi said through a translator. “No one could even come close. We were in hiding. We didn’t see anything.”

According to the rebel KLA, the graves at Izbica aren’t the only ones that may frustrate investigators from the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in their search for evidence to convict Milosevic of crimes against humanity.

Serbs also dug up the bodies of 70 to 80 alleged massacre victims buried in a single mass grave in the village of Razala, near the guerrillas’ mountaintop headquarters at Likoc, a KLA fighter said.

The grave was then filled with cows’ bodies and covered with dirt again, he said. That claim could not be independently confirmed.

During the 11 weeks of NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia, Izbica came to symbolize the atrocities the alliance insisted it was fighting to stop.

NATO provided fuzzy aerial photographs of the site early in the war, on April 17, as evidence of a mass grave in Izbica. Refugees arriving in Albania had already said that Serbs had lined up elderly men and killed them in the village.

Those accounts were sometimes confused and contradictory, as is often the case when traumatized survivors recall horrifying details of killings they saw or heard from different angles.

But war crimes investigators got more clues from a videotape smuggled out by an ethnic Albanian physician, Dr. Liri Losci, who said he had witnessed the victims’ mass burial.

Losci’s tape was released May 19, the same day the State Department used it in a special briefing to back up aerial reconnaissance photos that showed before-and-after images of the grave site.

A March 9 aerial photo showed no mounds of earth on the slope rising above Izbica, where a couple of hundred people used to live.

On April 15, a reconnaissance picture showed three rows of about 150 graves in Izbica, the same number villagers said were dug up in a stretch of hillside about 100 yards long.

Losci’s videotape shows 127 men’s bodies lying on the ground, fully clothed. Twelve younger men executed about a month later were also buried at Izbica, Rama said.

That total of 139 bodies still falls short of the estimated 150 graves that can be counted in the aerial photo, a discrepancy that forensic experts may be able to check if they reach the site.

In the village itself, a tractor wagon was piled high Tuesday with partially burned wooden grave markers mixed with scorched pieces of clothing and blankets. The burned wrecks of several other tractors and cars stood in the middle of the village, where fires also ruined houses.

One grave marker leaning against the tractor wagon had the name Avdulla Murat Duraku written on it next to the birth date Aug. 28, 1953. The date of death was March 28, 1999. Another bore the name Sokol Lah Duraku but had no birth date. Both markers listed the home village of the deceased as Buroj, near Izbica.

Neither name appears on the list of Izbica’s dead included in the war crimes tribunal’s May 27 indictment of Milosevic, three other senior officials and a commander.

But the indictment’s list does have a Dibran Duraku, age 65.

Another wooden marker, at the grave site, is a closer match to a name in the indictment. It says Halit Ramaj, but the birth date is not clear. The indictment alleges that a Halit Rama, age 60, was among those massacred at Izbica.

Tossed aside near the grave marker is one of several pairs of latex gloves and the plastic packet that contained them. Such debris also lies next to the graves.

The brand name printed on the package is Micro-touch, made by Johnson & Johnson Medical Inc., suggesting that the gloves probably came from a hospital or morgue rather than a remote village such as Izbica.

Reaching Izbica became possible for foreign journalists only Tuesday, as Serbian police and Yugoslav troops withdrew from the area.

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All of Paul Watson’s dispatches from Kosovo are available on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/dispatch.