Report Decries Abuses by GIs Sent to Kosovo

They were sent to Kosovo to keep the peace.

But sometimes, these U.S. soldiers also kidnapped people, threatened them with knives and guns, beat them and spat on them. Sometimes, they made them lie on the icy ground and stepped on them if they complained.

And once, they dug a hole in front of a man and told him it would be his grave--unless he did as they said.

The paratroopers of Alpha Company, 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment followed the motto “Get Ugly Early,” to make sure people in Kosovo knew who was boss.

On Monday, the U.S. Army said in a scathing report that some Alpha Company soldiers were guilty of criminal wrongdoing and “had violated basic standards of conduct, human decency and the Army values.”

Dissecting an episode that marks the first major blot on the reputation of the American peacekeepers in the Balkans, the report said the paratroopers “violated the limits and terms of their military assignments by intimidating, interrogating, abusing and beating Albanians.” It blamed their unit’s chain of command for failing to correct misconduct despite being aware that it had taken place.

Army officials said the great majority of the 6,000 U.S. troops serving in the strife-torn Yugoslav region of Kosovo have conducted themselves according to the highest standards. Yet Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki ordered a further review of the report’s findings, and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said he viewed the incidents as a matter of “grave concern.”

The investigation grew from criminal charges that were brought against Staff Sgt. Frank J. Ronghi, who pleaded guilty to raping and killing an 11-year-old Kosovo Albanian girl, Merita Shabiu, in January. Last month, he was sentenced to life in prison.

The investigation brought to light questions about the aggressive methods used by members of Alpha Company in trying to restrain ethnic Albanians, Serbs and other Kosovo groups who remained in bitter conflict in the aftermath of the 1999 war over Kosovo.

Nine other soldiers have since been given various forms of administrative punishment, including reduction in rank and pay cuts. Investigators with the office of the Army inspector general, who prepared the report, also recommended that some of the troops face courts-martial, but the Army has declined to take that step.

The report recommended that the commander of the 3rd Battalion, Lt. Col. Michael D. Ellerbe, be given a letter of reprimand or other punishment for creating the “negative command climate” in which the troops acted. Army officials, however, said Ellerbe was transferred to another command within the 18th Airborne Corps but not punished.

The Army laid part of the blame for the abuses described in the report on the fact that the paratroopers had been sent to Kosovo expecting “high intensity conflict.” What they found instead was a tense peace in which ethnic Albanian and Serbian partisans carried on a shadowy war of bombings and sniping.

Frustration of Soldiers Reported

In that environment, the report said, some of the troops of Alpha Company became frustrated and angry and sought to intimidate the “enemy,” though it was difficult to know exactly who the enemy was.

In one incident, an officer, Lt. John Serafini, and two sergeants tried to find out who had committed two bombings by kidnapping two ethnic Albanian brothers and taking them to an abandoned warehouse in the town of Klokot, the report said. There the brothers were punched, slapped and threatened.

The officer took his M-4 carbine and, after unloading it, held it to the back of one man’s head. “Do you want to die?” he said.

In another case, last Dec. 30, the troops stormed into a restaurant called Sam’s Pizzeria, forced most of the customers out and began brutally interrogating one man.

They put him on the ground, beat him and twisted his arm “to make him say what they wanted to hear,” an ethnic Albanian witness told investigators. The soldiers, led by Serafini, hit the man with a rifle butt, kicked him in the stomach and testicles, and stuck a knife in the wall near his head to frighten him, the report said.

The troops went on weapons searches in ways designed to terrorize Kosovo residents. Though other U.S. troops had been polite, the Alpha Company paratroopers kicked in the doors of the homes they were searching, tied the hands of the owners and forced women and children to remain outside late into the night, witnesses told the Army.

The troops tried to intimidate people in the streets by swearing at them and beating on their vehicles.

Harassing a Man in the Streets

On one market day, Alpha Company soldiers got angry at a man who kept wandering into traffic. One soldier head-butted him, giving him a bloody nose. Moments later, when the man stayed in the road, Ronghi bashed him “with great force” in the head with a billy club, the report said.

Later, the soldiers realized that the man could neither hear nor speak.

One soldier described how a junior officer drove an ethnic Albanian man who had been detained for questioning to a field near the town of Vitina.

The man was measured for height. Then the officer and his troops proceeded to dig a grave in front of him. They told him “that if he did not tell [the officer] what he wanted to know, that they were going to shoot him, and bury him, and nobody would ever know.”

The troops also sided with the Serbian minority against the larger ethnic Albanian population, some of whom wanted revenge against a group that had forced many of their families into the hills in 1999. The unit’s improper conduct “[reflects] the overall negative command climate within [the unit] and is indicative of an attitude of Serb favoritism,” the report said.

The troops would grope women as they walked through town, touching their breasts and buttocks, and saying, “Hey, baby, what’s your name?”

In an incident last Nov. 29, soldiers went to a village outside Vitina where residents were celebrating a holiday and shooting in the air.

They saw a small group of people approaching the village square. A sergeant “searched them and then told them to lie down on the ground, for more than 30 minutes, and it was very cold that night. Some of the women were asking me to let them go home, because they had their children with them, but the soldiers would not let them go,” a witness said.

Another witness told of how the company confiscated illegally cut firewood from ethnic Albanians.

When residents asked the soldiers for some, according to the witness, the soldiers would ask the ethnicity of the resident. If the response was Serbian, they were given some. If Albanian, they were sent away empty-handed.

“Many of the soldiers in the company let the perceived power go to their heads, and that power was abused,” one Alpha Company soldier told investigators. “Over the course of A Company’s time in Vitina it was routine for soldiers to use unnecessary and unprovoked physical force with the people of Vitina. Soldiers would spit on locals, push them on the streets, poke the women with sticks, and generally act like barbarians.”

Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, has asked Gen. John W. Hendrix, head of Army Forces Command, to complete a review of the report “and take any corrective actions as appropriate” within 30 days. An Army spokesman, Maj. Ryan Yantis, said he believed those steps are more likely to be administrative ones aimed at preventing further misconduct than any recommendation of further discipline.

Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, predicted that the incidents were not likely to provoke a great international reaction. The ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo is still eager to have U.S. soldiers there, he said.