A Voice For the Voiceless

MISSION

The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

War Crimes Give Campaigners a Target

When Serbian forces withdrew from Kosovo, they left behind death, destruction, and despair. Michael Stechow, who worked for the International Crisis Group in Gjakova/Djakovica, remembers the scene when he first arrived in the town. Human heads were turning up among the garbage. Eventually people began to bury their own dead, while trying to note any details that could help war crimes investigators. The Hague tribunal received reports of 11,334 bodies in 529 gravesites throughout Kosovo. Very few villages had emerged unscathed. 

Fresh graves in Gjakova.

Adding to the trauma, over 1,500 Kosovo Albanians had been seized by Serbian forces and taken to prisons in Serbia. Some of those detained were prominent civic leaders like Flora Brovina (head of the League of Albanian Women) and Albin Kurti (the Kosovar student leader). Others just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They even included a six-year-old child, Sabri Musliu.

Perhaps paradoxically, the immensity of these crimes gave civil society in Kosovo a renewed sense of purpose. The Humanitarian Law Center was founded in Belgrade in 1992 and opened a branch in Prishtina in 1996. This allowed the Center to work on both sides of the troubled frontier following the Serbian withdrawal.

Kosovare Kelmendi.

The Center's founder, Natasa Kandic, is one of the few Serbians who commands wide respect in Kosovo. Her colleague, Kosovare Kelmendi, who heads the Prishtina branch of the Humanitarian Law Center, is also well known in Kosovo. The night after NATO bombing began, intruders dragged her father, Bajram, a noted human rights lawyer, and two of her brothers out of their house. Kosovare discovered their bodies by the side of a road two days later. (Bajram's widow-Kosovare's mother-heads the Judiciary Department set up under the U.N. administration in Kosovo.)

Under Natasa Kandic and Kosovare Kelmendi, the Center exploited its ability to work on both sides of the frontier. It began to investigate those who were missing in Kosovo and those detained in Serbian jails. Once a prisoner was confirmed as alive in a Serbian jail, another name could be struck off the list of missing. Taking advantage of the office in Belgrade, the Center's lawyers also made an effort to visit as many detainees as possible.

The work was dangerous and difficult. Center staff were repeatedly threatened and on occasions even kidnapped. The lawyers were unable to visit military prisons. Even when visits were permitted, the Serbian authorities required written permission from the prisoner's family in Kosovo and did not allow interpreters in the jails. This was a problem for the Albanian prisoners who did not speak Serbian. Guards listened in on the conversations between lawyer and prisoner.

Tahil Demaj, vice president of the Peja branch of the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms.

Many other Kosovar groups began organizing around war crimes in the immediate aftermath of war. The Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms had been prominent in the parallel society, but the network collapsed in the war. Recording war crimes provided it with a new mission. Several other local groups also assisted at exhumations-sometimes on their own, sometimes working with the Hague tribunal.

If war crimes galvanized Kosovar activists, they also mobilized ordinary people (if such a term is appropriate) all over the world. Alice Mead, an author of children's books, first visited Kosovo in 1994 armed with a camera. In 1998, she co-founded the Kosova Action Network. With the outbreak of war, she began working tirelessly to generate interest and support for the Kosovars.

In September 1999, the Network joined forces with Naida Dukaj, 23, an Albanian American who runs the Kosova Humanitarian Aid Organization in between working in her father's machine tool factory in California. Together, Naida and Alice collect all the information available on prisoners and issue it in the form of a weekly newsletter.

Alice, Naida, and many others kept up a drumbeat of pressure on the United Nations, the European Union, and the U.S. government. Initially, there was very little response or enthusiasm. But the campaigners kept hammering away, stressing the injustice, and keeping the issue alive. 

Demonstrators in Prishtina holding pictures of the missing including pictures of doctor and poet, Flora Brovina, released in late 2000 after over a year in prison.

They were particularly forceful with UNMIK, which did not want to pick any new quarrels with Serbia. UNMIK formed a working group to coordinate action on the prisoners among its sprawling components, and Bernard Kouchner, head of UNMIK, became steadily more forceful in his comments. Shukrie Rexha, who heads the Association of Political Prisoners (APP) in Prishtina, was invited to attend meetings of the Kosovo Transitional Council (KTC), set up by the United Nations as a kind of interim cabinet.

The Hague tribunal should have been a powerful partner for the campaigners. Set up in 1993, the tribunal has an open-ended mandate and can investigate crimes anywhere in the former Yugoslavia-including Kosovo. But it proved a disappointment for many campaigners in Kosovo.

In May 1999 the tribunal's then-Prosecutor, Louise Arbour, indicted Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, and four senior members of his government for directing the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. Arbour also mounted a huge investigation in Kosovo itself, deploying 16 international forensic teams.

In spite of this, the prosecutor also announced that she had no intention of prosecuting those who had actually committed the war crimes in Kosovo. That would be left to the U.N.-administered system of justice in Kosovo.

This was a staggering blow to groups like the Humanitarian Law Center in Prishtina because the justice system in Kosovo was being slowly and painfully rebuilt. The United Nations made it clear that any judicial capacity would be used to punish and prevent new crimes-particularly attacks on minorities. Past crimes were less of a priority.

This spurred the campaigners to greater efforts. Under pressure, UNMIK began exploring the possibility of creating a Kosovo war crimes tribunal with international judges and lawyers to handle war crimes.

The Humanitarian Law Center also pressed the Hague tribunal to reach out to grieving relatives. Tribunal officials sometimes plead that they must remain neutral and discreet. But the sensational and highly political nature of the Tribunal's work-not to mention the psychological impact of exhumations on communities-has always made it much more than a legal instrument.

Not that publicity and outreach were the solution. The tribunal could open all the graves in Kosovo and spread its message far and wide. But, said relatives, until there was some assurance that war criminals would be brought to justice, its efforts would count for little.