Captured KLA Men Say
Serbs Were Executed

  "Reuters"
  August 29, 1998 Klecka, Kosovo

NOTE: This is Reuters' wire report. Very few people read wire reports. We do not know whether this text was ever printed in any of the Western journals.

The text of the report is presented here in its entirety.

For fair use only
Published under the provision of
U.S. Code, Title 17, section 107.

DULJE, Serbia, Aug 28 (Reuters)- Serbian police said they captured an ethnic Albanian guerrilla base in southwest Kosovo where Serb civilian hostages were executed, Tanjug news agency reported on Friday.

The seizure of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) command post in the village of Klecka on Thursday completed the recapture of villages, straddling the Pec-Prizren road, from ethnic Albanian separatists who held them for three months.

Police escorted journalists into the area on Friday after three days of fierce fighting to dislodge its KLA defenders.

Reporters for Western media said two captured KLA men showed them a spot in Klecka where 10 Serbs -- including three women and two children -- were shot by a KLA firing squad.

Pristina country court investigating magistrate Danica Marinkovic said four burned bodies found in the village were believed to be those of victims of the shootings. There was no trace of the other corpses.

Dulje, 10 km (six miles) south of Klecka, and other villages around it on the highway are in an area which has been under heavy assault by Serb security forces who over the last month have rolled back the KLA's territorial gains in west and southwest Kosovo.

"This region was a terrorist stronghold from where they could control the main road," police spokesman Colonel Bozidar Filic said.

"From positions here and across the road the KLA had been attacking police and army outposts and patrols for more than three months."

He said many Serb civilians had been kidnapped in the area, mostly taken off the buses or grabbed from cars.

The fierceness of the fighting around Dulje was obvious.

The village of Crnoljevo, where up to 2,000 ethnic Albanians lived before the clashes began, was deserted except for police. Most of the houses were demolished or burnt.

The battle for Crnoljevo was intense because the area was a pocket of the toughest KLA resistance, Serb police said.

"One policemen was killed and four were wounded. We found six dead Albanians," Filic told reporters on a hill criss-crossed by trenches dug by the KLA and now used by police.

The ethnic Albanian Kosovo Information Centre (KIC) said on Friday that six ethnic Albanians were killed on Thursday around Suva Reka further down the same road towards Prizren.

Five people were killed in the western Malisevo region on Thursday and Friday, it said.

The KLA is battling for the independence of Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians make up about 90 percent of the province's two million people. At least 265,000 Kosovars have been displaced by the fighting.

In the area around Dulje, a dusty side road running through densly forested hills above Crnoljevo was covered with debris and the remains of KLA barricades.

A column of Yugoslav army tanks, heavy guns, armoured personnel carriers and lorries passed along the Pristina-Prizren road On Friday.

"There were no civilian casualties in this operation," a member of the Serbian Anti-Terrorist Unmit (SAJ) said.

" We do not know how many of their fighters were actually killed because they (the KLA) take their wounded and dead with them. We saw bloodstains in the woods."

Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

PS: Notice that the above Reuters' article had to have the obligatory sentence: "ethnic Albanians make up about 90 percent of the province's two million people." The sentence was repeated as a mantra by Western press. The intention was to claim: "Albanians are majority - so why should they not have right to secede from the country?"

Of course, Western countries would never let portions of their countries where minorities are majority secede. Also, most importantly, Western media never mentioned how ethnic Albanians got to be voping 90% of the population of Kosovo. They achieved that through terror and by cleansing the ethnic Serbs and other non-Albanian peoples.