This is a partial list of the people who were killed, mutilated, raped, seriously wounded, severely beaten or tortured, or disappeared. The list was made by comparing all data published by governments and NGO's, supplemented by communications from families, friends, and neighbors. At the end of each entry we give the initials of the sources used. This list includes people of all nationalities, including Serbs and Montenegrins (Orthodox Slavs), Roma (Gypsies, including Ashkaelia and Egyptians), Moslems (Moslem Slavs), Gorani (Moslem Slavs from Southern Kosovo), Croats ( Catholic Slavs), Turks, and Macedonians.
Albanians killed by Serbs are not listed here, but most of them are included in the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) List. We will publish the complete list of Albanian victims when it becomes available. Albanians on this list were most probably killed because of their lack of full cooperation with Albanians engaged in the armed struggle against Belgrade. That could mean that one had refused to be taxed or drafted or refused to give up his weapon--many Albanians in the countryside had rifle or pistol permits. An Albanian risked getting killed if he refused to resign his job as mailman or electric lineman, or if s/he maintained a friendship or a relationship with a Serb. An Albanian could get shot while riding a bus or riding in a Serb's car or even in his own, as some guerrillas used any passing vehicles, including buses, tractors, and horse-drawn carts, for target practice. In time of civil war, personal and patriotic motives often intermingle, and an Albanian could be killed because of personal disagreements with a relative of a guerrilla fighter. According to the Pristina daily Koha Ditore, guerrillas of the KLA tortured and killed guerrillas of a rival group, the FARK. The motives for all these killings vary, but one thing is certain: they would be alive today, practicing medicine, delivering the mail, selling their produce or their cheese at the farmers market, or grazing their sheep in peace, had President Bush not officially authorized the Kosovo insurrection in his Christmas note to Milosevic, as reported in The New York Times of December 28, 1992.
We publish this list as a service to the surviving families, whom we met in Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Macedonia . They are not to be forgotten.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS
We asked for photographs of the dead and missing. We received only a few hundreds, many of which are bad copies of faded ID cards. Why so few photos? When a house is attacked and burned, those of the family who manage to escape do not run into the woods carrying photo albums. Sometimes whole families are wiped out, sometimes the victims are unknown. Who was killed in the village, who got away? In some villages, attacked and burned down, only a few of the bodies are identified. KFOR soldiers do not have the time to look for or identify Serb and Roma bones in all the charred ruins that dot the face of Kosovo, they hardly can protect the living. The InterNATO Tribunal at The Hague is not concerned with crimes committed against Orthodox Christians (Serbs or Montenegrins) and their Moslem allies in either Bosnia or Kosovo, even though those were the crimes which started the violence and revenge cycle in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The Milosevic government was never known for its efficiency at publicizing statistics. The only truly interested people are a few organizations with very limited resources and the surviving families. The ICRC (International Committe of the Red Cross) is the organization with the greatest experience in this field. To quote from http://www.cicr.org/icrceng.nsf/5cacfdf48ca698b641256242003b3295/6a4bf8e778d5668e412568da004cb570?OpenDocument
"ICRC teams were mobilised in all of its offices in Kosovo to systematically visit towns and villages to encourage families to come forward with the information of missing relatives. Most of the names gathered were from Kosovo Albanians reporting that their family members had been arrested, but in Kosovo and also elsewhere in FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] the ICRC was also gathering information from hundreds of families of Serbian, Roma and other communities who were reporting that their relatives had been abducted by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) or civilians."
The ICRC teams have systematically searched from village to village and have named most Albanian victims, because the Albanians have returned to their villages and have thus been able to determine who is missing. How are Serbs and Roma survivors to meet each other and the ICRC when they are spread all over Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Italy? This is particularly a problem for the Roma, who escaped to different countries, are despised or hated at home and in host countries, and have been openly discriminated against by foreign aid organizations. They could not find who died and who survived because they could not reach relatives, friends, and neighbors.You cannot send a postcard to your former neighbors, there is no mail. You cannot call, they never had a phone. Sorry, no e-mail. Anyhow the neighbors are gone and their house is gone. We must assume that a sizable percentage of victims, particularly from the Roma nation, is still unknown.
WOMEN
Most of the victims on this list are men, but we do have the names of hundreds of killed or disappeared women. We indicate this by adding a letter F after the name. Most of these women's age was between 60 and 90, which is the reason why we have so few pictures of women. It is easier to forget old folks, they were expected to die soon anyhow. Do you know anyone who carries the picture of his dear grandmother in his wallet? Most of the pictures are of young and middle aged men. Why? Because their mothers or wives have survived and had those pictures in their wallets. Of most of the dead all that is left are some bones. No tombstone, no picture. Mostly Serbs and Gypsies. Last time it was Serbs, Gypsies, and Jews. This time, all the Jews, prodded by grandparents who had survived WWII, got away with their lives, and the clothes on their backs. The decision to leave the NATO occupation areas was easier for the Jews to make, in certain black uniforms they saw the face of death, they had seen them before. But to the old folks in the villages--particularly the widows, some of whom, according to custom, had their burial clothes prepared-- leaving the land was unthinkable. They staid and went all back to the land.
Rape victims deserve the same honor and consideration as the tortured and the wounded. However, some women who were raped in the course of conflict may choose not to claim the status they deserve. For this reason, if the women in question were not killed, we are going to omit their name. In any case of Albanian women raped as punishment for their relatives' lack of political correctness, we are going to omit the village as well, to avoid them reprisals, should they still be living there. Unless rape victims come forward and give us permission, we are going to respect their right to privacy, even though their names are already part of the public record.
HOW MANY ARE THE VICTIMS OF NATO IN KOSOVO?
Liberation Day, June 10, 1999, is the day on which the Yugoslav army began withdrawing in accordance with the terms of the Kumanovo Armistice. The western press tells us that, since Liberation, the Serbian dead--it is not appropriate to mention non-Serb enemies of NATO-- amount to "more than three hundred" victims of "revenge killings". Are we making the claim that the number of dead victims of NATO and its allies in Kosovo is more than two thousand, without counting the raped, wounded, and mutilated? No, we are not making any numbers claims. We actually don't have the time to add up the numbers, every day we get new data. All we can give you is hundreds of fotos, thousands of names which belong to people who lived in peace with their neighbors in the multi-ethnic Kosovo which NATO destroyed. Most of them walk no more, that's all.
If you really must have a body count, add them up yourself.
SHOULD WE COUNT BODIES OR VICTIMS?
Some of the dead were known to surviving neighbors only by their first name, and we'll call them N.N. , followed by the name of the town, followed by their first name. Some of the dead and missing were unidentified people observed as they were being arrested or killed. If a source claimed that a couple of Serbs or Roma were burned inside their houses in Pec, we would call them N.N. PEC A and N.N.PEC B or N.N.ROMA PEC A and N.N.ROMA PEC B. As data become available we will change the N.N.'s into names. If a Serb village was burned down and the church reports that ten old folks had remained there and that there is no trace of them, we should count them all as victims even if the bodies are not spotted. Unidentified bodies found in mass graves or dumped at the cemetery should not be added to the total of the dead, since most of them probably belong to people already reported as disappeared. We must do our best to avoid inflating the total, without at the same time ignoring a report just because it is unclear.
RECTIFYING ERRORS
Many of the reports have errors and some victims may have been named twice,
under slightly different names or in different towns. It's possible that a
few of those described as detained or arrested may have been freed without
the news getting back to the church or other source of data. Some reports
no doubt give misspelled names, and often different reports give different
date and place for an arrest which clearly involves one person, rather than
two people with the same name.
When it seems likely that a killing might have been reported already, but
we are not really sure, we add the mark at the end of the paragraph. In
a land where the last names were created by adding an "ic" or "vic"
to the father's first name, it's not so odd to have a couple of victims with
the same name.The pool of Serbian last names seems to be limited. Help with
weeding-out doubles will be appreciated, but it would not change the horror
of it all, if the number of children, mothers, grandmothers, and war prisoners
killed or disappeared on our watch, were in the hundreds or the thousands.
NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS
Dates are abbreviated in the American way (month preceding day) or in the
European way (day preceding month).Thus the date of August 3, 1999 can be
given either as 8/3/99 or 03.08.99 or 3 8 1999 or 3 8 99. American style dates
dates are only given with slashes, such as 8/3/99 or 8/3/1999. European style
dates use the other formats.
Hours: h00.30 is 30 minutes after midnight, h12.00 is noon, h20.00 is 8P.M.,
h24.00 is midnight.
indicates that this person may already have been reported under a slightly different name. We do not want to inflate casualties, neither do we want to ignore a dead or missing person just because his name is similar to that of another victim. We hope that witnesses and family members will come forward and help us clarify such reports.
Indicates that the family name does not appear to be Serb or Montenegrin.
If nationality is not indicated, we need help to identify it.
AFP: Agence France Press
Blic: a daily paper in Belgrade
cpt: Center for Peace and Tolerance of Belgrade
ERRC: the European Roma Rights Center, http://errc.org
F: communications from family, friends, and neighbors.
HLC: Humanitarian Law Center of Belgrade
ICRC: International Committee of the Red Cross
KMDLNJ: Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms, Pristina
0: Serb Orthodox Church
P: Organization of the Families of the Disappeared of Belgrade
SNP: Source Named Perpetrators. It means that the report gave details of the
kind that would interest prosecutors, if there were any interested prosecutors
in Kosovo or at the Hague.
W: Kosovo White Book, Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Belgrade, March
2000