Soldier admits to massacre of Kosovo Albanians

A FORMER Yugoslav Army soldier told the Slobodan Milosevic trial yesterday how he helped massacre Kosovo Albanian civilians, including a baby that “screamed unbelievably loud” after it was shot.

The unidentified witness, who testified by video link to The Hague war crimes tribunal from the Balkans, was the first ex-soldier giving evidence against the former Yugoslav president to admit he killed during Serbia's 1998-99 crackdown on Kosovo's Albanians. Milosevic is on trial for crimes against humanity in Kosovo and Croatia and genocide in Bosnia.

The man, his identity concealed and known only as "K41", described how the brigade he joined in 1998 at age 19 shelled and stormed the village of Trnje in March 1999, shortly after NATO began bombing Yugoslavia in response to the Kosovo clampdown.

As some 80 to 100 soldiers prepared to enter Trnje, an army captain motioned to the village and told sergeants that "on that day no one should remain alive there", K41 said.

Houses and a haystack were torched and Albanian men on the street were shot on sight, K41 said.

Troops searched houses for occupants, and a twitching curtain at one house prompted soldiers to force 15 people including women, elderly people and at least one baby out at gunpoint into the courtyard.

As Milosevic yawned, K41 said his sergeant ordered all but four or five of the soldiers away. Those remaining, including himself, were ordered to shoot the civilians. They complied.

"There was at least one baby, it might have been not even a year old," he said. "The people who were all began falling across one another. What I remember most vividly is how I remember it very vividly there was a baby and it had been shot with three bullets and it was screaming unbelievably loud."

Milosevic, who has been defending himself since his trial started in February, is charged with ultimate responsibility for the murder of around 900 Kosovo Albanians and the expulsion of around 800,000 people in the southern Serb province.

Prosecutors have set out to prove that Milosevic, who was then president of Yugoslavia and the supreme commander of the Yugoslav army, spearheaded "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo.

Milosevic insists his forces were combating the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in a legitimate counter-insurgency operation, and that ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo to escape NATO's 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

Presiding Judge Richard May, who is overseeing Milosevic's epic trial, formally warned K41 that he was not obliged to give evidence that could incriminate himself.

But the witness said he wanted to testify to express everything that had been troubling him for the past three years, in the hope it would help him "feel easier in my soul".

"The thing I find most troubling is that never a night goes by without my dreaming of that child who was hit with that bullet and was crying," he told the UN International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.

K41, who was later assigned to a technical company in charge of matters like maintaining trucks, said superiors told him and his peers that KLA guerrillas could be in the villages.

But K41 said he saw no evidence of that, and that Yugoslav soldiers never came under return fire in Trnje.

"At no point was there any shooting or opening of fire from the village. Nor did we come across any uniforms or rifles which would mean there had been soldiers belonging to the KLA there."

Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice indicated to the tribunal this week that K41 would be testifying via a video link from Banja Luka. Such links have not been used before at the Milosevic trial.

The witness said he been unable to get a passport at short notice to travel to The Hague because, among other reasons, he had been afraid to go to the police to apply because police had come to his home looking for him a few months previously.