Human rights group accuses Macedonia of murder

An international human rights watchdog has accused the Macedonian Government of murdering ethnic Albanian civilians and burning their houses in a village near the capital, Skopje.

A report by Human Rights Watch says Macedonian police shot and killed six civilians and burned at least 22 homes in an attack on the ethnic Albanian village of Ljuboten on August 12th.

Another three civilians were killed by indiscriminate shelling, while a 10th was shot dead as he tried to flee the village, the report says.

Two days after the offensive, Macedonia’s Interior Minister, Ljube Boskovski, said the dead men were “terrorists” and had been killed in a gunfight.

However, Human Rights Watch said its investigators found no evidence of any gunfight and no evidence of rebels in the village at the time of the attack.

The report also says that Boskovski was in Ljuboten at the time of the offensive.

The rights organisation said the incident should be investigated by the UN War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague.

In addition to the killings of the 10 civilians, Human Rights Watch also accused the Macedonian police of abusing hundreds of ethnic Albanians who fled Ljuboten during the Government attack.

Police officers separated more than 100 men and boys from their wives and families and took them to police stations in Skopje, where some were beaten.

This is reminiscent of the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War, when Serb forces separated an estimated 8,000 Muslim men and boys from their families before slaughtering them and burying them in mass graves.