The Devil's Garden: A War Crimes Investigator's Story

6. Kosovo

69 6 z Kosovo I saw horror seize the young man’s face as the muzzle of my gun flashed twice and the report echoed inside my car. The first round went through the car door and struck his hand as he leaned against the doorjamb. His eyes were wide open as the bullet—and his right thumb— hit the wall of the “stop-and-rob” convenience store behind him. The bandit’s other hand was inside the driver-side window, holding a lock-blade knife to my throat. As I leaned away, the second round from my .38 Smith & Wesson Chief Special tore into his heart. My own heart was pounding. The serial armed robber I’d been looking for had found me. On a hot summer night in July 1999, I awoke in a sweat to the sound of explosions and the smell of smoke. For a moment I was caught between past and present, reliving the fatal shooting from my days as a twenty-five-year-old plainclothes policeman and realizing that right this minute smoke was filling my apartment. It didn’t take me long to become oriented to my surroundings and to get the hell out of there. I was in Kosovo , and the house next door had just been firebombed. My investigations in Bosnia had been interrupted by the events occurring in Kosovo. Serb military and paramilitary forces had entered the autonomous province and were pursuing a campaign of ethnic cleansing and terror, murdering innocent women and children, the elderly, and the infirm. Many of the Serb police officers with the MUP in Kosovo joined the criminal enterprise and participated in a pattern of ongoing criminal activity. Among them were special police units (PJP) and special antiterrorist units (SAJ). Also involved in the criminal activities in Kosovo 70 / THE DEVIL’S GARDEN were members of the special operations unit of the Serbian State Security (DB), called the Red Berets or JSO. Milorad “Legija” Ulemek, a.k.a. Milorad Luković, operating then under the code name “Brazil,” was their commander. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), where Slobodan Milošević was president, claimed these police and security forces were doing nothing more than defending their homeland from groups of violent terrorists and racketeers. I didn’t know it then, but it would not be long before killers and assassins such as Legija, who took the nom de guerre Legionnaire after he served with the French Foreign Legion, would play critical roles in my investigations of previous crimes that had taken place in Croatia. In some respects it all began on June 28, 1389—St. Vitus Day—at Kosovo Polje (Kosovo Field). There the Serbs lost a major battle with the Turks, which opened the floodgates into Bosnia for the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Thousands of Christians in Bosnia eventually fled north to the area that now comprises Slovenia and Croatia. Centuries later, the battle reignited. With Tito long gone, ethnic tensions rose between Serbs and ethnic Albanians living in Kosovo. There was a call for Kosovo to become an independent republic of the SFRY, but many Serbs feared the republic could become a “Greater Albania.” Serbs also alleged that they were being mistreated by the Albanians. In 1986 the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts published a report, the “SANU Memorandum,” that outlined the physical, political, and cultural genocide that Serbs—the ethnic minority in Kosovo—allegedly were suffering at the hands of the Albanian majority. These events and others brought Slobodan Milošević, then the president of the Socialist Party of Serbia, to Kosovo in 1987, when he made his infamous remark, “No one should dare beat you again,” before a large group of angry Serbs. Many believe this speech prompted the secession of the republics in the SFRY and the outbreak of war and subsequent crimes in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and ultimately Kosovo. In early 1998 armed conflict broke out between Serb security forces and members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in Kosovo. By that time, the KLA, whose members were largely Muslim, had already been listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. Indeed, the SFRY had implemented “special measures” to suppress counterrevolutionary efforts in Kosovo against the SFRY. Kosovo / 71 With Serb forces “defending” Kosovo and the sovereignty of Serbia, allegations that Serb forces had murdered ethnic Albanians in Kosovo surfaced. The KLA was...