Global Policy Forum

By Carlotta Gall

Capt. Dragan Karleusa, deputy head of the police organized crime unit in Belgrade, is amazed to find that he now leads an ever-expanding investigation into war crimes. He is stunned by the number of bodies he and his men are now discovering, and the unexpected role now played in his life by freezer trucks in which the bodies — thought to be those of victims of Serbian security forces in Kosovo — were hidden.

"We started investigating a single incident, but we ended with a very big case," the burly Serbian policeman said. "We ended up chasing a wolf."

Since he began investigating the first freezer truck of dead people found in the Danube in May, Captain Karleusa has discovered nine more truckloads, the most recent with 40 to 50 bodies in Lake Perucac, an artificial reservoir 90 miles southwest of the capital.

As many as 1,000 bodies have been found so far, including those of three Albanian-American brothers from New York. Serbia has astonished foreign countries with its sudden and open investigation of mass graves found around the republic in recent months and with its transfer on June 28 of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Far from lessening the pace of war crimes investigations after Mr. Milosevic was handed over, the authorities have pressed on with the investigation of killings of Kosovo Albanians by the Serbs during the war over the province in 1999. Serbia's government is exhuming more bodies and opening its first war crimes case at home against two men alleged to have killed 19 people in Kosovo.

The government ran a deliberate campaign in the news media to reveal the details of the mass killings in Kosovo to sway public opinion in advance of the transfer of Mr. Milosevic to The Hague.

Even if some politicians try to use it for their own reasons, once an investigation like this is under way, it takes on a momentum of its own, said Natasa Kandic, leader of the Humanitarian Law Center, an independent human rights group that has carried out considerable research on the mass killings in the Balkans.

The authorities say they now have solid evidence that Mr. Milosevic, at a meeting with senior officials in late March 1999, after the war began, ordered his security forces to cover up any evidence of crimes that would be of interest to the Hague tribunal.

At least 10, but maybe dozens, of truckloads of bodies were shipped from Kosovo to Serbia proper and dumped underwater or in mass graves. "This whole operation was a crazy thing to do, a crime and for us incomprehensible,"

Captain Karleusa said. "The goal was to hide something."

Dusan Mihajlovic, Serbia's interior minister since voters elected an anti-Milosevic coalition late last year, has said he is determined to get to the bottom of the original killings and continue the investigation beyond the cover-up operation.

"The police have three aims," he said, "to find all the mass graves in Yugoslavia, to find who gave the orders to bury them there and to establish if these bodies were victims of war crimes, or of war, or of the NATO bombing against Yugoslavia.

"Because if there were war crimes, we have to find who gave the orders and who were the executors. And we will publish it when we find out, because we want to find the men who did those crimes and also to remove the collective guilt that is weighing on the police and army and on the Serbian people.

"We are going to reconstruct all crimes and will shed light on them all."

The reaction of ordinary people in Serbia to the disclosures has been shock, and there have been many calls for full investigations and for finding the people responsible.

An account in the Belgrade newspaper Danas by an army reservist who saw a truck being dumped into a lake said the bodies had floated to the surface and then had been pulled out by the police and buried nearby.

"This is a shame," he said. "They buried 50 people, and I am supposed to take my children to this lake and swim. We are all living here with the fact that they buried human bodies and are still silent."

But the investigations are advancing slowly, not least because senior officials of the Milosevic years and of the army and the police forces are refusing to cooperate.

What is known is that bodies were dumped in mass graves, either in the Danube or on land. The exhumations of the 800 to 1,000 bodies known about so far will take months. Captain Karleusa says he will need much longer to establish who gave the orders for the carnage and who carried it out.

He has not been able to interview Vlajko Stojilkovic, Mr. Milosevic's former interior minister and the man whom police officials say was ordered by Mr. Milosevic to clean Kosovo of bodies and other evidence that might interest the Hague tribunal.

Mr. Stojilkovic, who is one of the four ministers indicted along with Mr. Milosevic by the tribunal for war crimes in Kosovo, is still living openly in Serbia, where as a member of the Yugoslav Parliament for Mr. Milosevic's Socialist Party, he can still claim parliamentary immunity.

Until that is revoked — and so far no motion has been brought before Parliament to strip him of the immunity — investigators cannot question him, Captain Karleusa said.

Information gathered so far about the mass killings has come mostly from witnesses and the truck drivers, many of whom were police reservists called up during Yugoslavia's war with NATO and were unsettled by what they saw.

Some police officers have come forward only when prodded after the press started writing stories. Police officers led Captain Karleusa to the second freezer truck in Lake Perucac.

"It had been declared a secret," the captain said, "and they were ordered not to talk. But people are now talking openly, and that is the way we find things out. We get information from the bottom, not from the top."

One predicament is that Captain Karleusa's boss is Sreten Lukic, the police director of public security, who served as the commander of police forces in Kosovo during the war. Mr. Lukic, if anyone, knows at least some of what went on in Kosovo and who was giving the orders. Although he helped set up the original unit to investigate the first freezer truck, he is not contributing to the investigation.

Captain Karleusa is adamant that his boss will not be spared if he is responsible for any crimes.

"If he was responsible for anything, we are going to determine it," the captain said. "Although he is my boss, he cannot influence the investigation or me, because it was decided to go with this all the way to the end. Those are the words of Minister Mihajlovic: `no matter what the price.' "

Mr. Lukic has appeared to shunt some of the blame toward the army, reminding journalists at a news conference in June that the army had overall command during the state of war declared for the 78 days of NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

The army has admitted to exhuming bodies, saying it was necessary to clear them to prevent disease. According to documents published in the well-informed Belgrade weekly Nedeljni Telegraf, exhumations by the army included the 145 victims of killings in Izbica, who were buried by villagers and whose bodies disappeared in May 1999, shortly before the end of the war.

But military officials have denied any involvement in the cover-up or in mass killings. The army says it is conducting a number of investigations and trials against its own members, but the cases are thought to be minor and remain largely closed.

"The army has their own very closed judicial system and is not our jurisdiction," said Mr. Mihajlovic, the interior minister.

Captain Karleusa noted that the investigation was complex. "You have to have in mind," he said, "at the battlefield there were several different kinds of units — army, police, paramilitaries, different volunteer forces and different local groups — and everybody could have done it.

"It was war, and you could have two units crossing the same area on the same day."

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