Analysis of Slobodan Milosevic’s opening testimony by Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, Balkan Affairs Adviser to the Albanian American Civic League. Submitted to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague in conjunction with former Congressman Joe’s DioGuardi’s oral testimony on April 15, 2002.
Slobodan Milosevic’s charges against former Congressman Joe DioGuardi and the Albanian American Civic League:
In his opening statement before the ICTY on February 15, 2002, Slobodan Milosevic made the following statement (transcript pages 406-407):
“In the support to Albanian terrorism and separatism in Kosova and Metohija, we see the engagement of the Albanian émigrés in the countries of Western Europe and in the USA. In America in 1989, an Albanian American Civic League was set up under the presidency of Congressman Joseph DioGuardi, whose task it was to lobby on Capitol Hill for the requests and goals of the Kosovo Albanians. By actively lobbying, this opened the road to the Kosovo and Metohija separatists for official contacts in the American Senate and Congress. …At all events, the Albanian American Civic League made a great contribution to the systematic expansion of the anti-Serb mood and the Satanisation [sic] of the Serb people in the American public opinion.”
In a well-established pattern, Milosevic is casting blame on others for the consequences of his actions and trying to manipulate the Serbian people and world public opinion in the press. Just as he did for ten years in the Balkans, he is deflecting attention away from the atrocities that he and his regime committed over a decade of genocidal warfare and using his trial in The Hague to accuse the West and NATO of creating the conditions that led to the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and four wars that claimed 350,000 lives and left four million homeless. Once again, he is trying to portray the Kosovar and Bosnian victims of his reign of terror, mass expulsion, and mass murder as “terrorists” and “separatists” whom he was forced to put down for the sake of Serbia and the international community.
The Albanian American Civic League has indeed “actively lobbied” the U.S. Congress in an effort to stop the oppression of the Kosovar Albanians and to influence U.S. foreign policy in pursuit of a just and lasting peace in the Balkans. This work began in earnest in the spring of 1987, when Milosevic started his barbaric campaign against the Albanians of Kosova and made his notorious speech in Kosova Polje, blaming the Albanians for the calamities that had befallen Serbia. Then a member of the U.S. Congress, DioGuardi initiated Congressional Resolutions, statements and hearings in an effort to bring the plight of Kosovar Albanians to the attention of the world. In January 1989, upon leaving Congress and at the urging of many Albanian Americans, he formed the Albanian American Civic League, so that the Kosovars would have a voice in Washington and a platform from which to educate the international community about what was really happening in Kosova. This turned out to be critical because two months later Milosevic invaded and occupied Kosova. Milosevic’s brutal occupation would last for ten years, culminating in the NATO bombing campaign against the Serbian military.
In the decade that ensued, at no time did DioGuardi ever attempt to stigmatize or demonize the Serbian people. In fact, in speech after speech, many of which are on videotape and can be supplied to ICTY, he made a point of distinguishing between the
Serbian people (the majority of whom he called “good people” like the majority of the Germans in the Nazi era) and Slobodan Milosevic and his henchmen. This is not to say that there was no Serbian civilian collaboration in the Milosevic enterprise. There was indeed. But DioGuardi and the Board of the Albanian American Civic League have always publicly recognized that the Serbian masses were also victims of the Milosevic era because of the misinformation fed to them daily through the state-controlled media in Belgrade.
The Albanian American Civic League’s role during the Serbian occupation of Kosova (1989-1999):
In his testimony of February 15, (pp. 382-383), Milosevic said that “…until 1998, a full ten years from the time when Serbia was accused of having taken over state competencies on its own territory in Kosovo and Metohija, in those ten years, there were no killings practically anywhere, or burnings or kidnappings or anything of that kind, and nobody was imprisoned for political reasons.” He went on to say that the “Albanian language stood side by side the Serbian language” and that it was the “official language of the province.” He spoke about educating Albanian children in “state schools” in the “Albanian language.” He also said that Albanian political leaders could “hold press conferences in the middle of Belgrade” and “hurl slanders with respect to the state without any sanctions.” Later he said (p. 410) that, “there was no evidence that there was any kind of persecution of Albanians in Kosovo.”
These are preposterous claims. When Yugoslav President Marshal Tito died in 1980, the Serbs, whom he had held in check, resumed their historic oppression of Albanians. Albanian high school and university students in Kosova staged massive demonstrations, expressing their dissatisfaction with their political, economic, and legal status in Yugoslavia. They called for Republic status for Kosova, marking the beginning of a new movement for the resolution of the Albanian national question in the second half of the twentieth century. The student uprising was the precursor to the fall of Communism and the breakdown and reconstruction of the former Yugoslavia, especially because it was in Kosova that the failures of the federation as a political and economic system were most evident. The regime retaliated with tear gas, machine guns, and tanks. Albanians, including women and children, were killed for shouting “Kosova Republik” and “We want democracy.” The exact number of students and adults wounded and killed will probably never be known. However, it is a matter of public record that, from 1981 to 1987, more than 600,000 Kosovar Albanians, or one-third of Kosova’s population, were put through the Serbian criminal justice system. Many were beaten, tortured, and imprisoned for political offenses, such as “crimes against the state” or “hostile propaganda against the state.” The leaders of the demonstrations were imprisoned for as long as ten years.
In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic rose to power by fanning the flames of the anti-Albanian
racism that was so deeply rooted in Serbian society. On March 28, he invaded and occupied Kosova. Albanian radio and television stations, schools and clinics were closed down, businesses were seized, and professionals were fired from their jobs. The Albanian language was banned in public life and Serbo-Croatian was instituted as the official language. Imprisonment, torture, and murder became routine. Faced with these intolerable acts, the Kosova Assembly proclaimed the independence of Kosova within the Yugoslav Federation on July 2, 1990, and clandestinely circulated the Constitution of the Republic of Kosova in September 1990. In response, Serbia dissolved the assembly, removed all Albanians from municipals posts and replaced them with Serbs from Serbia. What ensued for the next ten years was the worst occupation in the heart of Europe since the Nazi era, during which some 400,000 Albanians fled Kosova, even before the Serbian summer offensive of 1998.
At the outset, Milosevic was successful in concealing from the international press the stark realities of the Serbian occupation of Kosova because he had total control of the Yugoslav wire service, Tanjug. As conditions in Kosova worsened in the spring and summer of 1989, the House and Senate passed resolutions (H.Con.Res. 314 and S.Con.Res. 124), with input from the Civic League, condemning Serbia for human rights abuses in Kosova. As a result, Slobodan Milosevic recalled the Serbian ambassador to the United States. DioGuardi then began making preparations to go to Belgrade and Prishtina to witness the occupation firsthand, take photographs, and get testimony from Albanian journalists and intellectuals in order to prove to the Bush administration what was really happening in Kosova, since the U.S. State Department chose for many reasons to ignore the realities of the Milosevic regime.
With the support of Congressmen Tom Lantos and Ben Gilman and with a letter from Senator Bob Dole and twelve other U.S. senators calling on Milosevic to free Kosova, DioGuardi went to Belgrade and then to Prishtina in November 1989. The U.S. State Department knew nothing about his visit until his plane landed in Belgrade (because otherwise they would have prevented it) and Congressman Lantos notified then-U.S. Ambassador Warren Zimmerman that he had arrived in Serbia. An agitated Zimmerman told Lantos that it was dangerous for DioGuardi to be in Belgrade and that he should leave immediately. Meanwhile, he was on his way to the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade, where he invited the media to join him. The hotel’s Serbian director informed DioGuardi that he would lose his job if he proceeded with this plan. And so, DioGuardi phoned representatives of the Serbian and foreign media and invited them to a press conference in the International Press Building. He managed to give the more than twenty who attended articles about Milosevic and his human rights violations and atrocities in Kosova from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, articles that they had never seen. He then delivered the Dole letter to Milosevic’s office, warning him that the U.S. Congress was monitoring his actions against the Albanians of Kosova.
After that, the Yugoslav Secret Service followed DioGuardi to Prishtina, where he arrived to find soldiers, tanks, and armored personnel carriers on every street. He tried to hold a press conference at the Grand Hotel in Prishtina and was evicted. Undeterred, he held it in front of the hotel and in front of the tanks and, as crowds converged, he recorded the historic confrontation with the Serbian military that ensued. When DioGuardi returned to Washington, he reported his experience to the U.S. Congress and showed photographs of Serbian brutality that he had obtained from noted journalist Zenun Celaj (now managing editor of Zeri newspaper) and human rights activist Zekaria Cana. Lantos responded that the occupation of Kosova reminded him of Nazi-occupied Europe, which he and his family, Jews in Hungary, had managed to escape.
In February 1990, renowned Kosovar activist Enver Hadri was assassinated in Belgium for actively lobbying the European Parliament about police killings of innocent Kosovar Albanians. DioGuardi was invited to give a eulogy at his funeral before thousands of mourners. At the request of Hadri’s widow and son, DioGuardi traveled afterwards to Geneva to deliver to the UN Human Rights Commission a list of thirty-four nonviolent Albanian demonstrators killed by Serbian authorities, which had been found on Hadri’s body at the time of his death. A year later, a member of the Serbian secret police (UDBA), under Milosevic’s control, was publicly identified as the killer.
On April 24, 1990, the Albanian American Civic League brought ten political and civic leaders, including Ibrahim Rugova, to Washington to testify against Milosevic’s occupation of Kosova before in a hearing chaired by Congressmen Tom Lantos and John Porter, then cochairmen of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. The Serbian embassy applied immense political pressure to prevent this hearing from happening, but they failed. Meanwhile, the hearing was so successful and Congressman Lantos was so impressed that he agreed to accompany DioGuardi to Kosova. In late May, they arrived in Prishtina and were greeted by tens of thousands of Albanians in front of the Grand Hotel with flowers and cries of “USA—Long Live Democracy.” In response, the Serbian military dispersed the crowd with tear gas and beat and shot hundreds with rubber bullets, killing one man. Outraged, Lantos vowed to DioGuardi that he would dedicate himself to undoing Milosevic back in Washington. In July 1990, because of the adverse publicity generated by this trip, the Serbian parliament banned DioGuardi from returning to Yugoslavia for five years at Milosevic’s request.
Three months later, in August 1990, Senator Bob Dole and six of his colleagues went to Kosova at the request of the Albanian American Civic League to challenge the Serbian occupation. When they arrived in the center of Prishtina, they watched helplessly while the awaiting crowds were tear-gassed and the Serbian police prevented them from getting out of their bus. Senator Dole’s staff managed to capture part of this incident on videotape, a copy of which we are prepared to submit to the ICTY.
In January 1991, DioGuardi brought Iljaz Ramali, speaker of the exiled Kosova Assembly, to Luxembourg to meet with Congressman Tom Lantos and Lord Nicholas Bethel of the British and European Parliaments to sign a joint declaration proclaiming an “Interparliamentary Group for Kosova’s Protection” as a strategy to further expose Milosevic’s occupation of Kosova. Unfortunately, Ibrahim Rugova and his party, the Democratic League of Kosova (LDK), felt this effort competed with their party-building initiatives at that time and did not support it.
In February 1991, DioGuardi testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, cochaired by Senators Joe Biden and Claiborne Pell, and made the first public case for the independence of Kosova under international law. At this hearing, DioGuardi presented written documentation of Serbian atrocities against innocent Albanian civilians, which had been provided by the Center for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms in Prishtina, and an account of the destruction of Kosova’s industrial base from the Trade Union of Kosova. DioGuardi called Milosevic the modern-day successor to Adolf Hitler at this hearing and chastised the State Department for ignoring their own country reports on Serbian human rights violations since the 1980s and conducting a deeply flawed foreign policy that would ultimately lead to war in the Balkans.
In June 1991, DioGuardi flew to Copenhagen, Denmark, to meet the Albanian community and to attend a Helsinki Commission Conference. He held a press conference, at which he showed enlarged photographs of Albanians tortured and killed by the Serbian police at the direction of Slobodan Milosevic. Later, in October 1991, a bill that the Civic League had lobbied for was passed, banning aid to Serbia under the Nickles-D’Amato Amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill. In a referendum held that year, the Kosovar population exercised their right of self-determination and overwhelmingly voted for independence from Serbia.
In January 1992, with the mounting violence against Albanians in Kosova, which ultimately produced a massive flight of some 400,000 to Western Europe and America by 1995, the Civic League was instrumental in the introduction of a well-documented Congressional Resolution (H.Con.Res. 264), cosponsored by Congressmen Lantos and Gilman, calling for the recognition of the independence of Kosova from Serbia. For the next seven years, DioGuardi and, as of 1994, Shirley Cloyes (who would later become his wife) worked tirelessly to persuade the U.S. Congress and two successive administrations to end the occupation of Kosova and to grant independence to Kosova, based on constitutional principle, as it had to four other juridical units in the former Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia. In May 1994, Congressman Gilman introduced a Resolution (H.Con.Res. 251) calling on President Bill Clinton to report to the Congress within sixty days about the conditions in Kosova and to make recommendations for protecting the rights of Kosovars, including the possibility of establishing an international protectorate for Kosova, together with other members of the UN Security Council and the European Union. In 1995, DioGuardi and Cloyes were responsible for the first Congressional hearing on the Albanian dimension of the Balkan crisis. Many more Resolutions and hearings followed.
Unfortunately, the West continued to follow a policy of appeasement and containment, going so far as to make Slobodan Milosevic, the war criminal, the peacemaker at the Dayton accords in 1995. Unrewarded for its policy of nonviolent resistance in the face of the Serbian occupation, Kosova, for all intents and purposes, was abandoned by the international community and left to fend for itself. In 1993, out of desperation, the Kosova Liberation Army was formed in Switzerland, and five years later it would come to the defense of Kosovar Albanians when the Serbian army attacked Drenice in February 1998. Before the attack, U.S. envoy Robert Gelbard gave the green light to Milosevic to invade Drenice when he called the Kosova Liberation Army a “terrorist group.” In March 1998, under questioning, with input from the Civic League, at a full U.S. House International Relations Committee hearing, Gelbard was forced to admit that the U.S. government had not officially labeled the KLA as a terrorist organization. The retraction created a storm in the Western media and, overnight the attempt to “criminalize” the KLA was halted. (Milosevic’s version of these events on February 15, p. 400, is incorrect.)
Milosevic claims that the West “broke up Yugoslavia” (February 14, p. 257) and was on the side of the KLA. The opposite was true. If anything, the United States and Europe supported Milosevic again and again, along with his revisionist history of the Balkans, until the evidence was so irrefutable, the carnage so great, and the prospect of more war so undeniable that the United States and NATO could no longer stand by and watch. As events would bear out, the true target of Milosevic and his henchmen was not, in his words the “terrorist, separatist” KLA, but the entire civilian population of ethnic Albanians.
Slobodan Milosevic’s revisionist history:
In his opening remarks, Slobodan Milosevic calls Kosova the “cradle of Serbian civilization,” its “Jerusalem. He lays claims to the territory of Kosova as an integral part of the “sovereign state of Serbia.” He denies that the Serbs “had planned the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo for a long time.”
Part of the reason that the West watched and waited for so long as Kosovars were imprisoned, tortured, and killed is that Europe and America subscribed to Milosevic’s intentionally distorted presentation of Balkan history and his sovereign claims to Kosova. Milosevic tries to lay claim to Kosova as Serbian land, because Serbs have lived there since the seventh century A.D. (February 18, p. 495). In reality, Albanians are the indigenous people of the Balkans, arriving in the region some ten thousand years before the Serbs. Milosevic calls Kosova Serbia’s “Jerusalem,” because of the historic June 13, 1389 battle of Kosovo Polje, in which the Serbian Army (together with the allied Christian armies of Bulgarians and Albanians) fought a gallant, but losing battle against the advancing Ottoman Turks.
What Milosevic does not talk about is that, after the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, which marked the end of five hundred years of Turkish Ottoman rule, about a half million Albanians were either killed in Serbia and Macedonia or died of hunger and disease.
Landlocked Serbia, wanting Kosova’s natural resources and the seaports of neighboring Albania, launched a brutal takeover and annexed half of Albanian lands, including Kosova. In 1918, the “Great Powers” ratified Serbia’s annexation of Kosova and divided up the rest of Albanian territory. Only because of the intervention of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was the State of Albania saved (which is one of the major reasons why to this day Albanians revere the United States). This left half of the now seven million Albanians in the Balkans inside Albania and the other half outside, living side by side in the new State of Yugoslavia under hostile Slavic regimes. From that time until the NATO bombing campaign in 1999, the Serbs resorted to occupation, the destruction of cultural identity, the burning of entire villages, forced expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and genocide against the more than 90 percent Albanian population of Kosova. For close to a century, anti-Albanian racism has been a reality among Slavs in the Balkans, and there has been a clear pattern of arrest, torture, imprisonment, ethnic cleansing, mass expulsion, and genocide.
In the 1920s and 1930s, half a million ethnic Albanians were forcibly expelled by Serbia from what is now Serbia and Macedonia to Turkey. On March 7, 1937, Dr. Vaso Cubrilovic, professor of philosophy at the University of Belgrade and, in the postwar period, a minister in various departments of the Yugoslav government, presented to the government of the then “Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes” a report entitled “The Expulsion of the Albanians.” The Serbian regime took great care to keep the report secret, because it mapped out a variety of methods for expelling the ethnic Albanian population and, in the event of failure, exterminating them. Cubrilovic wrote his report while Serbian diplomats were in the process of negotiating “The Agreement on the Rules of Emigration of the Turkish Population from the Regions of Southern Serbia in Yugoslavia.” In reality, the agreement concerned a plan to expel those Albanians who were Muslim from Serbia, which then included Macedonia and Montenegro, to Turkey. Slobodan Milosevic considered Cubrilovic a mentor and even sent a eulogy to be read at his funeral.
Only World War II temporarily stopped the expulsion of Albanians to Turkey. According to Milosevic in his statement of February 15 (p. 393), this is when the “blood-soaked implementation of the product of a Greater Albania started.” In reality, after the German retreat from the Balkans in 1944, the Serbian army launched an offensive to reoccupy Kosova and other Albanian lands in Macedonia and Montenegro, waging a campaign of terror and genocide that resulted in the death of more than 40,000 Albanians.
A particularly infamous subset of this genocidal period is the killing in March 1945 of more than two thousand Albanians, who had volunteered to join the Yugoslav army to “fight facism” and were marched from Kosova to Tivar, Montenegro, where they were summarily executed.
From 1947 to 1966, close to 300,000 Albanians were expelled from Kosova and other parts of Yugoslavia, most of whom were sent to Turkey by the infamous Aleksandar Rankovic, who served as Serbian Interior Minister under President Marshall Tito. Many
others were imprisoned and tortured. After Rankovic’s dismissal in 1966, Tito, aware that the oppression of Kosovar Albanians had reached dangerous proportions, granted Kosova autonomy and then “legalized” this status in the new Constitution of 1974. Under this arrangement, Kosova, an autonomous province, had its own government, police force, banking, health care and educational systems, and an equal vote and rotating seat in the federal presidency of Yugoslavia. After a period of less virulent repression, Tito died in 1980, and the Albanian population of Kosova once again came under attack. (The crackdown of 1981 against Kosovar Albanians, the invasion of Kosova in 1989, and the terrible occupation that followed have been described above.)
In the light of the occupation, it was ludicrous when Milosevic stated in his opening testimony on February 14 that, “It is well known that the war has not solved the situation in Kosovo, but aggravated it” (p. 226), that there was “no humanitarian catastrophe until the beginning of the NATO airstrikes” (p. 231), and that “the violence came from terrorist actions by the KLA” causing the Serbs to react “overly violently” (page 232).
From the 1998 Serbian summer offensive to the 1999 NATO bombing campaign:
By the time the Serbian army attacked Drenice, Slobodan Milosevic was responsible for shattering the former Yugoslavia in his quest for Serbian hegemony. In his opening statement, he rejected the fact that the mass expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and killing in Kosova had been planned, and he denied the reality of the Serbian summer offensive, in which another 300,000 Albanians were expelled under threat of ethnic cleansing and driven into Macedonia, Albania, and beyond. From March 1998 to the end of the war, DioGuardi and Cloyes were in regular contact with the leaders of the Kosova Liberation Army on the ground, and Cloyes, a former book publisher with media contacts, had facilitated connections between key KLA personnel in Switzerland and Kosova and CNN. At the end of August, DioGuardi and Cloyes flew to Albania to meet the Kosovar refugees, mostly women and children, and the director of UNHCR in Tropoje. They also met with members of the KLA at safe houses in this border town. The approximately three hundred refugees that arrived that day were in a state of trauma and exhaustion, having fled on foot over the mountains. Several recognized DioGuardi and Cloyes and spoke to them of burned houses, scorched fields, dead livestock, arrests, torture, and death.
Milosevic denied the reality of the January 15, 1999, massacre of forty-six innocent civilians at Racak, calling it a “conflict between a police unit and the terrorist KLA, which was used as an excuse to accuse Serb forces of attacking civilians.” Yes, the KLA fought Serbian forces in the village that day, but the KLA fled hours before the massacre occurred into the hills south of Racak. Milosevic may not use this skirmish to justify the actions of his army. The Serbian army’s actions that day, while they may have been new to the international community, were not novel to the 92 percent Albanian population of Kosova. The massacre in all of its dimensions—women locked in cellars, their sons and husbands taken away only to be found with their eyes gouged out, faces slashed, and shot in the head and neck at close range—followed a familiar pattern. Since the attack on Drenice in February 1998, there had been scores of execution-style killings that had left 2,000 dead by the time of the Racak massacre. The only thing that made this incident different was that it took place when Western monitors, under the auspices of the OSCE, were on the ground and NATO warplanes were flying overhead. Tragically, most of the 700 unarmed monitors were elsewhere in Kosova that day, trying to fulfill the humanitarian, but impossible, mission given to them under the premature and hollow October agreement that Milosevic had signed with US envoy Richard Holbrooke. That agreement was supposed to have led to a substantial withdrawal of Serbian troops. Instead, Milosevic used it as an opportunity to build up his troops for the mass expulsion that he unleashed in March when NATO finally bombed Serbia. Members of the KLA informed Cloyes and DioGuardi of the troop build-up, but it fell on deaf ears in the Clinton administration and was only verified in the press a year later.
Although we will never know for sure, we believe that the presence of the international monitors may have caused the citizens of Racak to let down their guard, and that they may have been taken by surprise on that fateful day. For example, Imrane Dema, now forty and a mother of three, told reporters in the Stenkovec refugee camp on June 3, 1999 that, “I believed in the October agreement, and all that happened was four of my husband’s cousins were murdered for renting their houses to the European monitors.” At an annual breakfast for Congressman Benjamin Gilman, one of the Albanian Americans in attendance told Cloyes that one of her brothers had been sliced in half in front of her parents at their home during the time of the “October agreement.”
In his opening statement, Milosevic blames the deportation of close to one million refugees from Kosova on NATO’s bombing campaign, and he blames the beating and killing of people and their deportation on the KLA (February 14, p. 251 and 264; February 15, p. 322). In reality, all of the deportees interviewed in print and on television in the refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania said that they were fleeing the Serbian military and paramilitary units. They spoke of being willing to die if a NATO bomb hit them, because they knew that only NATO could stop Milosevic’s genocidal march across Kosova. Arianit Zeka, a friend of DioGuardi and Cloyes in his twenties who works for the Alliance for the Future of Kosova and who comes from an educated, privileged family in Prishtina, spoke of his weeks of hiding in the hills. He said that they “lived like hunted animals in the woods” and talked about how everyone would extend their tongues when it rained in order to get water, and that, if it had not been for the NATO bombing campaign, they would have been either executed or died of starvation and dehydration. By all accounts, wherever KLA units were present, the chances of survival for Albanians increased.
All of the women, including a ninety-one-year-old grandmother, and children in the Kuci family in Junik (related by marriage to one of the Civic League’s Board members) lost their men to the Serb military and paramilitary units (1,000 were captured) and walked on foot over the mountains into Albania in flight from the Serbs. If he is called to testify before the ICTY, DioGuardi will be able to provide many other examples. But suffice it to say that from the time that the Serbian summer offensive began in 1998 until the onset of the NATO bombing campaign on March 24, 1999, the Albanian American Civic League received calls day and night from Civic League Board members and supporters describing the plight of their relatives in Kosova and asking for our organization’s help. Several of our friends in Kosova went into hiding under threat of death, when the Serbian army targeted leading professionals and intellectuals for arrest and execution. Others, like lawyer Bajram Kelmendi, failed to escape and were kidnapped and killed. DioGuardi and Cloyes were also in weekly contact with Arben Xhaferi, the leader of the Democratic Party of Albanians in Macedonia, whose office single-handedly moved more than 100,000 Kosovar deportees out of the refugee camps and into Albanian homes in Macedonia. Xhaferi personally crossed the border to rescue some of Kosova’s leading intellectuals and political figures, who otherwise would have been murdered by the Serbian army and police in their roundup of elites.
Milosevic states that “in the tradition of the Serbian military, a prisoner of war and an unarmed person is held sacred. … This was not done by the military or the police” (February 14, p. 253). He blames the killing of prisoners at the Istok prison in May 1999 on NATO (February 15, p. 345). But it was not the prison that was bombed by NATO. As the KLA reported to us from the field at that time, part of the barracks in which the Serbian army was housed got hit by NATO bombs. The Serbian military then used this as an excuse to throw bombs and hand grenades into the prison to make it look as if NATO were responsible for the deaths of the prisoners.
In his opening statement on February 14, Milosevic disputes the existence of mass graves. The international community now knows that bodies were exhumed and transferred back to Serbia in refrigerated trucks at war’s end and reburied there to conceal the atrocities committed during the Kosova war.
Throughout the war, Milosevic tried to undermine Western support for the KLA by attempting to link them to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. He discusses this purported connection several times in his opening statement and draws a connection with Iran, in particular (February 15, p. 387). Before the NATO bombing campaign began, a report was leaked to DioGuardi and Cloyes from the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee. Written by Yossef Bodansky, a former Mossad agent in the pay of the Greek and Serbian lobbies on Capitol Hill, and entitled “The U.S. and Iran’s New Balkan Front,” the report mounted an utterly fantastic and complex history to support a KLA connection with the hardliners in Tehran. The report went so far as to accuse esteemed, avowedly secular, and internationally known figures in Kosova, such as Adem Demaci and Rexhep Qosja, of being an integral part of this Muslim terrorist network. Unfortunately this report was embraced by the extreme right-wing of the Republican party and has been used ever since to oppose the Kosovar Albanian struggle for freedom by holding out the false specter of a radical Muslim state in the heart of Europe stretching from Bosnia via the Sandzak to Kosova and into the Middle East (Milosevic, February 18, p. 467). Albanians have lived in harmony for centuries as Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians. They have no ties to Islamic fundamentalism, and that includes the KLA. The KLA made a point of telling DioGuardi and Cloyes during the war that they would not take any money from Islamic and Middle Eastern states because they did not want the West to think that they were connected in any way to radical Islam. The international community should not allow Slobodan Milosevic to use the heightened sensitivity to terrorism since September 11, 2001, to misrepresent the Kosovar struggle to overcome his oppression.
As the carnage escalated from the spring of 1998 until the spring of 1999, DioGuardi and Cloyes testified before the U.S. Congress. In March 1998, DioGuardi appeared before the Congressional Helsinki Committee and in May before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calling for U.S. intervention in Kosova before Milosevic killed more Albanians. In July 1998, at the urging of the Civic League, Senator Alphonse D’Amato and Congressman Chris Smith passed Resolutions (S.Con.Res 105 and H.Con.Res. 304) calling for the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic as a war criminal in The Hague. A year later, Cloyes testified before the House International Relations Committee after Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick and Henry Kissinger in support of U.S. troop deployment to Kosova. In April, at the Civic League’s urging, bills were introduced in the House and the Senate calling for the arming of the KLA, the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic as a war criminal, and the ratification of the independence of Kosova.
In May 1999, Milosevic was indicted and a month later the war was brought to an end after a ten-week NATO bombing campaign.
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