BELGRADE, Serbia — Acting on tips from witnesses, Serbian war crimes prosecutors have discovered a mass grave believed to contain the bodies of 250 Albanians who were killed in Kosovo during the 1998-99 war there, then transported to Serbia and secretly buried to hide the atrocities…. The burial site - hidden beneath a small building and a newly built parking lot - is the fourth mass grave of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo that has been found in Serbia since 2001…. The latest discovery is another example of the mass atrocities that were committed during the bloody Serb crackdown on the Kosovo separatists that killed at least 10,000 people and left nearly a million displaced. Hundreds of bodies of slain ethnic Albanians have been exhumed in Serbia and returned to Kosovo since Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was ousted from power in a popular revolt in 2000
I spent a few months living and working in Kosovo in 1994…and it’s left me with a love of and concern for a place I came to love. I love Kosovo, not because of the physical beauty, which honestly is in short supply, but because of the people I encountered. Despite a truly oppressive environment, Kosovo’s majority-Albanian population still managed to live, love, and persevere. Sometimes, when I find myself thinking that I’m having problems, I think back to some of the people I met during my travels in Kosovo. It’s then that I remember than the police haven’t hauled me off for yet another beating, and that I’m not prevented by law from working because of my ethnicity. That is truly an exercise in perspective.
I left five years before war broke out, but during my time in Kosovo it was clear that war was coming. The only question was when and how brutal the Serbs would be. The discovery of yet another mass grave is another indication of how truly inhuman the Serbs were to a largely unarmed and defenseless population. What saddens me so about the aftermath of the war is how little most of us in the West have taken notice, much less care, about what happened in Kosovo. No, Slobodan Milosevic didn’t kill six million Jews (or, in this case, Albanians), and the war didn’t threaten the survival of the free world. The war in Kosovo happened in a forgotten corner of Eastern Europe of almost no value to Americans. There’s no oil or other resources that American corporations can exploit. Kosovo is a Third World country with little to offer outsiders and little media appeal.
What would happen if a genocide occurred and the media was otherwise engaged? Well, it would look a lot like Kosovo…and it would show how little we care about people whose resources we can’t find a way to exploit.
