Since the NATO military forces, under the UN flag, entered embattled Kosovo on June 14, 1999 and put an end to the Serb Army's savage rule, leading newspapers in the USA have been publishing a Niagra of reports from their own correspondents about the fiendish genocide to which the Kosovar Muslims were subjected by the Belgrade-directed Serb rulers and their bloodthirsty minions. Hundreds of what are described as 'mass graves', containing the dead bodies of innocent Kosovo Muslims, are being unearthed every now and then. These graves are no more than huge pits into which the Serb killers threw the dead bodies of their Muslim victims after mowing them down with close-range gunfire.

In mid-June, the commander of a British unit in the NATO forces estimated that the Serb Army and its hoodlums had slaughtered in April and May 1999 more than 10,000 Muslims and dumped their blood-soaked corpses in large, scantily-covered pits. A leading US newspaper, USA Today, published harrowing photographs of these mass graves under the caption: 'Killing fields of Kosovo'. The American newspaper reports from liberated Kosovo carried tear-jerking details of the wholesale burning of Muslim villages and Muslim-owned urban property by the Serb Army and its pare-military monsters. Their reports also spoke of the countless Muslim women who were kidnapped and raped in special assault chambers inside the encampments of the Serb Army and the garrisons it maintained all over Kosovo.

Stinking wells

Besides the 'mass graves' which are being unearthed now, the Kosovar Muslims and the NATO officers have bared stinking wells in the rural areas from which hundreds of dead bodies are being dredged up almost daily. These polluted wells and the dreadful odor that rises up from their bloody depths is giving a nightmare to the Kosovar rural communities and the UN Administration's health officials. Wells are a source of water supply for many villages in rural Kosovo. The Hague-based International War Crimes Tribunal is sealing up such wells, treating them as "mass graves" for further investigation and for hauling up those Serbs who committed war crimes in Kosovo.

Milosovic's brutalities

Spread over nearly 10,000 square miles and bordering on Albania and Macedonia, Kosovo's population of about 2 million in mid- 1998 was ninety per cent Muslim. Its origin lay in the over five centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule over the Balkans. Late in the 1 9th century and during the First World War (in which Turkey was defeated), the Christian European powers gobbled up the vast Ottoman Empire minus Turkey which Kemal Ataturk heroically saved. With Serbian resurgence in the Balkans, Kosovo came under Serb domination and the Kosovo Muslims were ill-treated. After the Second World War, Marshal Tito established socialist Yugoslavia in 1945 and made Kosovo a province of Serbia. After the death of Marshal Tito in 1980 the breakup of Yugoslavia began and its constituent units declared their independence. Yugoslavia's dictator Slobodan Milosevic unleashed terror on the Bosnian Muslims when Bosnia opted for independence; the Serbs grabbed a large part of Muslim-majority Bosnia in the early 1990s. The conflict was ended through the US-brokered Dayton accord in 1995. The Yugoslav warlords then intensified the brutalization of the Muslim Albanian majority in Kosovo and worked out a sinister design to drive out the Muslim population from Kosovo through the same method of so-called "ethnic cleansing" (an euphemism for genocide) which Milosevic's Serbian hordes had enacted against the Muslims of Bosnia. In June 1998, a UNHCR official at the UN in New York, Maria Okabe, told me that more than 1,000,000 Albanian Kosovars had been driven out of their homes in Kosovo forcing them to flee to neighbouring Albania Macedonia and Montenegro.

Belgrade's vicious strategy to change the demography of Muslim-majority Kosovo was continued all through 1998 and the Milosevic dictatorship turned Kosovo into a Serb military camp by deploying a quarter million troops and pare-military Serb personnel in the embattled province. The appeals of the UN, the European Community and the other civilized nations of the world to Belgrade not to brutalise the Kosovars were ignored by dictator Milosevic. The efforts of the European Union powers to bring about a peaceful settlement of the Kosovo conflict in a conference held near Paris in March were sabotaged by the arrogant defiance of Milosevic; the Muslim Kosovar delegation accepted the Ramboulliet peace formula but Belgrade rejected it. The Serb army then unleashed a horrendous reign of terror against the Kosovo Muslims which led to Yugoslavia being bombed by the NATO air armada led by the US planes. Around June 10, NATO and the Yugoslav Army worked out a deal under which the Yugoslav army withdrew from Kosovo, letting the NATO troops (with a small Russian contingent) enter Kosovo under the UN flag. More than a million Kosovars returned to Kosovo from the refugee camps in Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro and from the nearby forests.

Pakistani PM's visit

In May 1999, when the refugee exodus from Kosovo burgeoned due to Serb terror, Pakistan's Prime Minister Mr. Nawaz Sharif visited Albania and the refugee camps of the Kosovars on the Albanian-Kosovo border. He gave fraternal sympathy to the Kosovars and donated five million dollars for their relief. He also drew the attention of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to the urgent need for helping the Kosovars. The Secretary-General of the Motamar Al-Alam Al-Islami, Raja Zafrui Haq, a Minister in the Government of Pakistan, also urged the international community to put pressure on Belgrade to stop the genocide of Muslims in Kosovo.

Heart rending accounts

When nearly a million Kosovar Muslim refugees returned in mid-June to Kosovo they were shocked by the slaughter of their kinsmen and the destruction of their homes and villages by the Serb Army and police. Heart-rending accounts of the tortures to which the Kosovo Muslims were subjected by the Serb troops and police surged across the US press by mid-June in despatches from the American newsmen who went to Kosovo as the NATO forces entered it. Graphic details of these brutalities were gathered by the UN, the EU Human Rights organizations and by inspectors from the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. The US Government collected the details from its troops and diplomats who went to Kosovo. International and regional relief agencies also sent their representatives for relief work among the returning Kosovar refugees refugees - - old men, women and children-were fleeing Their rehabilitation requires five billion dollars and a towards the Alabanian border in tractors and trucks. A massive aid programme spread over some years, so posse of armed Serbs, wearing masks, stopped the horrendous has been the destruction unleashed on Kosovo by the Serb Army. The anger and bitterness of the Muslim Kosovars towards the Christian Serbs has been accentuated by the daily reports of the unearthing of mass graves of the Albanian Muslims and the rape of Muslim women by the Serb military personnel during the last months of Serb rule.

Rape in public

A New York Times correspondent, Elizabeth Bumiller, wrote in a heart-breaking despatch from Kosovo on June 22 that on April 27, when the NATO planes were bombing Yogoslavia, hundreds of Kosovar refugees-old men, women and children -were fleeing towards the Alabanian border in tractors and trucks. A posse of armed Serbs, wearing masks, stopped the Kosovar convoy at gunpoint near the border. Thirty-five-year-old Vesa Recaj, whose home was in Clyne in Southern Kosovo, told the NYT reporter, Bumiller, that the armed Serb hoodlums dragged ten Muslim women from the refugee convoy, flung them on the ground, tore up their clothes and raped them ruthlessly, forcing the Kosovar men to witness the rape scene at gunpoint. The Muslim women were then returned to the trucks with torn clothes and allowed to go to Albania. The shocked, molested Muslim women cried and wailed all the way. Some Muslim women jumped into wells to escape the Serb rapists.

Some Muslim refugees from Kosovo, whom I met near Los Angeles in the USA late in June, told me tearfully that this method of raping helpless Kosovar Muslim women was practiced in many parts of Kosovo by the Serb troops and the paramilitary killer gangs they had raised to terrorise the Albanian origin Muslims. They said that hi Albanian Muslim traditions in Kosovo, the Muslim women prize their honour and chastity, and by deflowering them in public at gunpoint the Serb hoodlums wanted to humiliate them as well as their male relatives and the Muslim community. The Serb Army in Kosovo had specially imported the Serb monsters who had ravished Muslim women by the thousands in Bosnia. They were trained in using rape as a weapon of war against the Muslims. Eyewitnesses of such Dracula-type scenes in Kosovo said that the Serb savages felt no shame in assaulting the Muslim girls before crowds on the ground and tearing up their clothes. The girls would resist and cry and try to run but they were hand-tied and other soldiers pointed guns at their foreheads while the Serb Draculas raped them' According to the NYT correspondent, Mr. Bumiller, five Kosovar refugees told her that they lived in the town of Mitrovica where the Serb killers had painted this slogan in the local language on the walls of the main high school: "We will rape your women so that Serb children are born from their wombs"

Many Muslim women, who were raped by the Serb troops and escaped to Albania and Macedonia, have undergone abortions in Kosovo hospitals since its liberation to get rid of the progeny of the Serb monsters who raped them. Many such women, who have been reunited with their lost husbands, are finding it difficult to tell their spouses about the sex assaults to which the Serb troops subjected them. An NYT reporter said in a despatch that in the town of Zrze in Kosovo, a Muslim husband, who had returned from the border and was held in a Serb jail for helping the Kosovo Liberation Army, told her that he refused to believe that his young wife was not raped by the Serb policemen when he was in jail. The Serb hoodlums had torched his house and looted all his property. His young wife told the NYT reporter that she had saved her chastity from the Serb monsters, but her husband, Behan Thaqqi doubted it. She was crying as she said this to the US reporter. Because of the acute sense of shame which the act of rape has for a Kosovo Muslim woman, the inspectors of the Hague-based War Crimes Tribunal are experiencing difficulty in getting the Muslim female victims of Serbian rapists to give the Tribunal inspectors detailed accounts of their ordeal and be willing to depose in court. The Tribunal is collecting evidence of rape by the Serb troops and their civilian accomplices.

Sex assault dens

The State Department in Washington had recently received reports from Kosovo that the Serb troops had converted Hotel Karsgac in the town of Pec into a sex assault den where the Albanian women were beaten up and raped for weeks on end. A similar sex assault den was established by the Serb troops and their pare-military hoodlums in a military barrack in the town of Djakovic. According to information gathered by the USA's Human Rights Watch Organis-ation, two Kosovar women in the town of Dragcin had given details of their molestation and rape by the Serb troops. The K UN F PA officials have also been infor-med that women of Albanian orig-in were subjected to mass sex assaults during the Serb rule. In the town of Djakovica in Kosovo, an Albanian Muslim told the US troops that in the Serb Army barrack behind the city stadium and a church, the Serb troops had operated a sex assault den where kidnapped Muslim women were jailed and raped by the Serb troops. An Albanian Muslim woman told US newsmen that a dozen Muslim women had escaped from this Serbian rape camp and committed suicide. American newsmen quoted a 28-year-old female soldier of the Kosovo Liberation Army as telling them that the Serbian Army was operating a large number of sex assault chambers in the army establishments in Kosovo where the kidnapped Albanian Muslim women were tortured and then gang-raped by Serb troops. Any woman who tried to escape was shot dead. Officers of the Kosovo Liberation Army are collecting evidence of the mass rape of Albanian Muslim women by the Serb troops and their civilian hood-lums for submi-ssion to the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. The KLA woman soldier, Skina Huda, told the American newsmen that after spending two months in the jungles on the Kosovo border, working for the KLA, she had returned and joined a KLA-supported information centre in the town for helping the returning Kosovar refugees. Many Muslim women, tortured by the Serb troops, are now furnishing evidence to her information centre.

Some Kosovar refugees told me in Irvine near Los Angeles that they had come to the USA under the US Government's permission to 22,000 war-hit Kosovars to seek refuge in the USA. According to them, the Serb Army used the mass rape of Albanian Muslim women as a weapon of war. After murdering their male relatives, they were jailed inside the military camps where they were initially tortured and gang-raped and then drugged food was given to them to make them docile and pliable for sex assaults by the Serb troops and the corps of hoodlums they had raised to terrorise the Albanian Muslims in Kosovo. Before leaving Kosovo, some Serb soldiers had forcibly taken away the raped Muslim women to Serbia for being sold to the human flesh trade operators in other European countries.

Ms. Huda of the KLA told US newsmen that in Kosovo Muslim society, a woman's honour is of the greatest importance to her both in individual and social life. "An Albanian Muslim woman does not fear death but for her rape is worse than death. Once subjected to rape, she feels a sense of shame in society all her life and is not at peace with her soul. This is the weakness known to the Serbs and their monsters took advantage of it by raping Muslims women in large numbers, especially in the April-May period and the days before the NATO forces entered Kosovo and the Serb Army withdrew. Together with raping Muslim women, the Serb killers wanted to wreck Muslim society and destroy the peace of the survivor Muslims in Kosovo."

Gangs of killers and looters

Some Kosovar Muslim refugees in the town of Tustin in the Orange County in California told me late in June that the Serb Army had deployed trained killers and looters against the Muslims in Kosovo. These killer gangs often wore masks and had black or red armbands. The Serb killers with the red armbands looted and robbed Muslim houses and the killers with the black armbands were absolute savages. Kidnapping Muslim men and women, raping Muslim women, dismembering the corpses of Muslim victims and selling their body organs, selling orphaned Muslim children to white slave gangs in Western Europe or baby traders and tracing Albanian Muslim refugees in the jungles and then slaughtering them were some of the devilish works of the gangs with black armbands. Belgrade's dictator Milosevic and his henchmen had specially deployed in Kosovo those Serb monsters who had specialised in killing Muslims and raping their women in Bosnia.

Russia's role

It is reported that clerics of the Greek Orthodox Church had taught these monsters that murdering Muslims and raping Muslim women was their religious duty to avenge what they alleged the Turkish conquerors did to the Serbs centuries ago. Most of the Christians in Yugoslavia belong to the Greek Orthodox Church which is an ally oft Russian Orthodox Church; hence the support Moscow has given to the Serbs and the Kosovar Muslims' distrust of the Russians. The Serb armed gangsters, while leaving Kosovo on June 10, carried with them in cattle vans large numbers of gagged and raped Albanian Muslim women so that they would not fall into the hands of the War Crimes Tribunal inspectors and they could be later on sold to the brothels in Western Europe. Those Muslim women who tried to escape were shot dead and their bodies dumped into wells or pits. Babies clinging to their dead mothers have been found in some mass graves; a little girl had her bruised baby doll sticking out of a mass grave. The girl and her mother had been butchered by the Serb savages. Thousands of stories of their barbarism are now surfacing in Kosovo which makes it impossible for the Muslims to trust the Serbs. The Kosovar Muslims are angry that Russian soldiers should now move into Muslim villages in Kosovo to protect the Serb killers who are staying back in Kosovo for political reasons on Belgrade's instructions. Like the Serb killers, it is feared, the Russians will only kill the Kosovar Muslims and that is why the Russian troops are hated by the Kosovar Albanians. Once they get drunk, they would catch any Muslim female to rape her, according to many Kosovar Muslims.

More mass graves

A US newspaper, 'USA Today' in its issue of June 25 published a large number of photographs of the mass graves of the Albanian Muslims who were murdered by the Serb troops. A photo shows a huge pit full of dead bodies, many rotting and stinking, in the town of Ljubzade in Kosovo. It showed a Muslim, Ramzan Bajrami, picking up a shoe from a grave; he was searching for his missing relatives. He and his relative, Rushdi Naziri, had dug up a pit in which some 80 dead bodies of Muslims were rotting. It is a gruesome sight to see shrieking men and women searching for their missing relatives in these mass graves. Some searchers have become mentally deranged because of the horrible scenes they have witnessed. The War Crimes Tribunal inspectors are sealing off many mass graves for being turned into crime exhibits when the Serb monsters are hauled up before the tribunal for war crimes. Many families of returning Kosovar refugees are mentally very disturbed because they seek night and day their missing relatives, hoping against hope that they might still be alive. Such mass graves now number by the hundreds and each pit has between 50 and 150 dead bodies of Kosovar Muslims. The War Crimes Tribunal has indicted Belgrade's dictator Milosevic as a wanted war criminal. The US Government has offered five million dollars for his arrest. The USA Today has published interviews with a large number of Kosovar Albanians whose relatives were butchered in cold blood by the Serb army and police. One of the persons interviewed was Sabri Popaj in his torched house in village Belakirkva. In April, two of his sons were murdered by the Serb troops. They, along with some other Muslims, had hidden themselves in a cave in a nearby hill. The Serb army got wind of it any they mowed down each and every Muslim in the cave. Sabri lost 22 members of his family in this carnage. Not far away from the scene of this brutal killing is another pit containing 50 Muslim dead bodies. Sabri said they were herded into trucks by the Serbs and shot dead by machine gun firing. Sabri gave details of these mass graves to the US newspaper reporters and the UN officials. Among those killed was a cousin of Sabri, Dr. Nasim Popaj, who was a popular Muslim doctor. A UN indictment of Belgrade dictator Milosevic for war crimes lists some 3 00 victims of his death orders in Kosovo; Sabri's relations are among them.

Missing relatives

On June 14, according to reports in the US newspapers, the American and British troops with the NATO forces had unearthed many more mass graves in which the Serb army had dumped the dead bodies of the Muslims it had killed. Former soldiers of the KLA are helping the UN investigators in uncovering more such mass graves for the War Crimes Tribunal. What is upsetting the returning Kosovar refugees is that they are unable to trace their missing relatives. Women with missing husbands dare not remarry because they hope that their spouses will return one day. In some cases, split couples have been reunited after months of separation but, by and large, their homes no longer exist; the Serb barbarians had looted and burnt them.

Farida Morina and her neighbour, Nasib Kastrani returned to their home village together with Nasib's 11-year-old son Sadiq Kastrani. But they were homeless because their houses had been burnt by the Serbs. Waziri Mazriko and her husband got back to their home village from a refugee camp but their house was a heap of burnt rubble. It was an old Turkish style house and had many precious artifacts. The Serbs took pleasure in destroying any house or mosque which had signs of Turkish architecture. US newspapers published the story of Farida, crying at the steps of her burnt house, saying "O! God, where shall I now go? I have no home, my brother is missing and my other family members remain untraced. Are they dead, in the mass graves?. . A 23-year-old Kosovar who had returned from a refugee camp showed to American newsmen the dead bodies of seven of his relatives who had been shot dead by the Serbs inside his house. The house was partly burnt. Before the Serb Army left Kosovo, its soldiers went on killing sprees, shooting any Albanian they saw. They torched a whole village near the town of Pec. The Muslims escaped to a nearby forest where some Christian monks claimed to have saved them from being butchered by the Serb troops. The burnt village of Decani near Pec has much shocking evidence of Serb barbarism.

Mass slaughter

US newspapers reported that on April 30 the Serb forces killed 115 Albanian Muslims in village Stutuk in Kosovo. The killing was done by the killer gangs raised by the Serb army. In Swarika town, a Muslim, Sami Krosnki, told newsmen that the Serb killer gangs with red armbands looted and burnt houses while the ones with black armbands murd-ered the Muslims. They usually wore masks while mac-hine gunning the Kosovars and often they burnt the Muslim dead by throwing their dead bodies inside burning houses. The USA Today published a photograph of a grave which had an adult male clinging to the body of a blonde woman, his wife. Her shoes were burnt but looked elegant. Obviously the couple was of some eminence and affluent. The Serbs had looted their house.

The mass graves are unfolding harrowing accounts of the Serb army's barbarism. A watch on the hand of a dead man in a pit showed the date as April 24 and the time as 11. Obviously the man was shot at that time and a bullet wrecked the watch also. In villages by the scores, dead bodies, rotting for weeks past, are being found. Some were eaten by hungry dogs. In a house in Wanwarika town, the dead bodies of a large number of women with their children have been found; the Serb troops had killed them in a hurry while leaving the town. Frozen blood is splattered over the walls and rooms of a number of houses. In village Dragacin the returning Kosovar refugees took the NATO German troops to stinking wells inside which the dead bodies of murdered humans were rotting. The German soldier, according to a report in USA Today, was shocked and said:" Horrible, Horrible; the Serbs committed barbaric crimes,'

Cruelty in hospitals

According to reports in some US newspapers, the Serb administrators in the main Government Hospital in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, had been insulting and humiliating the Muslim staff since 1990. They slowly drove out all the Muslim doctors from this hospital. The Serb doctors would not beat the Muslim patients unless they were heavily bribed. It was the policy of the Serb doctors to neglect or poison the Muslim patients. The dead bodies of the Muslim patients were sent to medical teaching colleges in Serbia for dissection. A newspaper of Irvine County near Los Angeles, the Orange County Register, reported on June 20 that in the past ten years the Serb doctors in this hospital had killed a large number of Muslim patients. Huge sums of money were demanded from their relatives to treat the Muslim patients and when the doctors did not get enough money they poisoned him. The Albanian Muslim doctors who were thrown out from the Government Hospital had opened a private clinic. Muslim patients were treated there almost for free. Soon after NATO's bombing, the Serb Army shut down all the private clinics run by Albanian Muslim doctors all over Kosovo. The medical equipment in these Muslim-run clinics was looted by the Serb army looters. The NATO administrator has persuaded the old Muslim medical staff to rejoin the hospitals and restart their clinics. The Serb doctors, fearful of the wrath of the Kosovars, fled to Belgrade before the NATO forces moved into Kosovo.

A prominent Muslim doctor of Pristina, Dr. Talat Gajnoli told American newsmen that the Serb Army removed him from the main Government Hospital in Pristina on March 24, 1999. He moved to Macedonia with his wife and three children. He worked in the refugee camps and treated the wounded of the Kosovo Liberation Army in border camps. With him were many other Muslim doctors and nurses; they have returned to Pristina and taken up jobs in the local hospitals under the NATO control. Two well known Kosovo doctors, Dr. Benic Kastrani and Dr. Luci Jinko, who were sacked from the Pristina Hospital by the Serb army have been re-employed in that hospital.

An American newspaper in Los Angeles, the L.A. Times, carried many despatches of its correspondents in Kosovo, highlighting the suffering and anguish of many returning Albanian refugees when they saw their houses burnt and looted and the dead bodies of their relatives rotting in them. The American newsmen talked to Gani Krasinki in the town of Caraluka. He was shocked to see the charred dead bodies of his brother and his wife in their burnt house. He nearly lost his mental balance; medical treatment for him is a problem because many life-saving drugs are not readily available. Those Kosovars who find dead bodies inside their homes have been told to inform the War Crimes Tribunal inspectors and then bury them. Gani told newsmen that how could he sleep inside his burnt house with the corpses of his near and dear ones lying in it unburied.

Relief agencies

Orphaned Muslim children in Kosovo are having a tough time because no proper arrangements for their care have been made so far. Relief agencies from many European countries and the USA are doing their best but the need is so enormous that they cannot cope with it fully. Many relief agencies from the UAE, Pakistan and the Muslims of the USA are helping in the rehabilitation of the war-hit Muslim families. The Muslim Associations in the USA have sent relief goods worth two million dollars to Kosovo. Christian aid organizations of the USA, UK, Germany, France and Austria are also helping. Surprisingly, the OIC has not set up any office in Kosovo nor is there any evidence of relief coming from this organisation. Relief agencies from Turkey are helping the Kosovar war victims in diverse ways.

A correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, Valerie Reitman, in a despatch, bared the gruesome story of the finding of dead bodies in a well in the village of Qysk in Kosovo. It had inside it the corpses of a dozen men, obviously murdered by the Serb death squads. She reported that in the Djakovica area in southwest Kosovo, 39 out of 44 villages have contaminated wells with human and some animal dead bodies. She says in her reportage: "Serbian forces apparently suffered so many bodies of ethnic Albanians into wells during their campaign of terror last spring that the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia is treating them as mass graves in their own right". It seems that on March 30, the Serb troops yanked some 70 men from a column of fleeing refugees, killed them and dumped their corpses in the well.

Los Angeles Times correspondent Valerie Reitman also reported that the dead bodies of two boys were pulled out of a community well in the town of Dedaj. When word of it got around, more than a hundred men and women rushed to Dedaj, hoping to find the dead bodies of their missing relatives and give them a decent religious burial. War crimes investigator, Ben Higan told Reitman that "it was al I part of the Serbs' ethnic cleansing, the scorched earth policy of trying to render the place uninhabitable". The Serbs dumped some animal dead bodies inside the wells in which they had thrown the Kosovar Muslims they had killed. Reitman also reported that near Kamenica, in east Kosovo, the bodies of seven women were found and they had been raped before being shot dead. The Council for Defence of Human Rights, human rights NGO, is collecting more details of Serb savagery. The dead bodies dumped in wells by the Serbs are surfacing every day and an international aid group, Doctors without Borders, is getting requests for plastic bags to remove the rotting dead dredged up from the wells. Doctor Luc CastelI of this NGO told Reitman that she had never seen so many dead bodies dumped inside wells as in Kosovo. (Castell worked in past years in many hot spots such as Cambodia, Sudan, Liberia and Haiti).

According to USA Today of June 15, the American troops of the 82 Airborne Division, who entered Kosovo on June 14, had that very day taken control of three mass grave sites near the southern Kosovo city of Kacanik. The graves held the bodies of 80 Kosovars killed by the Serb forces in April 1999. On June 15, the USA Today reported in a despatch from David Lynch in Kacanik in Kosovo that the Serbs had killed 81 Kosovars whose bodies lay in a mass grave of freshly turned earth. Dr. Lul Raka of the local hospital said that some of them were killed in their houses and some on the streets. Fatmir Shahu, 32, a local resident gave the US newsman an account of how the Serb military descended upon the town, shooting and killing the Muslims. At least 17 victims were cut down in the street while another 46 Kosovars, fleeing to a creekside road, were killed by the Serb police with machine guns. Ismail Sopa told journalist Lynch that some Kosovars cowered behind houses; the Serbs traced them and shot them dead. Sabit Raka, a Muslim, said that his school-going daughter, Jehan Raka, was shot by the Serb gunmen. At night the Serbs returned with a wooden wagon and dragged the dead bodies to an Albanian cemetery and threw them in a mass grave. Similar accounts of Serb barbarism towards the ethnic Albanian Musldns have appeared in many US newspapers in despatches sent by their own correspondents covering Kosovo.