Mauro del Vecchio, a former general of the Italian army, who led a unit of 7,000 soldiers who entered Kosovo in June 1999 after the end of NATO bombing of Serbia, said that during the first three weeks of his mandate the reports of the bodies of killed Serbs and Roma arrived on his desk every morning.
He said for Italian magazine “Panorama” that this was a “taboo”, and that he was not allowed to talk about it with journalists.
“The killings continued later, but not so often. Those who did not flee from Kosovo were under constant risk of being killed or raped. Abandoned Serbian houses were burned to the ground. Albanians attacked churches and monasteries. Their goal was to erase every trace of Serbian presence in Kosovo,” said del Vecchio.
He added that nobody hid Serbian corpses which were found in all possible places.
“Mothers and wives of kidnapped Serbs begged officials to find their loved ones, but most of them were never found, not even those who were dead,” said del Vecchio.
Italian magazine “Panorama” writes that the fact that 70 percent of the total number of kidnapped Kosovo Serbs, who disappeared after June 1999, disappeared when the war officially ended, is terrifying.
The magazine came into possession of photographs UNMIK soldiers found in Decani in 2003, but did not publish them because they were “appalling”.
The photographs show members of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) smiling with a head cut off from Serbian Army member. The other photograph shows them putting at least two cut off heads in a bag, reported portal “Balkanpres”.
In the period when the photographs were taken, according to the magazine, the zone was under the command of Ramush Haradinaj.
Haradinaj was acquitted of all charges by the Hague Tribunal in April 2013. Witnesses who accused him died in weird accidents or were threatened.
