John Sweeney in Pristina Sunday June 27, 1999 The Observer
Hundreds of documents uncovered after the Yugoslav army retreated prove that the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo was meticulously planned and ordered from Belgrade.
The papers provide crucial evidence linking massacres that claimed an estimated 14,000 lives to Serb army generals and police commanders all the way up to President Slobodan Milosevic.
Serbia's security forces kept or destroyed most of the documents, but left enough to ensnare the organisers of Operacija Potkovica - Operation Horseshoe. This was the plan hatched by Belgrade last September to cleanse Kosovo of 'terrorists' - the majority Albanian population - which began the moment the Nato air strikes started on 24 March.
The existence of the cache of documents was disclosed as British forces confirmed that their soldiers have arrested a member of the Serbian Interior Ministry Police suspected of involvement in as many as 56 of the murders in Kosovo. He is not listed as a suspect by the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. He was detained on the evidence of people who said they saw some of the murders.
It was the second time British troops had arrested someone suspected of the atrocities. Last week military police detained a man linked to 46 alleged murders at Slovinje, also near Pristina.
The evidential quality of the captured documents varies hugely, from official minutes to lists carelessly scribbled in notebooks. Some of them place army and police commanders at the scene of villages and towns before, during or after massacres.
There is no single 'smoking gun', but it is understood that, taken together, the documents will enable war crimes investigators to nail dozens of army officers and police commanders to massacre sites.
The documents will help asssemble a case against General Sreten Lukic, author of Operation Horseshoe, and may lead to the precise identification of a ministry police commander known only by his nickname, Mica, who devised the human shield atrocity at Korishe on 13 May.
Mica ordered a convoy of refugee tractors bound for Albania to park outside a hotel. The refugees were told not to leave, or they would be shot. Nato bombed the parked refugee convoy hours later.
A Nato intelligence officer working with investigators told The Observer: 'We now realise that this wasn't mad dog killing. They mapped out which towns and villages they wanted to cleanse as a priority, and the massacres started there. It was organised from the top, and the plan went like clockwork.'
Most of the captured documents are now in the hands of the intelligence service of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Sherbimi Informativ I Kosaves or ShIK. Its head, Kadri Veseli, confirmed to The Observer that documents had been captured.
One Minister in the self-proclaimed KLA interim government, Ram Buja, said: 'Nothing happened in Kosovo without it being planned and organised in Belgrade. None of the killings took place outside of Milosevic's control.'
Buja said: 'We have information from the ShIK that the same people carried out the massacres. Sometimes they were dressed in army uniforms, sometimes in police uniforms, sometimes as paramilitaries. Different uniforms, the same killers.'
The Nato intelligence officer and a former KVM official, who were both in Kosovo before the conflict, separately confirmed that they had observed paramilitaries, working in close co-operation with the ministry police, arrive at two separate massacre sites before the Nato campaign.
The paramilitaries wore olive fatigues, black balaclavas and drove the same cars. 'It was always the same cars,' said the Nato officer.
One fragment of evidence is the names of 10 Serb troops scrawled in a notebook found in the half-ruined home of Qamil Shehu, an elderly Albanian from the village of Little Krushe. He first described how he survived the massacre on 26 March, which claimed 105 men and boys, to The Observer last month.
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999