- The Guardian,
- Friday October 13 2000
Jails are softening their regimes as pressure piles on the new Yugoslav president, Vojislav Kostunica, to release the hundreds of jailed ethnic Albanians.
However, Mr Kostunica wants to link their fate to the question of missing Serbs. He has indicated a pardon would be possible only after more than 1,000 Serbs who disappeared in Kosovo are accounted for.
About 2,000 ethnic Albanians, arrested in Kosovo in the runup to last year's war, were transferred to jails in Serbia as the Nato bombing began. Lists are incomplete but the estimates of those still being held range from 600 to 900.
Little has been heard of the prisoners since they vanished into jails in the cities of Nis, Sremska Mitrovice and Pozarevac.
In Pozarevac, the Milosevic family's home town, claims of beatings and killings have been made.
Guards allegedly formed two lines to greet the arrivals with a game of "hot rabbit". One by one the Albanians were ordered to run through the lines while fists, boots and sticks rained down.
Some of the prisoners, aged 14 to over 70, were wounded during their journey from Kosovo. "And do you know what?" said one prison source. "Not one of them made a sound. They didn't scream or beg for mercy.
"The beatings were savage but the longer it went on, the more the guards came to respect them. They had dignity and were tougher than Serb prisoners," the source said.
A former prisoner told the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre that between seven and nine inmates were bludgeoned to death with chains. There has been no independent confirmation.
"Serbian prison guards tend to be badly educated and don't know much about human rights," said Gradimir Nalic, a lawyer who has defended some of the ethnic Albanians.
Mr Nalic said a mafia-type extortion racket offered freedom to those who could afford to bribe judges, prosecutors and guards. "Those left behind were the poorest."
Another lawyer, Husnija Bitic, a Kosovo Albanian who has represented many of those in prison, cuts an incongruous figure. For the most part, he looks like any other lawyer, dressed in a grey pinstripe suit. The oddity is his baseball cap.
He has good reason to wear the cap: a 7cm hole in his skull, the result of a beating by masked men who burst into his home in Belgrade on March 16. He had faced a series of death threats for working with the prisoners.
Mr Bitic listed lots of cases of people being held without any evidence and of people being sentenced without the prosecution even putting up cases. He has not worked since the beating.
At one stage he represented Flora Brovina, one of the best-known Kosovan prisoners whose retrial was postponed yesterday until November 16. She is accused of assisting the Kosovo Liberation Army by supplying medicine, treating wounded fighters and helping to supply them with uniforms. Although her 12-year sentence was quashed on appeal, a retrial was then ordered. There is increasing speculation that she may be released.
Mr Bitic was particularly upset about the fate of another client, Ukshin Hoti, the leader of one of the Kosovan parties. He was allegedly released in May last year without Mr Bitic's knowledge and has not been seen since.
Paul Miller, based in Skopje as a field researcher for the human rights group Amnesty International, said: "Our first challenge to Kostunica to prove his commitment to the rule of law is to release prisoners of conscience such as Flora Brovina."
Apart from a group of 144 mostly students and middle- class professionals from the Kosovo town of Djakovica, the prisoners tend to be farmers or labourers.
