YUGOSLAVIA: Serb forces had orders to slaughter villagers in Kosovo to "cleanse" the province of Albanians, a Yugoslav army soldier told the trial of the country's former president yesterday.
Serbs torched houses and executed old people, women and infants in the village of Trnje in March 1999, said the witness, whose identity was kept secret.
"We were told to go to the village and cleanse it and do our best not to keep anyone alive there," he said.
Prosecutors say the killings were part of an ethnic cleansing campaign against the majority Albanian population in Kosovo and were master-minded by the former Yugoslav president. He is defending himself against charges of genocide and war crimes in the Balkans during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The 26-year-old witness, a truck driver in the army, said he saw Serb soldiers shoot down three old women and two elderly men fleeing across a field before going house-to-house in Trnje shooting inhabitants in cold blood.
In one compound he said he saw a pile of 15 bodies, mostly women and children, who had been forced into a corner and shot at point-blank range.
"In another house I saw a mother with a baby. The baby was shot in the head and this also killed the mother," said the man, a Muslim from Montenegro.
The witness, who sat behind a screen and whose image was scrambled on monitors relaying his testimony to the press and public gallery, said he came across a young soldier sobbing.
"He cried when they killed a young woman, a good-looking woman. This soldier was sorry to have done this thing," he said.
In another incident, Serb forces were entering a village when they came upon a man with his arms raised. "He was shouting: 'I surrender, I surrender.' ... A policeman took out a knife and cut off his ears," the witness said.
The soldier said he overheard top Serb army officers giving orders to expel Albanians from their homes in Kosovo and to slaughter others in villages that were razed to the ground.
To convict Mr Milosevic over Kosovo, prosecutors must prove not only that atrocities against ethnic Albanians took place, but also that he knew about them or should have known.
During cross-examination, Mr Milosevic questioned the witness about attacks on Serb forces by Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rebels, whom he blames, along with NATO bombing, for atrocities in the province.
The soldier said that during his one year of army service he saw only one KLA uniformed soldier, a woman captured near the border with Albania, but there were periodic skirmishes with rebels.
Serb forces captured Albanian men in civilian clothes accused of being rebels and many were executed on the spot, but the KLA was lightly armed, with mostly hunting rifles, he said.
Mr Milosevic says he does not recognise the court and has refused to plead to the charges, prompting judges to enter not guilty pleas on his behalf.
- (Reuters)