Klečka massacre

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The Klečka massacre was a mass murder of 22 Serb civilians in the village of Klečka near Lipjan in Kosovo , allegedly by members of the Albanian paramilitary organization UÇK . The massacre took place over a period of several days in July 1998 during the Kosovo war . After the killings , the perpetrators tried those killed by combustion in an as crematorium misused Kalkofen cremate a lemon factory.

In its declaration to the General Assembly of the United Nations on the killing of the Serbs, the Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Affairs equated the perpetrators with Nazis and the manner in which corpses were disposed of with the industrialized mass murder of Jews Support in the “legitimate fight against terrorism”. Some representatives of the international community condemned the incident, but there was no broad solidarity with the Serbs. In Serbia the crime of Klečka led to the thesis of the Albanian genocide against the Serbs being confirmed. The narrative constructed since the 1980s was updated and radicalized in the Serbian media.

In April 2001 a Serbian court found two Kosovar Albanians guilty of terrorism, mass executions and rape of Serbian civilians in Kosovo and sentenced them to 20 years in prison. The brothers Luan and Bekim Mazreku were arrested in August 1998 shortly after the discovery of the mass grave in Klečka around 30 kilometers south of Pristina and had stated in their interrogations that they belonged to a KLA group that had killed a total of ten people a key witness confirmed the information. The trial began in April 2000 and was interrupted three times.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Escalation of horror. In: Die Welt from August 31, 1998.
    World: Europe - Serbs highlight 'KLA atrocity'. In: BBC of August 29, 1998.
  2. ^ Daniela Mehler: Serbian coming to terms with the past: Change of norms and struggles for interpretation in dealing with war crimes, 1991-2012. transcript Verlag, 2015, ISBN 3-83942-850-5 , p. 136.
  3. ↑ Two former KLA members sentenced to 20 years in prison. In: The Standard of April 18, 2001.