Rogovo incident

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In the so-called Rogovo incident ( Serbian Сукоб у Рогову Sukob u Rogovu ; in German "Confrontation in Rogovo") at the end of January 1999 in the domestic phase of the Kosovo war, 24 or 25 men of Albanian ethnicity , most of them demonstrably UÇK members, and one Yugoslav policeman killed in the village of Rogovo between Đakovica ( Albanian  Gjakova ) and Prizren .

Depending on the portrayal, it was either a “massacre”, an “execution” or the ruthless destruction of a “UÇK base” by the Serbian-Yugoslav police. Testimonies of the villagers speak loudly OSCE - KVM credit report in five to six cases of arbitrary executions.

background

Rogovo incident (Serbia and Montenegro)
Rogovo / Rogovë
Rogovo / Rogovë
Belgrade
Belgrade
Serbia
Central Serbia
Vojvodina
Kosovo
Montenegro
Rogovo in the FR of Yugoslavia 1999

Rogovo (Albanian Rogovë / Rogova ) is a village in the Gjakova district in the southwestern part of Kosovo , near the border with Albania . In early 1999, repeated attempts by smaller groups of KLA fighters to penetrate the border posts had increased tension in the region. Shortly before, on January 25, 1999, in the Okrug Peć , an incident had occurred in Rakovine (Albanian Rakovinë / Rakovina ). During the last week of January 1999, Special Police forces and the Yugoslav Army (VJ) carried out operations in the area and many villagers fled. Several times the police returned to Rogovo and the surrounding villages to look for UÇK members. At the end of January / beginning of February 1999, the UÇK again controlled roughly the same areas that it had already ruled in the early summer of 1998 and from which the Yugoslav army had withdrawn after the Holbrooke-Milošević Agreement.

procedure

The actual process has not been fully clarified. It can be assumed that a police officer was killed in a fire attack by the KLA on a police patrol, whereupon the police not only took revenge with excessive severity on the KLA group that initiated the attack, but also arbitrarily killed some possibly uninvolved civilians.

Investigation of the OSCE KVM

On the morning of January 29, 1999, the Deputy Chief of Police in Djakovica informed an OSCE KVM team about “an incident in Rogovo”. At around 6:30 a.m., a police patrol was attacked by 10 UÇK officers in the center of Rogovo. One policeman was killed in ambush and two were slightly wounded, but no other (UÇK) victims were mentioned. The KVM team arrived in Rogovo at 9:55 am, where they saw the blanket-covered body of a dead police officer in the back of a car. When the team with General John Drewienkiewicz, a deputy of William Walker, was allowed an hour later, after the arrival of an examining magistrate for Okrug Peć from Peć ( Pejë / Peja ), to close the property of the farm, which was enclosed by three to four meter high walls entered, it found a total of 24 bodies. Three bodies were in the back seat of a red van that had been badly damaged by bullets, and another eight in the stern compartment; three machine guns were found inside the van. A submachine gun was placed near each of the three bodies that lay near the van. A police officer showed the KVM team a bag that contained several hand grenades and numerous loose ammunition. In a nearby “garage”, the KVM verifiers saw another five corpses, some of them submerged in water, and a submachine gun next to one of them. Next to the outer wall, the Kosovar Albanian owner of the property was found dead with a rifle lying next to him. In a building at the rear of the site, the KVM team saw four bodies with weapons and numerous used cartridge cases. Four of the dead were dressed in camouflage-colored uniforms with UÇK badges. The ID of a KLA courier was found on one of the victims. Overall, fewer weapons were found than dead.

When the scenario of the shooting was investigated by police investigators, a large crowd gathered. All bodies from the van were pulled out for identification. One of them had obviously serious injuries, the nature of which suggested a grenade explosion in the van. The bodies were then taken to the medical center in Pristina ( Prishtinë / Prishtina ) for an autopsy .

Police information

According to the police, a police patrol was ambushed and a police officer was killed, after which the police returned fire and killed 24 suspected members of the KLA.

Information from the villagers

According to information provided by the Albanian villagers to the OSCE KVM, the homeowner drove three men in his red van to his shop in the city at 5:30 a.m. In a café he was asked if he could “help transport soldiers”. The owner left the place with a few others, accompanied by another car. Immediately afterwards, about 15 police officers entered the café, searched everyone present and asked about the van and its driver. 20 minutes later, the owner returned to his house with his hands tied and accompanied by two police officers. Then at around 6:00 a.m. his red van arrived with various armed UÇK people in it. 20 police and / or special forces forces entered the property and started shooting at the UÇK people while they were still in the car. Neighbors heard intense gunfire and some explosions. After the shooting, the owner was taken to the pile of wood, where he was apparently arbitrarily killed. About seven police officers then entered the neighboring house and took the male family members out and to the red van, beaten up, killed at random behind the house near the pile of wood and thrown into a shallow pool of mud and water in the "garage". According to several statements, the four men were not involved in UÇK matters. Around eight o'clock, around 30 police officers entered the courtyard of another Kosovar Albanian house about 150 meters from the property. “Do you have guests?” They said they came into the house and took four family members outside and ordered them to kneel with their hands behind their heads. After the police ransacked the house, they ordered the family to go back inside, but they detained a man. Witnesses saw him being taken to the first house by two police officers, where he was arbitrarily killed and thrown into the dirty water.

The day before the killings, the tense conditions in the village had come to a head, as the police surrounded the village and did not let anyone in. On January 29, seven houses in the village were searched and some items were stolen, and between 9:30 a.m. and 10:00 a.m., six people, most of them men, were beaten up.

Information from the UÇK

According to a statement by a UÇK commander to the KVM, 18 of the dead were UÇK members and fell like soldiers.

reception

International

The linguist Noam Chomsky , known as a sharp critic of US foreign and economic policy, presents the Western assessment of the acts of violence committed in Kosovo by the Serbian or Albanian side as an example of an asymmetrical perception of interests in the sense of “ Genocides are acceptable as long as the West” she perpetrated ":

“Up until January 1999, the British assumed that most of the atrocities had been committed by the UÇK, the Albanian Liberation Army. According to its own statements, the KLA tried to attack the Serbs across the border and provoke excessive reactions so that the human rights violations committed could win over public opinion in the West. When the war began, the violations of human rights escalated dramatically. "

- Noam Chomsky

Germany

The Rogovo case acquired particular importance in Germany as a subsequent legitimation vis-à-vis the public for the German participation in the NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia.

As early as the end of March 1999, the media had picked up on Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping's assertion that the Serbs had set up a concentration camp in the Pristina football stadium . On March 30, the Berliner Kurier headlined: “Serbs killers drive Albanians into concentration camp zones”. On April 1, the Bild newspaper had a photo of a crowd of Kosovar Albanians who had fled to Macedonia before the war on page 1 of the issue with the headline “... They are driving them to the concentration camp”.

On April 27, 1999, Rudolf Scharping presented to the public photos that had been taken on January 29, 1999 of the crime scene in Rogovo as alleged evidence of a Serbian "massacre" of civilians. He described this as evidence that a systematic expulsion of Kosovar Albanians in violation of human rights had begun before the time of the NATO air strikes , and tried to support his assertion of the existence and the early implementation of a so-called horseshoe plan .

“What we are showing you here, as I already said, you need strong nerves to be able to endure such horrific pictures at all, but they make it clear with what brutality it started back then and has continued since. If you look at such photos, then you will also be able to see very, very easily that this can also be evidence-securing to a certain extent. The uniforms you see there are uniforms of the Serbian Special Police. This also makes it clear that army forces and special police, and later on, not only these but also gangs of released prisoners and others, are involved in such murder. They are harrowing images. And I have to go to great lengths to describe it in a tone that does not, in a sense, lead to an explosion. "

- Rudolf Scharping, Federal Minister of Defense, April 27, 1999

In an interview with Ulrich Deppendorf on ARD on April 30, 1999, Scharping spread the speculation that the heads of the dead from Rogovo had been hit with baseball bats. He rejected any criticism of his use of the photos and any doubts about his claim that the Serbs had been practicing ethnic cleansing since January.

Although the Reuters news agency had published similar photos of the incident three months earlier and described the dead as UÇK fighters killed in revenge for a slain Serbian officer, many German media now adopted Scharping's portrayal in the Kölner Express as “ This is why we are waging war! “Summarized, war-justifying sense.

Even before the pictures were presented by Scharping, there were public voices expressing concerns that the portrayal of alleged Serbian atrocities could be influenced by the political interest of the red-green government to win over those voters who are reluctant to wage war.

On May 18, 2000, a panorama report was broadcast that placed Scharping's presentation of the Rogovo incident in the context of general war propaganda aimed at securing the support of the population for the conduct of the war. Scharping's assertion serves as the starting point for proof of the manipulation:

"We did very good research and obtained images that OSCE staff took in the morning between seven and eight o'clock."

- Rudolf Scharping, Federal Minister for Defense

The German police officer and OSCE observer Henning Hensch, who was the first international investigator to be there, contradicts this. According to his information and other photographs, the arrangement of the bodies in Rogovo in the pictures shown by Scharping does not indicate a massacre, since the bodies of the UÇK fighters were only put together in this way after the crime scene was recorded.

In 2001, a TV documentary ("It began with a lie") , which was later criticized unusually harshly, appeared on WDR , describing Scharping's presentation as war propaganda, which pursued the aim of disseminating untrue or exaggerated accusations by the Serbs to dwindle public support for warfare to restore and subsequently legitimize NATO's warfare against Yugoslavia in public. The TV documentary claims that the dead found in Rogovo are not civilians, but UÇK fighters who were not victims of a massacre but died in battle. The pictures taken by a western camera team immediately after the events in Rogovo showed the victims with rifles, ammunition, military boots, UÇK badges and membership cards, which proved, according to the documentation, that the people killed were not civilians . Henning Hensch, who, according to the TV documentary, was the first OSCE observer to be on site, is cited again as evidence that the presence of the KLA and military equipment was not arranged subsequently by the Serbian side and before the arrival of the camera team. Contrary to Scharping's statement that in his portrayal of the events in Rogovo as a massacre he was referring to "OSCE observers who were the first to arrive", Hensch had come to the conclusion in his official investigation report that Rogovo was not Massacre of civilians. Hensch reports that on the day his presentation was first published, the defense minister “was informed that the presentation that had expired was not the case.” In addition, the corpses that the defense minister had shown are there by the Serbian security authorities and by Hensch and his two Russian colleagues after they had collected them from the various sites, some of which were about 300 meters apart. Thus, the images presented by Scharping and allegedly proving an execution would have no real connection with the actual events.

In 2012, Hensch reiterated his statements in a TV report from NDR . In Hensch's view, the available footage from Rogovo not only does not provide evidence that a massacre took place, but rather that it was a matter of “military conflict”. The pictures selected and shown by Rudolf Scharping would have been those that were only taken after the investigations in the yard had already been concluded and the police had gathered the bodies. In fact, the pictures that Scharping had presented as evidence of a massacre were largely made by Hensch himself with a colleague. Although a camera team and press photographers were present on the farm in Rogovo on January 29, 1999, Scharping had claimed that a German lieutenant had taken these photos secretly and then brought them to Germany. As the reason why the first lieutenant did not appear in public when the pictures were presented, Scharping had given that he was undergoing medical treatment because of the pictures and the experiences they had:

“I would have liked to introduce you to the lieutenant myself. But he is being treated, which has to do with the pictures and the experiences that lie behind these pictures. "

- Rudolf Scharping, Federal Minister for Defense

At the request of the NDR editorial team at the Federal Ministry of Defense in Berlin as to whether a German first lieutenant was in Rogovo at the time and whether he took photos, this was denied, contradicting Scharping's claim.

meaning

According to the OSCE, the incident in Rogovo is probably the most significant key event after the so-called Račak massacre during the Kosovo Verification Mission's deployment in the Kosovo conflict before March 20, 1999, i.e. before the final failure of the Rambouillet Treaty and the withdrawal of KVM verifiers from Kosovo. Together with the incident in Račak on January 15, 1999 and the incident near Rakovina on January 25, the events in Rogovo were also seen as an early indication of developments at the end of March 1999.

In Germany the case Rogovo gained particularly in the arguments of the defense minister Scharping great importance, who declared that there exists a plan horseshoe for the systematic expulsion of Kosovo Albanians, whose implementation started at the beginning 1999th In an information leaflet dated May 11, 1999, he had informed the members of the Bundestag in writing that it had been known since April that “ the evictions and violent attacks were by no means a direct reaction to the air strikes by the Alliance, but were part of the so-called Operation 'Horseshoe' from the outset. “Which was developed at the end of 1998 and implemented since the beginning of 1999. Surtitled as “ The Yugoslav leadership is proceeding according to plan and implementing its plan step by step ”, his communication showed three images apparently intended as evidence, the first of which referred to the Rogovo incident, while the other two showed aerial photos of burning houses about three weeks after Beginning of NATO air strikes were recorded.

In April 1999 it became clear that the final failure of the Rambouillet Treaty and the so-called Račak massacre were too uncertain a basis for legitimation to guarantee the support of the German public. The red-green government, which was only elected into office at the end of September 1998, was also exposed to considerable doubts on the part of the NATO partners regarding its loyalty to and suitability for the alliance. Because of the concerned population, it was forced to develop and use means of propaganda within a short period of time. In this situation, with the presentation of further crimes against humanity committed or possibly allegedly committed by Serbs, public support in favor of the now unpopular warfare was restored. The incident in Rogovo was of prime importance here.

Quotes

"They show photos that clearly show the massacre on the 29th near Rogova and they also show that the plan to expel the Kosovars was implemented in January."

- Rudolf Scharping, Federal Minister for Defense

“Corpses, corpses everywhere. Shot men whose faces were mutilated with baseball bats so that no one could identify them. Images of horror, images from Kosovo. Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping showed them yesterday in order to prove emphatically that Serb leader Milosevic is raging so cruelly. Therefore this war: The mass murder must come to an end. "

- Kölner Express, April 28, 1999

“It was also very clear that this was not a massacre of the civilian population, because according to the OSCE reports, the KLA commanders themselves said that fighters for the great cause of the Albanians had died there. So the German Defense Minister actually interpreted it as a massacre. "

- Heinz Loquai, retired General - OSCE

See also

literature

  • OSCE, Kosovo / Kosova - As Seen, As Told - An analysis of the human rights findings of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission - October 1998 to June 1999 , 1999, 433 S., ISBN 83-912750-0-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Judgment, IT-05-87 / 1-T (PDF; 7.3 MB), judgment of 23 February 2011 in the ICTY trial against Vlastimir Đorđević, file number IT-05-87 / 1-T, p 156ff.
  2. ↑ a b Heinz Loquai, The Kosovo conflict - way in an avoidable war - The period from late November 1997 to March 1999 , Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2000, 183 pp, ISBN 3-7890-6681-8 , S. 142
  3. ^ A b c d e Carl Polónyi, Salvation and Destruction: National Myths and War using the Example of Yugoslavia 1980-2004 , Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2010, 528 pp., ISBN 978-3-8305-1724-5 , pp. 372f.
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i OSCE: Kosovo / Kosova - As Seen, As Told - An analysis of the human rights findings of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission - October 1998 to June 1999 , 1999, ISBN 83-912750-0 -0 ; P. 184f.
  5. ↑ OSCE: Kosovo / Kosova - As Seen, As Told - An analysis of the human rights findings of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission - October 1998 to June 1999 , 1999, ISBN 83-912750-0-0 ; P. 170
  6. ↑ a b c d e Heinz Loquai, The Kosovo Conflict - Ways to an Avoidable War - The time from the end of November 1997 to March 1999 , Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2000, 183 pages, ISBN 3-7890-6681-8 , P. 39
  7. ↑ Heinz Loquai, The Kosovo conflict - way in an avoidable war - The period from late November 1997 to March 1999 , Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2000, 183 pp, ISBN 3-7890-6681-8 , p 39; Note: Loquai speaks of 25 Albanians killed.
  8. ↑ Commando Company Fear ( memento from January 19, 2013 on WebCite ), weekly newspaper, December 27, 2002, by Stefan Fuchs
  9. ^ Carl Polónyi: Salvation and Destruction: National Myths and War using the Example of Yugoslavia 1980-2004. Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2010, ISBN 978-3-8305-1724-5 , p. 399ff.
  10. ↑ Truth, Censorship, Propaganda - The Media and War , Part 2 , Panorama , broadcast on April 15, 1999: Udo Röbel, chief editor of the Bild-Zeitung: “ I'm not afraid either, so things by name and by name To get a point if you expect that from the picture. When you see the page 'They are driving them into the concentration camp', this picture was so impressive, this trek of tens of thousands from Pristina, that actually spoke for itself. And if then, on that day, the defense minister of concentration camps in Serbia or in Kosovo speaks, then this picture and this line get an eerie drama. "
  11. ^ Hermann Meyn, mass media in Germany , UVK, Konstanz, new edition. 2004, ISBN 3-89669-420-0 , here p. 270
  12. ↑ a b c d e f g h i It began with a lie , WDR, by Jo Angerer and Mathias Werth, broadcast on ARD on February 8, 2001, transcription available at the URL: http: //www.ag-friedensforschung. de / topics / NATO war / ard-broadcast.html . YouTube link (video, 52 minutes): The war in Kosovo: It began with a lie - Germany's way into the war in Kosovo , published on July 3, 2012 by YouTube user Bildungsverein der Roma zu Hamburg eV , accessed on May 22 2013.
  13. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Time travel: As an observer in Kosovo ( Memento from August 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), NDR, broadcast on January 15, 2012; The film can be viewed on some video portals.
  14. ↑ a b Thomas Deichmann, From 'Never Again War' to 'Never again Auschwitz': Dilemmas of German Media Policy in the War Against Yugoslavia , in: P. Hammond & ES Herman (eds.), Degraded Capability: The Media And The Kosovo Crisis , 2000, pp. 153–163, here p. 156.
  15. ↑ a b c History of War Propaganda , Federal Center for Political Education, October 1, 2011, here p. 3 , (last accessed on December 12, 2012)
  16. ↑ Kosovo (II): The Somewhat Different War , Der Spiegel, 2/2000 (January 10, 2000), by Erich Follath, Siegesmund by Ilsemann & Alexander Szandar
  17. ↑ Thomas Deichmann, From 'Never Again War' to 'Never again Auschwitz': Dilemmas of German Media Policy in the War Against Yugoslavia , in: P. Hammond & ES Herman (eds.), Degraded Capability: The Media And The Kosovo Crisis , 2000, pp. 153-163, here p. 156f.
  18. ↑ Truth, Censorship, Propaganda - The Media and the War , Part 2 , Panorama , broadcast on April 15, 1999; Peter Scholl-Latour : “ I have the terrible suspicion of the leading politicians that they have to keep their supporters, which are largely made up of people who are very committed to peace, engaged by portraying the greatest possible horror. "
  19. ↑ a b c Revelations by an insider - Scharping's propaganda in the Kosovo war ( memento from March 2, 2013 on WebCite ) (TV report, 10:38 minutes). Panorama , Das Erste , May 18, 2000, Report by: Mathis Feldhoff and Volker Steinhoff, archived from the original on March 2, 2013.
  20. ↑ a b c Revelations of an Insider - Scharping's Propaganda in the Kosovo War ( Memento from March 2, 2013 on WebCite ) (transcript of the TV report). Panorama , Das Erste , May 18, 2000, Report by: Mathis Feldhoff and Volker Steinhoff, archived from the original on March 2, 2013.
  21. ↑ OSCE: Kosovo / Kosova - As Seen, As Told - An analysis of the human rights findings of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission - October 1998 to June 1999 , 1999, ISBN 83-912750-0-0 ; S. IX
  22. ↑ OSCE: Kosovo / Kosova - As Seen, As Told - An analysis of the human rights findings of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission - October 1998 to June 1999 , 1999, ISBN 83-912750-0-0 ; P. 35
  23. ↑ Heinz Loquai, The Kosovo Conflict - Ways to an Avoidable War - The time from the end of November 1997 to March 1999 , Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2000, 183 p., ISBN 3-7890-6681-8 , p. 113ff.
  24. ↑ a b Time travel: As an observer in Kosovo ( Memento from August 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), NDR, broadcast on January 15, 2012; The film can be viewed on some video portals; with reference to Konrad Kleving