War Crimes in Kosovo

A Population-Based Assessment of Human Rights Abuses against Kosovar Albanians

The Kosovo crisis resulted in the largest population displacement in Europe since the Second World War. This report is the first epidemiological study of human rights violations committed against Kosovars. By using a population-based approach in Albania and Macedonia, this study establishes patterns of human rights violations and the pervasiveness of violence and abuses by Serb forces suffered among the refugees when they were in Kosovo.The PHR/Columbia team collected information on 11,458 household members from 23 of the 29 districts within Kosovo.

Serb forces committed widespread human rights violations, including killings ; beatings; torture; sexual assault; separation from family members; disappearances; shootings; lootings and destruction of property; and violations of medical neutrality. One in every three households interviewed by PHR/Columbia reported at least one of these abuses in the past year. Virtually all of the participants in this study were forced, directly or indirectly, to leave their homes simply on the grounds that they were Kosovar Albanians. 

It is clear from this study that until Serb forces departed, to be an ethnic Albanian in Kosovo was to be vulnerable to abuses for no other reason than one's ethnic identity. Such was the lot of many of those whom PHR interviewed. Such accounts of suffering, individually, and collectively, are a powerful testimony to the cruelty, thoroughness, and breadth of Yugoslav President Milosevic's war against unarmed and helpless Kosovar Albanian men, women, and children.

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