Rubin warns that the United States is on the lookout for crimes against humanity in Kosovo, and says anyone found responsible will be prosecuted  ALSO: Renewed attacks under way in Yugoslavia Pentagon: Weather a factor as new airstrikes begin

March 26, 1999
Web posted at: 3:20 p.m. EST (2020 GMT)

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. officials are monitoring reports of war crimes by Serb forces in Kosovo and will pass along any evidence to international prosecutors, a State Department official said Friday.

"There are increasing reports of atrocities against Albanian civilians in Kosovo," State Department spokesman James Rubin said. "We are extremely alarmed by these reports."

Rubin avoided specific allegations. But the warning comes amid reports of a Serb campaign against ethnic Albanian leaders in Kosovo, where a year of ethnic strife has culminated in three days of NATO airstrikes against Yugoslavia.

He said Americans were watching the conduct of the combatants in Kosovo through "national, technical means" and would turn any evidence of atrocities over to an international war crimes tribunal.

"Attacks directed against the civilian population, the summary execution of detained persons and wanton destruction or devastation not justified by military necessity are war crimes under international law," Rubin said. He said there was no statute of limitations on such crimes.

A well-known Albanian human rights lawyer, reported missing in Kosovo on Thursday, was reported killed Friday outside the provincial capital of Pristina. The bodies of Bajram Kelmendi and his two teen-age sons were found at a gasoline station near Pristina, according to the Humanitarian Law Center, one of the most respected human rights groups operating in former Yugoslavia.

Kelmendi's reported killing is among many attacks against outspoken Albanians reported within Kosovo, apparently designed to destroy the leadership of the Albanian secession movement within the Serbian province. Human rights groups said several ethnic Albanian community leaders have been kidnapped in Kosovo, and several have been killed.

'A new phase' of war

The reports came as NATO began a third day of air attacks on Yugoslavia. Yugoslav authorities have expelled journalists and diplomatic observers from several NATO member countries, but reports of massacres and widespread destruction by Yugoslav Army troops and Serb paramilitary groups emerged from other sources.

The Humanitarian Law Center has offices in Belgrade and Pristina. A more prominent international group, Human Rights Watch, based in New York, is collecting reports on humanitarian situations inside Kosovo from a variety of first-hand sources. The U.S. State Department regards information from Human Rights Watch as reliable.

"The war in Kosovo has now entered a new phase," said James Hooper, of the Balkan Action Council in the United States. "Serbian forces have begun to abduct and execute the professionals, the political leaders and others in a number of places throughout Kosovo."

U.S. intelligence officials say Serb forces are driving ethnic Albanians out of villages and rounding up prominent civilians while international observers are gone.

NATO officials on Friday again urged Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to end attacks by his troops and Serb paramilitary units in Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians are the majority.

U.N. cites massacre report

Ethnic Albanian guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army are fighting for independence for the Serb province.

NATO countries say Yugoslavia must agree to a peace plan that gives the province autonomy, but not independence, in order to stop NATO air raids. Rubin said no KLA members have been implicated in any atrocity reports.

Kosovar Albanian leaders have agreed to the Western-backed peace plan.

In Pristina, Veton Surroi -- one of the four Kosovar Albanian signers of the peace accords -- has gone into hiding, and the newspaper he published was shut down. A moderate Kosovar political party said 10 men were executed Wednesday, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said Yugoslav troops reportedly killed 20 civilians.

Citing witnesses' accounts, UNHCR spokesman Kris Janowski said the soldiers torched village homes, separated men from their families and executed 20 of them. The accounts came from 174 women and children who crossed into northern Albania.

"They alleged 20 of them (the men) were executed and they actually saw the bodies," Janowski said from the UNHCR office in Geneva. There was no independent confirmation.

The commission estimates about 450,000 people have fled Kosovo in more than a year of fighting -- roughly 25 percent of the province's pre-conflict population, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said Friday.

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