Mauro Del Vecchio, former General of Italian
Army in KiM: We were finding bodies of killed Serbs every morning
Blic - January, 5 2009 - 08:04
By: N. Vlačo
ROME – Mauro Del Vecchio, former General of Italian Army who led the unit of
7,000 soldiers that entered Kosovo in June of 1999 after end of NATO air strikes
on Serbia told Italian ‘Panorama’ weekly that during the first three weeks of
the mandate ‘reports on the found bodies of killed Serbs and Romas arrived on
his table each morning’, but that was a taboo topic they were not allowed to
speak about with journalists.
‘The killing continued later but not so frequently. Those that have not fled
Kosovo were under permanent risk to be killed or raped. Deserted Serbian houses
were leveled to the ground or set on fire. Albanians were attacking the churches
and monasteries, too. Their goal was to erase every trace of the Serbian
presence in Kosovo’, Del Vecchio said. Today he is representing the Democratic
Party in the Italian Senate.
The ‘Panorama’ weekly published for the first time photographs of Serbian
victims made by Italian soldiers in 1999.
‘Nobody was taking Serbian bodies that were left in all possible places. Mothers
and wives of abducted Serbs were pleading for their dearest to be found, but the
majority of them have never been found, not even those that were dead’, Del
Vecchio said.
The Italian weekly reports as a ‘horrifying fact’ that 70 percent of the total
number of abducted Kosovo Serbs had disappeared after June 1999 when the war was
officially over.
The magazine has also come in possession of photographs that the UNMIK soldiers
found in Decani in 2003 but has not published them because they were ‘horrific’.
They show the KLA members smiling with a cut off head of a Serbian reservist.
Another photograph shows them putting in a bag at least two cut off heads. It is
also said that at the time when the photographs were made that was the zone
under command of Ramush Haradinaj.
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