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The Current

'Tell it to the World': Hiding Mass Murder in Kosovo

The mass murder of Ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo War is a deep scar on our history. Today, there are new war crimes unfolding in new conflicts. A former prosecutor at The Hague tasked with bringing those dark crimes to light, joins us to mark the importance of victims who use their voices to "Tell It to The World."...
CBC Radio ·
The mass murder of Ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo War is a deep scar on our history. Today, there are new war crimes unfolding in new conflicts. A former prosecutor at The Hague tasked with bringing those dark crimes to light, joins us to mark the importance of victims who use their voices to "Tell It to The World."

Fifty-Two ethnic Albanians killed by Serbian police and dumped in a mass grave by the police were re-buried with full Muslim rights in Kosovo in 1998. And those 52 bodies would represent just the tip of the iceberg.

We now know that literally truckloads of bodies of murdered ethnic Albanian civilians -- women, children and men -- were being transported out of Kosovo, to be disposed of in Serbia. Many more were simply gunned down in their villages and left there for dead... their corpses sometimes burned.

The slaughter of ethnic Albanians by Serbian special forces was carried out systematically throughout the conflict... and so were the subsequent cover-ups. International outrage would only flare up after the fog of war lifted.

Eliott Behar is a Canadian lawyer who had the unenviable task of investigating and prosecuting these war crimes for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. His new book is called "Tell it to the World: International Justice and the Secret Campaign to Hide Mass Murder in Kosovo."

Eliott Behar was in our Toronto studio.


This segment was produced by The Current's Lara O'Brien.


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