UC professor died for Kosovo dream - Published Wednesday, December 15, 1999, Tom Lochner, Times Staff Writer, (c) 1999 Contra Costa Newspapers
The Serbian man killed by a mob in the streets of Pristina, Yugoslavia, two weeks ago was a former Albany resident and visiting professor at UC-Berkeley who went home to pursue his dream of a harmonious Kosovo.
Friends in the East Bay say Dragoslav Basic, 63, was a powerful voice for peace.
A native of Pristina, Kosovo's capital, Basic was a professor of civil engineering who specialized in the construction of bridges and other public works projects in earthquake-prone areas.
But when he took a position at the University of Kosovo in 1990 after 11/2 years at Cal, Basic envisioned a different kind of bridge.
"He told me 'I could help the people build a bridge of humanity that no earthquake could ever destroy,' " said Berkeley resident Nick Tomasevic, a retired pilot and friend.
Early in the morning of Nov. 29, Basic was pulled from his car along with his wife and mother-in-law, then shot as a crowd beat and tortured the women amid revelry on Albanian Flag Day, the holiday that commemorates the birth of the modern Albanian state in the aftermath of World War I.
The attack, reported widely on international television, newspapers and radio, was a graphic reminder of the ethnic rage Basic sought to quell.
"It was not like he was just shot and killed," said Snezana Landau of El Cerrito, a friend of the family. "He was shot like a mad dog in the street with hundreds of people looking on. And nobody wanted to do anything."
Basic and his wife, Dragica, 51, are believed to have been taking Dragica's mother, Borka Jovanovic, 74, to a hospital after the older woman fell ill.
The women suffered numerous injuries and were hospitalized in Nis, outside Kosovo in eastern Serbia.
"Tomislav (the couple's son) saw his mother in Nis; he said he could not recognize her," said Desa Wakeman of Berkeley, a retired executive for a leasing company and Tomasevic's sister.
Wakeman's relatives spoke to Tomislav by phone.
"He said, 'My mother, you know, had beautiful black hair, but I couldn't see it, there was so much blood.' "
On Tuesday, Dragica Basic was in a Belgrade hospital where she had been transferred for emergency eye surgery on Thursday. Jovanovic was in the same hospital in critical condition.
By the time of Basic's death, the student body at the University of Kosovo had become overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian. Although he taught in Serbo-Croatian and English, Basic had become almost fluent in Albanian and advocated that others do the same.
"He once said to me, 'Almost every Albanian in Kosovo speaks Serbo-Croatian; every non-Albanian in Kosovo should speak their beautiful language,' " Tomasevic said.
Basic, a Fulbright scholar, was proud of his Serbian roots and confident of his place in the old, and the new, Kosovo.
"This is where his family had lived for centuries," said Wakeman. "They were very literate, Serbian Orthodox people, carriers of the Serbian tradition, who knew the history of the area. That is why they did not want to move."
Basic earned a master's degree at the University of Mississippi in the late 1970s, friends said. Basic lived at University Village, a UC-Berkeley-owned housing project in Albany.
The couple's daughter, Nikoleta, graduated from Albany High School in 1989; Tomislav attended Cornell Elementary School. The children live in Serbia today, where Nikoleta teaches English and Tomislav studies pharmacology.
Basic was at Cal in 1989 when Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic, with ethnic strife on the rise, revoked Kosovo's status as an autonomous province within the Serbian Republic.
"(Basic) had a tremendous dilemma," said Wakeman. "He said, 'If everybody escapes, who is going to remain there?'
"He felt it was his duty to return, not just as a Serb but as an educator," said Wakeman. "He believed that through higher education, something good could be achieved among the people of Kosovo."
And not just among Serbs and Albanians, but the province's Turkish, Greek and Rom minorities as well.
In a sense, Basic was trying to reclaim a part of his youth.
"The problem of Kosovo and Yugoslavia affected him terribly, not just because it was his homeland but because it was an example that human beings could coexist if the good will was applied more often," Tomasevic said.
Christian-Muslim animosity in the Balkans goes back to 1389, when a Serbian army fell to the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo. Basic was determined, 600 years later, that it was time for that wound to heal. He objected to political and religious leaders perpetuating violence, often by what they failed to say as much as by what they said.
"Basic was very critical when Milosevic went to Kosovo on the commemoration of 600 years, that he did not address the Albanian people," Tomasevic said. "He believed (Milosevic) should have said, 'Dear brother Albanians: 600 years ago, a catastrophe happened to all of us, and now we have a duty. There is enough room in Kosovo for all of us."
In World War II, Basic believed, "a simple encyclical letter to all the Roman Catholic churches in the world, emphasizing that Jesus Christ was Jewish, that Christianity is a branch of Judaism, like Islam, too," might have staved off the Holocaust, Tomasevic said.
After Basic returned, he lamented what he saw as U.S. encouragement of post-Tito Yugoslavia's fragmentation, said Tomasevic. Wakeman and Tomasevic are ethnic Serbs who in 1941 were "cleansed" from their native Croatia, as Wakeman puts it.
"(Basic) accused the U.S. government of not (promoting) the idea of the melting pot," Tomasevic said.
Basic believed the U.S. should have said, "Listen, people: you are fingers of the same hand. We ... will not tolerate disintegration of your country. We will help you reorganize it," said Tomasevic.
Basic had a favorite saying about the end of war, by the 19th century Hungarian poet Sandor Petöfy, that he thought would make a great motto for the United Nations:
"What is battlefield glory compared to the beautiful rainbow made by breaking the sun's rays through the rain of tears?," Tomasevic said.
"This fellow, Basic, he was a civil engineer," said Tomasevic, "but besides his profession, he was a great humanist, a philosopher and a pacifist."
Early Count Hints at Fewer Kosovo Deaths - By STEVEN ERLANGER with CHRISTOPHER S. WREN, New York Times, November 11, 1999
PRISTINA, Kosovo -- In five months of investigation and
exhumation of the dead in Kosovo, war crimes investigators have
found 2,108 bodies in grave sites throughout the province, the chief
prosecutor announced on Wednesday.
While there are several hundred more reported sites to be examined in
the spring, the number of the dead found so far seems significantly lower
than the estimate of 10,000 ethnic Albanians killed by the Serbs, issued
by Western officials, or the suggestion by American and allied officials
during the war that up to 100,000 were being killed.
In a report to the United Nations
Security Council in New York, also
released here, the chief prosecutor for
the International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia, Carla Del
Ponte, said that the bodies had been
found in 195 sites before work
stopped for the winter, and that there
were a total of 529 sites reported to
investigators so far.
Mrs. Del Ponte cautioned that the
number of dead was an interim figure,
and noted that "we have discovered
evidence of tampering with graves,"
particularly at well-publicized
suspected massacre sites like Izbica,
where investigators found no bodies
after the Serbian forces left Kosovo,
but freshly turned earth.
"There are also a significant number of
sites where the precise number of
bodies cannot be counted," she said,
adding that in some places bodies had
been burned and other steps taken to
hide the evidence.
But a long investigation of the Trepca mine, where Albanians said many bodies were brought for incineration, turned up no evidence of any crime. Similarly, at Ljubenic, near Pec, a widely publicized grave site said to hold 350 bodies only held five.
A draft report by the State Department noted that an average of only 17
bodies were found at examined sites, but says: "We would expect the
total number of Kosovar Albanian deaths to be over 8,000" once all the
graves are inspected.
Still, senior Western officials here say that the investigators did look at
the most serious sites first. While it is unlikely that a firm and final death
toll will ever be known, they suggested that a figure of between 5,000
and 7,000 will be more likely. Some suggested that 5,000 would be
more logical, given what has been found to date, and noting the simple
difficulty of killing large numbers of people and disposing of them quickly.
But officials also cautioned that some of the dead are fighters of the
Kosovo Liberation Army or may have died ordinary deaths.
Mrs. Del Ponte and her aides also noted that the tribunal's main job was
not to take a census of the dead, but to prepare legal material to seek or
extend indictments for war crimes against those most reponsible for the
abuses of the Kosovar Albanians.
"We now have in our possession invaluable documentation of what
happened to many people in many places in Kosovo," Mrs. Del Ponte
said. "There is no substitute for this kind of accurate information because
it is evidence that eventually will stand up in a court of law."
Kelly Moore, the tribunal spokeswoman here, said: "A prosecutor is not
a statistician. The job is to gather evidence for prosecutions."
Ms. Moore noted that of the indictments on war crimes charges against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four other top Yugoslav and Serbian officials, two charges cover the killings of Albanians, but two also cover their forced expulsion, deportation and persecution.
More than 800,000 Albanians
were forced from their homes and
out of Kosovo, while many more
thousands were living rough in the
hills inside the province. Albanian
human rights groups note that
several thousand Albanians are
reported missing, and it is unclear
how many of them may still be in
Serbian jails -- nearly 2,000
according to the International
Committee of the Red Cross -- or
abroad or dead but undiscovered.
Blerim Shala, the editor of the
Albanian weekly Zeri and a
member of the Kosovo Transitional
Council here, said that a respected
Albanian human rights group, the Kosovo Board for the Protection of
Human Rights, estimates that 7,000 Albanians were killed during the war.
Another 2,500 were killed in the previous year, beginning March 1998,
when the conflict between the Serbs and the Kosovo Liberation Army
intensified. Another 3,000 or so are believed to be missing, Shala said.
Daan Everts, the director of the mission in Kosovo for the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said that morally the final
number is not especially relevant, and noted that those who were killed
and abused were the subject of all the powers of an organized state.
"We don't know how many people are still in the ground," he said. "And whether the number is smaller or larger doesn't take away from the massive and organized violation of human rights by a state."
Graham Blewitt, the tribunal's deputy chief prosecutor, told reporters at
the United Nations that motive and method were more important legally
than the number of victims in proving genocide. "It's really not a numbers
game to determine whether genocide has been committed," he said.
During the war, however, estimated death figures were very high. On April 19, the State Department said that up to 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing and feared dead. On May 16, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said that up to 100,000 Albanian men in Kosovo had vanished and might have been killed. "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing," Cohen told CBS News. "They may have been murdered."
On June 17, a British Foreign Office Minister, Geoff Hoon, said: "According to the reports we have gathered, mostly from the refugees, it appears that around 10,000 people have been killed in more than 100 massacres." On Aug. 2, Bernard Kouchner, the United Nations chief administrator in Kosovo, said 11,000 ethnic Albanians were killed, and said his figure came from the Tribunal, which denied providing it.
A Spanish forensic team's experience has been typical. According to the newspaper El Pais, the team was told to prepare for at least 2,000 autopsies. But it found 187 bodies, usually buried in individual graves.
The El Pais report has led to some revise their expectations of the death toll, which Mrs. Del Ponte's report sought to clarify on Wednesday.
Wednesday, in Pristina, the NATO-led peacekeeping troops issued murder statistics since June 12, when NATO took control of the province. Of the 379 people killed, 135 were Serbs, a disproportionate number given that only about 5 percent of the province's current population is believed to be Serbian. Of the rest, 145 were ethnic Albanians, while 99 are of unknown or other ethnicity, said Maj. Ole Irgens, a spokesman for the force.
According to a report about to be released by the International Crisis Group, the number of killings now in Kosovo is comparable to the levels reported before the NATO intervention, when the Serbs were struggling to defeat the Kosovo Liberation Army. The figure is roughly 30 people
killed a week in a province with a current estimated population of 1.4 million.
Where Are Kosovo's Killing Fields? - Stratfor.com 16 Oct 99
During its four-month war against Yugoslavia, NATO argued that Kosovo was a land wracked by mass murder; official estimates indicated that some 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in a Serb
rampage of ethnic cleansing. Yet four months into an international investigation bodies numbering only in the hundreds have been exhumed. The FBI has found fewer than 200. Piecing together the evidence, it appears that the number of civilian ethnic Albanians killed is far less than was claimed. While new findings could invalidate this view, evidence of mass murder has not yet materialized on the scale used to justify the war. This could have serious foreign policy and political implications for NATO and alliance governments.
"The latest joke circulating around Belgrade, as the bombing of Yugoslavia ends, concerns the next president of Yugoslavia...
A poll was taken about who the next president of Yugoslavia will be, 99% percent agreed it will be Bill Clinton, for these reasons:
1) He drove the Albanians out of Kosovo
2) He united all the Serbs
3) He destroyed all the factories that were losing money
4) He modernized the Yugoslav army, because it has lost everything and the people of the US will have to replace it
It is interesting to consider that Tito spent a lifetime keeping the Russians out of Yugoslavia."
The civil strife shifted to civil war, which shifted to international war, which has now shifted to international cold wars: US v. Russia, US v. China, and US v., you'd never guess, but US v. India...
See Viktor Chernomyrdin's Letter to the Washington Post
New Cold Wars are beginning because the US has been telling these countries what to do regarding their economics and human rights, then completely ignores international protocol to protect the multi-billion dollar effort by the oil companies in the Caspian Sea under a lie of protection of human rights. Human rights of the Serb people were ignored.
War in the Balkans creates war between Greece and Turkey when the Turks come to the aid of the Albanians and Greeks the Montenegrins. The Caspian Sea is cut-off from a clear trade route to the West which is unacceptable to our National Security interests.
See Refugees or Oil?
Bombing is concluded when the US accepts the that the peacekeeping force must not be NATO led, but UN led. At Rambouillet, KOSOVO AUTONOMY WAS ACCEPTED, NATO peace-keeping was not. UN peace-keeping WAS. The bombing ended when Clinton's popularity began to take a dive to its lowest level in 4 years (53% approval down from 68% during the impeachment) and 82% polled by CNN wanted the bombing to stop. Within 2 weeks, it did. Milosevic did not accept our agreements, we accepted his.
See CNN poll
In the meantime China becomes a victim of the war. Russia is diplomatically included but ignored. (They are, after all, dependent on our TAX money.) It may take 10 years, but Russia and China will retaliate. India will less likely to participate in the will of the US.
See ÷ Global Reaction ÷
US Foreign policy has never been such a cowboy. There are many more mad at US than ever. This is why we need $300 BILLION of your TAX dollars for defense. Was the war staged for this purpose?
National Security? We're gonna need it.
Definition of National Security: Whatever it takes to keep people paying their taxes. Gotta get 'em to work, warm at work, warm at home and enough juice for the telly. You betcha, oil is the number one National Security Interest.
The Truth About Kosovo The Truth: Issues
