FIRST KOSOVO ALBANIAN VICTIM TESTIFIES IN MILOSEVIC TRIAL

THE HAGUE, Feb 20 (Hina) - Kosovo farmer Agim Zeqiri is the first victim to testify in the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for crimes against humanity in Kosovo. Sitting with his back turned to the defendant, the 50-year-old farmer described an attack of Serbian forces on his native village of Celina near Prizren in March 1999, in which he lost almost his entire family. During the cross-examination by Milosevic, the witness continued sitting with his back turned to Milosevic and did not look at him once. Zeqiri said that on the day when NATO attacks on Serbia began Serbian police and armed forces entered his village, which at the time numbered 7,000 inhabitants, and started systematically burning the houses. The villagers fled en masse and in the chaos Zeqiri was separated from his family. The next day, around 5,000 refugees from the village were surrounded by Serbian soldiers who separated the women and the children from the men and took the men in a column to the border with Albania. Zeqiri described how he was beaten by the soldiers and said that it had taken him weeks to recover from injuries in a hospital in Albania. Only after leaving the hospital was he told that 16 out of 18 members of his family, including his wife, four daughters and a son, had been killed. (hina) rml