Society for Threatened Peoples draws attention to the violent suppression and persecution of the Albanian majority before 1999

It is now 10 years since the beginning of the Nato intervention in Kosovo (24th March 1999) and the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) draws attention to the bloody suppression of the Albanian majority by the government of former Yugoslavia under the Serb president Slobodan Milosevic. "Some 12,000 Kosovo-Albanians had been murdered by this time and about one million were refugees or had already been driven abroad”, said the Chair of the German section of the GfbV, Tilman Zülch. "We hold also in memory the several hundred civilian Serb victims of the Nato intervention and the Roma and Ashkali murdered by Albanian extremists.”

With the background of these dreadful violations of human rights against the Albanian ethnic group the GfbV welcomes the recognition of the independence of Kosovo by 22 of the 27 EU states. The human rights organisation called for Cyprus, Spain, Greece, Rumania and Slovakia to do the same and in the coming weeks the GfbV will be approaching the media and the general public in these countries.