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Reign of terror

(TIME.com Europe) -- Even before the U.S. Army released its report into the abuse of civilians by GIs in Kosovo, the word was out: A tiny knot of American soldiers had harassed and assaulted Kosovar civilians because the troops had prepared for war and had not been adequately schooled in peace-keeping.

"As a result, the [U.S. troops] experienced difficulties tempering their combat mentality for adapting and transitioning to the Kosovo [mission]," Colonel John Morgan III concluded in a report. "In [this] environment, the unit's overly aggressive tendencies were manifested in practices such as the unit slogan, "Shoot 'em in the face," and their standard operating procedure of pointing the M-4 carbine weapon system with the attached maglight in the face of local nationals in order to illuminate their faces."

The investigation was ordered by General Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, after Staff Sergeant Frank Ronghi was charged with raping and murdering a Kosovar Albanian girl in January.

True, the guilty were only a dozen or so members of the storied 82nd Airborne Division, but the blame seeps far higher up the chain of command. Their woes began shortly after the 3rd Battalion of the 504th Parachute Regiment arrived in the Balkans last September. Once deployed to the town of Vitina, the soldiers morphed, figuratively if not literally, into cops, in theory poised delicately between the minority Serb population and Kosovar Albanians eager for revenge against the horrors wrought upon the Albanians by Serbian forces.

The report concluded that top U.S. officers in the town favoured Serbs, who accounted for about a third of the populace, over Albanians, who made up the rest.

The Army began to learn of the rot in the unit at ID TK Merita Shahibu's funeral. "If they can beat us," senior officers were told about the 3/504th, "they can also kill us." Nearly all the trouble occurred in Ronghi's unit. During one demonstration in January, the soldiers "verbally antagonised" the people they were charged with protecting. "Get the f--- out of here!" some of the GIs yelled at the Albanian Kosovars. "Shut the f--- up!" In many cases, those being sworn at did not understand English, the report said.

"What the f--- are you doing?" a GI bellowed at an Albanian man who had slipped into him on an icy Vitina street. The soldier then "head-butted" the man with his Kevlar helmet, bloodying his nose, before Ronghi walloped him "with great force" in the head, leaving him dazed. The man was later discovered to be deaf-mute. In another case, a U.S. soldier used his machine gun to pin a man against a wall who seemed unwilling to answer questions; he was later found to be deaf.

"Many soldiers let the perceived power go to their heads, and that power was abused," one unidentified soldier told investigators. "It was routine for soldiers to use unnecessary and unprovoked physical force with the people of Vitina. Soldiers would spit on locals, push them on the streets, poke the women with sticks, and generally act like barbarians."

One day when Vitina's streets were crowded with shoppers, a group of four soldiers, including Ronghi, "assaulted several females when they touched [their] hair, grabbed their buttocks and their body parts and spoke to them in a seductive manner. One soldier later confided that he groped the women "just to get a cheap thrill."

A civilian translator said he watched the soldiers stop women between the age of 15 and 25 on the sidewalks, and then hand-cuff their "husbands or fathers, boyfriends or brothers" who came to the women's aid. Then they would slap the cuffed men and punch them in their groins. "Some of the men were flexi-cuffed [plastic handcuffs] while they were being hit multiple times by various members of the squad, and they were not able to fight back or defend themselves," the interpreter said. "They would also grab people who were watching what was going on, handcuff them, and hit them also."

"The 3/504 was very heavy-handed with the people in Vitina," said an unidentified lieutenant colonel who witnessed the unit in action. "I tend to think that human dignity and respect are values, and not just rules of engagement," he said. "We, as Americans, have an innate feeling for what is right and wrong."

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Actions Louder Than Words -- 23 September 2000