[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 116 (Wednesday, August 1, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5864-S5865]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     JUSTICE FOR THE BYTYQI FAMILY

  Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, today is the 37th anniversary of the 
Helsinki process. Starting with the signing of the Helsinki Final Act 
on August 1, 1975, this process began as an ongoing conference which 
helped end the Cold War and reunite Europe. It has continued as a 
Vienna-based organization that today seeks to resolve regional 
conflicts and promote democratic development and the rule of law 
throughout the region.
  While serving in both chambers of the U.S. Congress, it has been a 
unique and rewarding privilege to engage in this diplomatic process and 
its parliamentary component as a member and chairman of the U.S. 
Helsinki Commission, with the goal of improving the lives of everyday 
people. While they may be citizens of other countries, promoting their 
human rights and fundamental freedoms helps us to protect our own. It 
is, therefore, in our national interest to engage in this process.
  On this anniversary, however, I do want to focus on three U.S. 
citizens who suffered the ultimate violation of their human rights when 
they were taken into a field and shot, deliberately murdered, in July 
1999 by a special operations unit under the control the Interior 
Ministry in Serbia. They were brothers: Ylli, Agron and Mehmet Bytyqi.
  The Bytyqi brothers were Albanian-Americans from New York. Earlier in 
1999, they went to Kosovo to fight as members of the Kosovo Liberation 
Army in a conflict which eventually prompted a NATO military 
intervention designed to stop Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and his 
forces. When the conflict ended, the Bytyqi brothers assisted ethnic 
Roma neighbors of their mother in Kosovo by escorting them to the 
Serbian border. Accidently straying into Serbian territory, they were 
arrested and sentenced to 2 weeks in jail for illegal entry. When 
released from prison, they were

[[Page S5865]]

not freed. Instead, the Bytyqi brothers were transported to an Interior 
Ministry training camp in eastern Serbia, where they were brutally 
executed and buried in a mass grave with 75 other ethnic Albanians from 
Kosovo. Two years later, after the fall of the Milosevic regime, their 
bodies were recovered and repatriated to the United States for burial.
  Ylli, Agron and Mehmet were never given a fair and public trial, an 
opportunity to defend themselves, or any semblance of due process. 
Their post-conflict, extrajudicial killing was cold-blooded murder.
  In the last decade Serbia has made a remarkable recovery from the 
Milosevic era. I saw this myself last year when I visited Belgrade. 
This progress, however, has not sufficiently infiltrated the Interior 
Ministry, affording protection to those who participated in the Bytyqi 
murders and other egregious Milosevic-era crimes. Nobody has been held 
accountable for the Bytyqi murders. Those in command of the camp and 
the forces operating there have never been charged.
  The same situation applies to the April 1999 murder of prominent 
journalist and editor Slavko Curuvija, who testified before the 
Helsinki Commission on the abuses of the Milosevic regime just months 
before. There needs to be justice in each of these cases, but together 
with other unresolved cases they symbolize the lack of transparency and 
reform in Serbia's Interior Ministry to this day. Combined with 
continued denials of what transpired under Milosevic in the 1990s, 
including the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica in neighboring Bosnia, these 
cases show that Serbia has not completely put an ugly era in its past 
behind it. For that reason, not only does the surviving Bytyqi family 
in New York, as well as the friends and family of Slavko Curuvija, 
still need to have the satisfaction of justice. The people of Serbia 
need to see justice triumph in their country as well.
  I want to thank the U.S. Mission to the OSCE in Vienna, which under 
the leadership of Ambassador Ian Kelly continues to move the Helsinki 
process forward, for recently raising the Bytyqi murders and calling 
for justice. I also want to commend the nominee for U.S. Ambassador to 
Serbia, Michael David Kirby, for responding to my question on the 
Bytyqi and Curuvija cases at his Foreign Relations Committee hearing by 
expressing his commitment, if confirmed, to make justice in these cases 
a priority matter. On this anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act, I 
join their call for justice.

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