So many corpses have been dumped into wells in Kosovo that the wells are emerging as a major health and reconstruction problem, says the United Nations, which is working to establish a government in the Serbian province.
Private wells provide a good deal of the water supply in rural Kosovo.
In the Djakovica area in the southwest, for example, the wells in 39 of 44 villages have been contaminated with either human or animal bodies, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Serbian forces apparently stuffed so many bodies of ethnic Albanians into wells during their campaign of terror last spring that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is treating them as mass graves in their own right. Serbian forces had yanked Mazrekaj, along with more than 70 other men, from a column of refugees attempting to flee Kosovo on March 30. Similar scenes have been occurring all over rural Kosovo, as returning ethnic Albanian refugees have come home to find their wells contaminated with bodies. Many have been waiting weeks for help in cleaning them out.