Opinion ID: 787211
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Corroborating Materials

Text: 17 We turn now to materials in the record that could corroborate Berishaj's accounts from the early 1990s-specifically his time at the illegal university in Kosovo and his military service from 1992 to 1994. Two pieces are worthy of note. First, Berishaj's story about the operation of the illegal university in Kosovo, and police hostility to it, is perfectly corroborated by an Amnesty International Report from 1994, which is in the administrative record. This report describes the creation in 1990 and 1991 by ethnic Albanians of a parallel educational system using [pre-Serbian] curricula, with lessons... held in private homes. The report also describes several specific episodes of police violence against ethnic Albanians on account of this parallel educational system. 18 Second, and also in the administrative record before the IJ, a 1992 article from the Bronx-published English-language Albanian-American newspaper Illyria profiles a young ethnic Albanian, Adem Krasniqi, whose experience as a forced inductee into the Serbian army closely parallels Berishaj's. Krasniqi was one of many Albanian tankers (i.e., tank operators or gunmen). In an attack on Vukovar, Croatia, he was forced to move forward in the first wave; the story quotes Krasniqi as saying, Behind us were the Serbian irregulars uniformed as soldiers. Anyone trying to desert would be shot. We had two choices. Keep firing or get shot from people behind you. Krasniqi also describes indiscriminate shelling, and being forced to fire at innocent civilians; this is again consistent with Berishaj's account.