The Los Angeles Times Friday, October 29, 1999
WHERE'S THE EVIDENCE OF GENOCIDE OF KOSOVAR ALBANIANS?
Yugoslavia: Uncertainties are immense, but body
counts still don't show extermination plan.
By Alexander Cockburn
So, is there serious evidence of a Serbian campaign of genocide
in Kosovo? It's an important issue because the NATO powers,
fortified by a chorus from the liberal intelligentsia, flourished the
charge of genocide as justification for bombing that destroyed much
of Serbia's economy and killed about 2,000 civilians.
Whatever horrors they may have been planning, the Serbs were
not engaged in genocidal activities in Kosovo before the bombing
began. They were fighting a separatist movement, led by the
Kosovo Liberation Army, and behaving with the brutality typical of
security forces. One common estimate of the number of Kosovar
Albanians killed in the year before the bombing is 2,500. With
NATO's bombing came the flights and expulsions and charges that
the Serbs were accelerating a genocidal plan; in some accounts, as
many as 100,000 were already dead. An alternative assessment was
that NATO's bombing was largely to blame for the expulsions and
killings.
After the war was over, on June 25, President Clinton told a
White House news conference that tens of thousands of people had
been killed in Kosovo on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's
orders. A week before came the statement from Geoff Hoon of the
British Foreign Office that, according to reports, mostly from
refugees, it appeared that about 10,000 Kosovar Albanians had
been killed in more than 100 massacres.
Of course, the U.S. and British governments had an obvious
motive in painting as horrifying a picture as possible of what the
Serbs had been up to, since the bombing had come under
increasingly fierce attack, with rifts in the NATO alliance.
The NATO powers had plenty of reasons to rush charges of
genocide into the headlines. For one thing, it was becoming
embarrassingly clear that the bombing had inflicted no significant
damage on the Serbian army. All the more reason, therefore, to
propose that the Serbs, civilians as well as soldiers, were
collectively guilty of genocide and thus deserved everything they
got.
Teams of forensic investigators from 15 nations, including a
detachment from the FBI, have been at work since June and have
examined about 150 of 400 sites of alleged mass murder.
There's still immense uncertainty, but at this point it's plain
that
there are not enough bodies to warrant the claim that the Serbs had
a program of extermination. The FBI team has made two trips to
Kosovo and investigated 30 sites containing nearly 200 bodies.
In early October, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported what
the Spanish forensic team had found in its appointed zone in
northern Kosovo. The U.N. figures, said Perez Pujol, director of
the Instituto Anatomico Forense de Cartagena, began with 44,000
dead, dropped to 22,000 and now stand at 11,000. He and his
fellows were prepared to perform at least 2,000 autopsies in their
zone. So far, they've found 187 corpses.
A colleague of Pujol, Juan Lopez Palafox, told El Pais that he
had the impression that the Serbs had given families the option of
leaving. If they refused or came back, they were killed. Like any
murder of civilians, these were war crimes, just as any mass grave,
whatever the number of bodies, indicates a massacre. But
genocide?
One persistent story held that 700 Kosovars had been dumped
in the Trepca lead and zinc mines. On Oct. 12, Kelly Moore, a
spokeswoman for the International Criminal Tribunal for
Yugoslavia, announced that the investigators had found absolutely
nothing. There was a mass grave allegedly containing 350 bodies in
Ljubenic that turned out to hold seven. In Pusto Selo, villagers said
106 had been killed by the Serbs, and NATO rushed out satellite
photos of mass graves. Nothing to buttress that charge has yet been
found. Another 82 Kosovars allegedly were killed in Kraljan. No
bodies have been turned up.
Although surely by now investigators would have been pointed
to all probable sites, it's conceivable that thousands of Kosovar
corpses await discovery. As matters stand, though, the number of
bodies turned up by the tribunal's teams is in the hundreds, not
thousands, which tends to confirm the view of those who hold that
NATO bombing provoked a wave of Serbian killings and
expulsions, but that there was and is no hard evidence of a
genocidal program.
Count another victory for the Big Lie. Meanwhile, the normally
reliable Society for Endangered People in Germany says 90,000
Gypsies have been forced to flee since the Serbs left Kosovo, with
the KLA conducting ethnic cleansing on a grand scale. But who
cares about Gypsies?
---
Alexander Cockburn writes for the Nation and other publications.
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