So much for the revisionist position.

U.N. Says More Than 2000 Bodies Exhumed in Kosovo

Updated 2:28 PM ET November 10, 1999

By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. investigators have exhumed 2,108 corpses in
Kosovo to date, but the true number of ethnic Albanian victims may be much
higher, the chief U.N. prosecutor Carla del Ponte said on Wednesday.
Giving the first concrete figures on deaths in Kosovo, Del Ponte told the
15-nation U.N. Security Council that U.N. forensic experts had examined only
about a third of 529 grave sites that reportedly contained 4,256 bodies.
A total of 11,334 deaths had been reported to her office to date but not
verified yet, she said. Forensic teams from the U.N. Hague-based war crimes
tribunal entered the Yugoslav province with peacekeeping troops five months
ago.
Thousands of ethnic Albanians were thought to have died during a Serb
crackdown that ended in June when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
accepted a peace plan for Kosovo following weeks of NATO-led bombing.
So far the tribunal has issued public indictments against Milosevic and four
associates. But Del Ponte indicated she also was considering charges against
the Kosovo Liberation Army, which fought Yugoslav troops for independence.
Russia, an ally of Yugoslavia, immediately castigated the tribunal for
indicting Milosevic, handing down sealed indictments and focusing its work
solely on ethnic Albanians rather than crimes committed against Serbs.
Del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia, cautioned that the figures she was giving for Kosovo did
not necessarily reflect the number of actual victims because "we have
discovered evidence of tampering with graves."
"There were also a significant number of sites where the precise number of
bodies cannot be counted. In these places steps were taken to hide the
evidence. Many bodies have been burned," Del Ponte added.
She stressed the importance of gathering remaining evidence before it became
polluted but she said that her teams hoped to finish work next year.
Del Ponte, a Swiss citizen, took over in mid-September as prosecutor for the
Yugoslavia tribunal as well as a Tanzania-based tribunal investigating the
1994 genocide in Rwanda. She replaced Canadian Louise Arbour.
She noted that international troops in Bosnia had arrested 14 accused but
emphasized that suspects "at the highest levels" had not been apprehended, a
reference to Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic.
Del Ponte said that Croatia too had challenged the jurisdiction of the court
and she was willing to talk to Zagreb about it. "But the fact they deny my
jurisdiction makes it even hard to engage in discussions," she said.
Most Security Council members praised the tribunal's work but Russian envoy
Gennady Gatilov said detaining or arresting suspects should not be done
without the consent of the state harboring the accused.
He also objected to sealed indictments, which the tribunal has used in
Bosnia to make sure suspects did not flee before arrest by NATO-led troops.
Gatilov said that the tribunal should consider its actions in light of
efforts to "move the peace process forward" both in the indictments of
Milosevic and the sealed indictment of a Bosnian Serb general arrested in
Vienna while attending an international seminar.
And he said the court also needed to investigate atrocities against Serbians
in Kosovo.
Del Ponte denied this was the case. "I can assure you that my office deals
with investigations where the perpetrators are not only Serbs. We have
perpetrators that are Muslims and from the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army)."
But she said the prosecutor had to close its offices in Belgrade and had
little access to victims there.
She said there were more than 40 fugitives at large "and I intend to use
secret indictments," saying that few national governments publicized
indictments.