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"The
guy's a complete asshole." Spectator readers, who
are simple souls, may be unfamiliar with the sophisticated legal
terminology and carefully weighed judicial arguments employed
by the Spokesman for the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia, the body upon which all future international
law and civilisation is to be based. Yet this was how Paul Risley
described your correspondent when confronted with a recent article
in this magazine on the low body count in Kosovo. In it, I alleged
that the number of Albanians massacred by Serbs had been inflated
by Nato propaganda and that the International Criminal Tribunal
is so deep inside Nato's pockets as to make kangaroo courts look
like models of due process.
Last week, the Tribunal's Prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, made a
statement to the United Nations in New York to counter the article's
allegations. She claimed that the findings of the forensic investigators
were helping to establish both the total number of dead and the
overall pattern of the killing. In fact what the report establishes
is both the overall pattern – and indeed the detail – of the deception
practised by the leading Nato governments.
In
May 1999, at the height of the attacks on Yugoslavia, the US State
Department published a detailed report entitled "Erasing
History, Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo." Its political impact
was immense, contributing to the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic
and the other Yugoslav leaders. The report is still available
on the State Department's web site, suggesting that it remains
authoritative. But what the Tribunal's findings now prove is that
the report contained little but the wild imaginings – or
deliberate lies – of the men and women whose fingers are
on the buttons of the world's most powerful military alliance.
According
to the State Department, the following massacres occurred: "Serbian
military and police forces reportedly killed as many as 350 ethnic
Albanians in Suva Reka"; 200 ethnic Albanian men were executed
at Orlate; 200 men of military age were killed in Podujevo; "approximately
150" were killed in Izbica; in Kraljane, 100 Albanian civilians
were executed; a "mass grave" contained 70 bodies in
Rezala; approximately 50 men were executed in Malisevo; in Kaaniku,
45 were killed and dumped in mass grave; 63 people were killed
in Cecelija ("according to Albanian TV in Tirana");
21 were killed in Kuraz; 20 in Goden; 12 in Gornje Obrinje; "at
least 6" in Gniljane; and 5 at Hade. There were "three
truckloads of bodies" in Pristina and 14 Albanian men were
executed at Vataj. This makes a total of over 1,300 reported deaths.
However, the ICTY investigators have not discovered one single
body at any of these 16 sites. In a separate allegation, John
Sweeney wrote in The Observer in June that the Serbs had been
burning "a hundred bodies a day for the past two months"
in the incinerators at the Trepca mines, yet Tribunal investigators
have categorically denied that there were any human remains either
in the mine shafts or in the incinerators – a fact which The Observer
has not deigned to report.
The
State Department reported 300 killed in Djakovica; 60 at Belenica;
50 at Glogovac; at least 70 in Kosovo Polje; 100 at Ljubenic;
112 at Mala Krusha; 20-30 at Prizren; 50 in Rugovo; 115 in Srbica;
40 in Urosevac. This makes a total of 927 alleged murders. The
ICTY investigators have in fact discovered 99 bodies at these
sites, a whisker over 10% of the figures reported. Finally, the
State Department reported 100 killed in Brusnik, while 28 bodies
have been found there. 37 bodies have been found at Jovic; 16
at Kacanik; 25 at Kotlina; 65 in Pec. Other significant finds
include 98 bodies at Gornje Sudimlja; 70 at Suvi Do; 77 at Bela
Crkva; 74 at Velika Krusa (where about 70 people were killed by
Nato cluster bombs); 67 at Celina; 68 in one site at Orahovac;
106 at Pusto Selo; 97 at Rakos; and 121 in three sites at Cikatovo.
The total body count reported by the Tribunal is 2,108.
Even
if one assumes that all these people are Albanians murdered for
ethnic reasons by Serbs, this is 1/5 of the number alleged by
the Foreign Office in June; 1/50 of the number alleged by William
Cohen in May; and 1/250 of the number suggested by the State Department
in April. However, even this assumption is unjustified. First,
in the vast majority of cases, the bodies were buried in individual,
not mass graves. Second, the Tribunal will not say what sex or
age the alleged victims are, let alone what nationality. There
were many causes of violent death in the province: over 100 Serb
and Albanian civilians have been killed in terrorist attacks by
the Albanian KLA since its insurrection began in 1998; 462 Serb
soldiers and 114 Serb Interior Ministry police were killed during
the war; the KLA, which had tens of thousands of men under arms,
also sustained casualties, as death notices in Kosovo towns announcing
Albanian men killed in combat testify; and finally, hundreds of
Serb and Albanian civilians were killed by the Nato bombing. (For
that matter, over 200 hundred people have also been killed since
the war by stepping on unexploded Nato cluster bombs.) Many of
the excavations have been carried out in what are obviously Christian
cemeteries (with gravestones rather than posts) while several
corpses have been wearing blue (i.e. Serb police) uniforms.
The
Prosecutor insists that this figure is not a final body count
nor even a full census of the dead. As she says with remarkable
candour, her office's first priority has been "to gather
evidence relevant to the criminal charges against President Milosevic
and other leaders" – in other words to look the other way
if atrocities are committed by Albanians against Serbs or gypsies.
(To underline the organic connection between the Tribunal and
Nato, indeed, the former's web page has a link to the latter's.)
Instead, she implies that the final body count may be higher when
examinations of the remaining "crime scenes" resume
in the spring. Paul Risley claims the exhumations have been shelved
"because the ground is frozen". However, there has been
no frost in Kosovo and the ground is not frozen: on the day this
article was written (15th November) it was raining heavily in
the province and the temperature was 10 degrees Centigrade. The
exhumations must, therefore, have been interrupted for some other
reason and the suspicion must be that the winter break is an attempt
to kick the embarrassing question of the low body count into touch
for a few months, in the hope that people will soon forget about
it.
The
pattern which is emerging, in other words, is not so much of a
systematic attack on the Albanian population as such – Nato's
declared casus belli – but rather of a low-level civil war with
casualties on both sides, a situation greatly aggravated by Nato's
attacks. The fighting was of an utterly different scale from that
in either Bosnia or Croatia. Yes, crimes were committed by Serbs
during the war, as they indisputably have been by Albanians before
and after it. But the most accurate depiction of the nature of
the Kosovo conflict is probably that given by a series of court
rulings in Germany between January and March of this year, when
a series of applications for political asylum by Kosovar Albanians
were rejected because political persecution could not be proven.
On 12th January 1999, for instance, the German Foreign Ministry
gave the following opinion to the Administrative Court in Trier:
"An explicit political persecution of the Albanian population
cannot be established, even in Kosovo … The actions of the
security forces are not directed against Kosovo Albanians as an
ethnically defined group but instead against military opponents
and their real or supposed supporters." Now, that's what
I call legal reasoning.
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