Page 20 THE SPECTATOR 20 November 1999<\/p>\n
I WAS RIGHT ABOUT KOSOVO<\/strong><\/p>\n John Laughland, in the face of vulgar abuse,\u00a0still maintains there is no evidence\u00a0of mass graves<\/em><\/p>\n ‘THE guy’s a complete asshole.’ Spectator readers, who are simple\u00a0souls, may be unfamiliar with the sophisticated legal terminology and\u00a0carefully weighed judicial arguments employed by the spokesman for the\u00a0International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the body upon which all\u00a0future international law and civilization are to be based. Yet this was how\u00a0Paul Risley described your correspondent when confronted with a recent\u00a0article in this magazine (30 October) on the low body-count in Kosovo. In it, I\u00a0alleged that the number of Albanians massacred by Serbs had been\u00a0inflated by Nato propaganda and that the International Criminal Tribunal is so\u00a0deep inside Nato’s pockets as to make kangaroo courts look like models of\u00a0due process.<\/p>\n Last week the Tribunal’s prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, made a statement\u00a0to the United Nations in New York to counter the article’s allegations.\u00a0She claimed that the findings of the forensic investigators were helping to\u00a0establish both the total number of dead and the overall pattern of the\u00a0killing. In fact, what the report establishes is both the overall pattern – and indeed the detail – of the deception practised by the leading Nato governments.<\/p>\n In May 1999, at the height of the attacks on Yugoslavia, the US State\u00a0Department published a detailed report entitled ‘Erasing History:\u00a0Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo’. Its political impact was immense, contributing to\u00a0the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and the other Yugoslav leaders. The\u00a0report is still available on the State Department’s website, suggesting that\u00a0it remains authoritative. But what the Tribunal’s findings now prove is that\u00a0the report contained little but the wild imaginings – or deliberate\u00a0lies – of the men and women whose fingers are on the buttons of the world’s most\u00a0powerful military alliance.<\/p>\n According to the State Department, the following massacres occurred:<\/p>\n ‘Serbian military and police forces reportedly killed as many as 350\u00a0ethnic Albanians in Suva Reka’; 200 ethnic Albanian men were executed at\u00a0Orlate; 200 men of military age were killed in Podujevo; ‘approximately 150’\u00a0were killed in Izbica; in Kraljane, 100 Albanian civilians were executed; a\u00a0‘mass grave’ contained 70 bodies in Rezala; approximately 50 men were\u00a0executed in Malisevo; in Kaaniku, 45 were killed and dumped in a mass\u00a0grave; 63 people were killed in Cecelija (‘according to Albanian TV in\u00a0Tirana’); 21 were killed in Kuraz; 20 in Goden; 12 in GornjeObrinje; ‘at\u00a0least 6’ in Gniljane; and five at Hade. There were ‘three truckloads of\u00a0bodies’ in Pristina, and 14 Albanian men were executed at Vataj. This\u00a0makes a total of more than 1,300 reported deaths. However, the ICTY\u00a0investigators have not discovered one single body at any of these 16 sites.<\/p>\n In a\u00a0separate allegation, John Sweeney wrote in the Observer in June that the Serbs\u00a0had been burning ‘100 bodies a day for the past two months’ in the\u00a0incinerators at the Trepca mines, yet Tribunal investigators have categorically\u00a0denied that there were any human remains either in the mine shafts or in the\u00a0incinerators – a fact that the Observer has not deigned to report.<\/p>\n The State Department reported 300 killed in Djakovica, 60 at Belenica,\u00a050 at Glogovac, at least 70 in Kosovo Polje, 100 at Ljubenic, 112 at Mala\u00a0Krusha, 20 to 30 at Prizren, 50 in Rugovo, 115 in Srbica, 40 in Urosevac.<\/p>\n This makes a total of 927 alleged murders. The ICTY investigators have,\u00a0in fact, discovered 99 bodies at these sites; a whisker over 10 per cent\u00a0of the figures reported. Finally, the Statc Department reported 100 killed\u00a0in Brusnik, while 28 bodies have been found there. Thirty-seven bodies\u00a0have been found at Jovic, 16 at Kacanik, 25 at Kotlina, 65 in Pec. Other\u00a0significant finds include 98 bodies at Gornje Sudimija, 70 at Suvi Do,\u00a077 at Bela Crkva, 74 at Velika Krusa (where about 70 people were killed by\u00a0Nato cluster bombs), 67 at Celina, 68 in one site at Orahovac, 106 at\u00a0Pusto Selo, 97 at Rakos, and 121 in three sites at Cikatovo. The total\u00a0bodycount reported by the Tribunal is 2,108.<\/p>\n Even if one assumes that all these people are Albanians murdered for\u00a0ethnic reasons by Serbs, this is 1\/5 of the number alleged by the Foreign\u00a0Office in June, 1\/50 of the number suggested by William Cohen in May, and1\/250 of the 500,000 suggested by the State Department in April. However, even\u00a0this assumption is unjustified. First, in the vast majority of cases, the\u00a0bodies were buried in individual, not mass graves. Second, the Tribunal will\u00a0not say what sex or age the alleged victims are, let alone what\u00a0nationality. There were many causes of violent death in the province: more than 100\u00a0Serb and Albanian civilians have been killed in terrorist attacks by the\u00a0Albanian KLA since its insurrection began in 1998; 462 Serb soldiers\u00a0and 114 Serb interior ministry police were killed during the war; the KLA,\u00a0which had tens of thousands of men under arms, also sustained\u00a0casualties, as death notices in Kosovo towns announcing Albanian men killed in\u00a0combat testify; and finally, hundreds of Serb and Albanian civilians were\u00a0killed by the Nato bombing. (For that matter, more than 200 people have also\u00a0been killed since the war by stepping on unexploded Nato cluster bombs.)<\/p>\n Many of the excavations have been carried out in what are obviously Christian\u00a0cemeteries (with gravestones rather than posts) while several corpses\u00a0have been wearing blue (i.e. Serb police) uniforms.<\/p>\n The prosecutor insists that this figure is not a final body-count nor\u00a0even a full census of the dead. As she says with remarkable candour, her\u00a0office’s first priority has been ‘to gather evidence relevant to the\u00a0criminal charges against President Milosevic and other leaders’ – in\u00a0other words, to look the other way if atrocities are committed by Albanians\u00a0against Serbs or gypsies. (To underline the organic connection between\u00a0the Tribunal and Nato, indeed, the former’s web-page has a link to the\u00a0latter’s.) Instead, she implies that the final body-count may be higher\u00a0when examinations of the remaining ‘crime scenes’ resume in the spring.<\/p>\n Paul Risley claims the exhumations have been shelved ‘because the\u00a0ground is frozen’. However, there has been no frost in Kosovo and the ground is\u00a0not frozen: on the day this article was written (15 November) it was\u00a0raining heavily in the province and the temperature was 10 degrees Celsius. The\u00a0exhumations must, therefore, have been interrupted for some other\u00a0reason, and the suspicion must be that the winter break is an attempt to kick\u00a0the embarrassing question of the low body-count into touch for a few\u00a0months, in the hope that people will soon forget about it.<\/p>\n The pattern which is emerging, in other words, is not so much of a\u00a0systematic attack on the Albanian population as such -Nato’s declared\u00a0casus belli – but rather of a low-level civil war with casualties on both\u00a0sides, a situation greatly aggravated by Nato’s attacks. The fighting was of an\u00a0utterly different scale from that in either Bosnia or Croatia.<\/p>\n Yes, crimes were committed by Serbs during the war, as they\u00a0indisputably have been by Albanians before and after it. But the most accurate\u00a0depiction of the nature of the Kosovo conflict is probably that given by a series\u00a0of court rulings in Germany between January and March of this year, when a\u00a0series of applications for political asylum by Kosovar Albanians was\u00a0rejected because political persecution could not be proven.<\/p>\n On 12 January 1999, for instance, the German foreign ministry gave the\u00a0following opinion to the administrative court in Trier: ‘An explicitpolitical persecution of the Albanian population cannot be established,\u00a0even in Kosovo…. The actions of the security forces are not directed\u00a0against Kosovo Albanians as an ethnically defined group but instead\u00a0against military opponents and their real or supposed supporters.’ Now that’s\u00a0what I call legal reasoning.<\/p>\n