Library:To kill a nation/Where are all the bodies buried?

On March 18 1999, a week before the aerial attacks on Yugoslavia commenced, David Scheffer, a State Department ambassador at large for war crime issues, announced that “we have upwards of about 100,000 [ethnic Albanian] men that we cannot account for” in Kosovo. A month later, the state department announced that up to 500,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing and feared dead. In mid-May, US Secretary of Defense William Cohen, a former Republican senator serving in President Clinton’s Democratic administration, stated that 100,000 military-aged men had vanished and might have been killed by the Serbs. Not long after—as public support for the war began to wane—Ambassador Scheffer escalated the 100,000 figure to “as many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between fourteen and fifty-nine” who remained unaccounted. He considered this one of the very greatest genocidal crimes against a civilian population. Indeed it was, if it happened.¹

As the war dragged on and NATO officials saw press attention drifting toward the contrary story—namely that the bombing was killing civilians—“NATO stepped up its claims about Serb 'killing fields,'” notes the Wall Street Journal.² Widely varying but horrendous figures from official sources went largely unchallenged by the media. Support for the bombings remained firm among Clinton supporters in Congress (including the one professed “socialist,” Bernard Sanders [Ind.-Vt.]), and among self-described humanitarian groups such as Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, and Concern Worldwide, along with “peace” groups, and various NGOs—many of whom seem to have convinced themselves that NATO was defending Kosovo from a holocaust.

Toward the close of the air campaign, British Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon said that “in more than 100 massacres” some 10,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed³—a figure substantially reduced from the 100,000 to 500,000 bandied about by US officials. A day or two after the bombings stopped, the Associated Press and other news agencies, echoing Hoon, reported that the Serbs had massacred 10,000 Albanians.⁴ No explanation was given as to how this figure was arrived at, given that not a single war site had yet been investigated and NATO forces were just beginning to roll into Kosovo.

On August 2, another pronouncement, this time from the ubiquitous Bernard Kouchner, the United Nations' chief administrator in Kosovo (and head of Doctors Without Borders and friend of KLA leaders), who claimed that 11,000 bodies had been found in common graves throughout the province. He cited as his source the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia. But the ICTY denied providing any such information to Kouchner or anyone else. To this day, he has not explained how he came up with his estimate and no one has pressed him on the matter.⁵

The Kosovo-based Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms, staffed in part by KLA officials, first promulgated the figure of 10,000 missing, purportedly based on interviews with refugees. The US State Department and Western media parroted the council's estimate. But the number had to be taken on faith because the council refused to share its list of missing persons.⁶

Humanitarian organizations, KLA leaders, NATO and State Department officials, and the news media fed off each other's stories. Through a process of unconfirmed assertion and tireless repetition, evidence became irrelevant. Unsubstantiated references to mass graves, each purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of Albanian victims, were daily publicized as established facts. From June through August 1999, the New York Times alone ran eighty articles, nearly one a day, that made some reference to mass graves in Kosovo. Yet when it came down to hard evidence, the graves seemed to disappear, as the FBI soon discovered.

In mid-June, the FBI sent a team to investigate two of the sites listed in the war-crimes indictment against Slobodan Milosevic, one said to contain six victims and the other twenty. The team lugged 107,000 pounds of equipment into Kosovo to handle what was called the “largest crime scene in the FBrs forensic history.” But some weeks later, the FBI team returned home, maintaining an odd silence about its investigation.⁷ Months later it reported having found not thousands but two hundred bodies at thirty sites.⁸

Investigators from other NATO countries had similar experiences. “French investigators were frustrated at Izbica,” reported the New York Times, “when a widely publicized mass grave in which they expected to find about 150 bodies turned out to be empty.” It must have been “dug up with a backhoe and the bodies spirited off, investigators said, between the indictment and the arrival of NATO troops.”⁹ A Spanish forensic team was told to prepare for at least 2,000 autopsies, but found only 187 bodies, usually buried in individual graves, and showing no signs of massacre or torture, contrary to the stories circulated by humanitarian groups and local residents. Most seemed to have been killed by mortar shells and firearms. One Spanish forensic expert, Emilio Perez Puhola, said that his team did not find any mass graves. He dismissed the widely publicized references about mass sites as being part of the “machinery of war propaganda.”¹⁰

According to the London Sunday Times, a private research team, Stratfor, basing their analysis on reports from forensic teams involved in the exhumation of bodies, determined that the final total of those killed in Kosovo came to “hundreds not thousands,” nor could it be assumed that all or even most of these deaths represented atrocities.¹¹ This resembles the Srebrenica story in which the Serbs were charged with 7,500 killings, while relatively few corpses were exhumed.

Experts in surveillance photography and wartime propaganda charged NATO with running a “propaganda campaign” that lacked any supporting evidence. State Department reports of mass graves and of 100,000 to 500,000 missing Albanian men “are just ludicrous,” according to these independent critics.¹² State Department spokesperson James Rubin admitted that the atrocity accounts he provided to reporters were fed to him by KLA commander Hashim Thaci and were “not necessarily facts.” One spurious tale marketed by Rubin described the detention of 100,000 ethnic Albanians in a sports stadium in Pristina, the provincial capital of Kosovo. But when an Agence France-Presse reporter hastened to the site to confirm the story, he “found the stadium to be deserted and showing no signs of recent occupation.”¹⁴

CORPSES MADE TO ORDER In June 1999, Kathy Sheridan of the Irish Times drove up the road to Vucitrn, a little town in Kosovo still held by Serbian security forces. She saw one body lying in the street and many Serbian interior ministry policemen. On the way back to Pristina, she told a BBC radio reporter that she had seen a corpse in Vucitrn and that the place was "littered" with Serbian police. Within minutes, he went on the air with a report that an "Irish reporter" had seen the town "littered with corpses."13 The Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic Albanians “might be buried in mass graves” around a mountain village in western Kosovo. Might be? Such speculations were based on sources that NATO officials refused to identify. Getting down to specifics, the article mentions “four decomposing bodies” discovered near a large ash heap, with no details as to who they could be or how they died.¹⁵

By late August 1999, the frantic hunt for dead bodies continued to disappoint NATO officials and their media minions. The Los Angeles Times tried to salvage the genocide theme with a story about how the wells of Kosovo might be “mass graves in their own right.” The Times claimed that “many corpses have been dumped into wells in Kosovo ... Serbian forces apparently stuffed ... many bodies of ethnic Albanians into wells during their campaign of terror.”¹⁶ Apparently? When the story got down to specifics, it dwelled on only one well in one village—in which the body of a thirty-nine-year-old male was found, along with three dead cows and a dog. Neither his nationality nor cause of death was given. “No other human remains were discovered,” the Times lamely concluded.

An earlier New York Times story told of French investigators who pulled the decomposed bodies of eight women from wells in the destroyed village of Cirez, acting on reports from local residents. Yet to be investigated were unconfirmed reports, from forty-four villages in the district around Decani, of thirty-nine dead bodies in wells.¹⁷ As far as I know, there have been no further stories about bodies in wells, which would suggest that no more bodies were actually found in wells.

At one reported grave site after another, bodies failed to materialize in any substantial numbers—or any numbers at all. In July 1999, a mass grave in Ljubenic, near Pec—an area of extensive fighting—believed to be holding some 350 corpses, produced only seven after the exhumation. In Izbica, refugees reported that 150 ethnic Albanians were executed in March. But their bodies were nowhere to be found. In Kraljan, 82 men were supposedly killed, but investigators found not a single cadaver. In Djakovica, town officials claimed that one hundred ethnic Albanians had been murdered, but there were no bodies because the Serbs had returned in the middle of the night, dug them up and carted them all away, the officials claimed. In Pusto Selo, villagers claimed that precisely 106 men were captured and killed by Serbs at the end of March, but again no remains were discovered. Villagers once more suggested that Serbian forces must have come back and removed them.¹⁸ Again, we would have to ask, how did the Serbs accomplish these mass-grave-disappearing acts? Where were the mass grave sites that had been emptied of bodies? Even if emptied they would have evidence of diggings and traces of their former contents (a shoe, hair, blood stains, a stray article of clothing). Where were the new sites, presumably chock full of bodies? And why were the new ones so impossible to detect? Questions of this sort were never posed.

The worst allegation of mass atrocities, a war crime ascribed to Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, was said to have occurred at the Trepca mine. As reported by US and NATO officials, the Serbs threw a thousand or more bodies down the shafts or disposed of them in the mine's vats of hydrochloric acid. In October 1999, the ICTY released the findings of Western forensic teams investigating Trepca: not a single body was found in the mine shafts, nor was there any evidence that the vats had ever been used in an attempt to dissolve human remains.¹⁹ Additional stories about a Nazi-like body disposal facility in a furnace “on the other side of the mountain” from the mine motivated a forensic team to analyze ashes in the furnace. “They found no teeth or other signs of burnt bodies.”²¹ The International Criminal Tribunal checked the largest reported grave sites first, and found most to contain no more than five bodies, “suggesting intimate killings rather than mass murder.”²² By the end of the year, the media hype about mass graves had noticeably fizzled. The designated mass grave sites, considered the most notorious, offered up a few hundred bodies altogether, not the thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands previously trumpeted, and with no evidence of torture or mass execution. In many cases, there was no certain evidence regarding the nationality of victims—and no report on cause of death.²³ All this did not prevent the Associated Press from reiterating the charge, as late as November 30 1999, that “10,000 people were killed in Kosovo.”

MASS-PRODUCED MASS GRAVE STORIES

You would expect the stories [about mass graves] to be horrifying. What is surprising is that they are so repetitious-using the same phrases—that reading them is exhausting. ... Evidence, if any, is anecdotal; sources are vague. The discovery or even the rumor of a grave is cited (often by some authority figure) as proof of Serbian atrocities. These atrocities are then discussed in great, though entirely speculative, detail.

Arguments are circular. Dead bodies are found, The assumptions are made that they are Albanians; they are civilians; they were killed by Serbs; the Serbs were soldiers or policemen. These speculations, once uttered, become part of the record, cited in later articles as established fact.²⁰

No doubt there were graves in Kosovo that contained two or more persons—which was NATO’s definition of a “mass grave.” As of November 1999, the total number of bodies that the Western grave diggers claimed to have discovered was 2,108, “and not all of them necessarily war-crimes victims,” the Wall Street Journal reported.²⁴ People were killed by bombs and by the extensive land war that went on between Yugoslav and KLA forces. Some of the dead, as even the New York Times allowed, “are fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army or may have died ordinary deaths”—as would happen in any population of 2.4 million over the course of a year.²⁵ And we know that civilians were killed by the KLA itself and by NATO’s own bombs—as NATO officials, after initial denials, were forced to admit. The attack on refugee columns along the Prizren-Djakovica road on April 14, and in Korisa on May 13 were two admitted examples.²⁶ No doubt there also were despicable grudge killings and executions of prisoners and innocent civilians as in any war, but not on a scale that would warrant the label of genocide or justify the death, destruction and misery inflicted upon Yugoslavia by bombings and sanctions. The absence of mass killings means that the ICTY indictment of Milosevic '"becomes highly questionable,” argues Richard Gwyn. “Even more questionable is the West's continued punishment of the Serbs.”²⁸ In sum, NATO leaders used vastly inflated estimates of murdered Kosovo Albanians as a pretext to intrude themselves upon the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, destroy much of its social production, and invade and occupy a large portion of its territory in what can only be termed a war of aggression.

PHILIP KNIGHTLEY ON “THE FIRST CASUALTY”

The atrocity story is a tried and tested way of arousing hatred. It fortifies the mind of the nation with “proof” of the depravity of the enemy and the cruel and degenerate conduct of his war. ... President Milosevic, from being a pragmatic leader that the West could do business with, became a new Genghis Khan and significantly, a new Hitler. ... So all those in government who supported the NATO war, from the Prime Minister down, began to pepper their speeches with words like “Holocaust” and “genocide.”...

Teams of frustrated war correspondents raced each other into Kosovo with one story on their minds: atrocities. Who would find the biggest and the worst? The Ministry of Defense had even prepared a map indicating possible sites of mass graves to help them. ... In this scramble for atrocity stories, prudent skepticism was lost. Reporters seemed ready to believe anything as long as it painted the Serbs as monsters.²⁷