Despite their high-sounding proclamations, US and other Western leaders treated Yugoslavia exactly the way they have treated many other peoples all over the world. Nevertheless, "Green" and "left" intellectuals and various liberals convinced themselves that this time their leaders were indeed acting as champions against genocide. Since NATO's war against Yugoslavia was indisputably illegal, it had to be justified on higher humanitarian grounds: it was a moral crusade to stop that greatest of all evils, Milošević, and the genocidal Serbs.
The Yugoslav army was invariably described in the Western media as "Serbian." By 1992, its troops were indeed predominantly Serbian, but the army still contained numerous other nationalities, including ethnic Hungarians, Turks, Egyptians, Roma, Slovaks, Gorani, Jews, and even draftees drawn from the Croat and Albanian populations living in Serbia and Montenegro.
Once the NATO bombings began, this Yugoslav army, along with police and paramilitaries from the Republic of Serbia, embarked on a policy of forced evacuation of Albanians from areas that were KLA strongholds, or suspected of being such. If the Serbs were intent upon a genocidal extermination of the Kosovo Albanian population, why were they sending them packing? If the reports can be believed, along with the expulsions, there was much plundering and instances of summary execution of KLA suspects by Serb paramilitary forces. But the scale of such criminal incidents is indicative of a limited counterinsurgency not an orchestrated mass genocide.
In addition, tens of thousands of Albanians fled Kosovo because of the NATO bombings themselves, or because they wanted to get away from the sustained ground fighting between Yugoslav forces and the KLA, or they were just afraid and hungry. Refugees from the war zone were all portrayed in the media as "deportees." But as one Albanian woman crossing into Macedonia put it when asked by a news crew if she had been forced out by Serb police: "There were no Serbs. We were frightened of the bombs."
During the bombings, an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 Serbian residents of Kosovo also took flight, as did thousands of Roma and other non-Albanian ethnic groups.' Were these people ethnically cleansing themselves? Or were they not fleeing the bombing and the ground war? In the Roma quarter of a Kosovo refugee camp in Macedonia, "a half-dozen refugees said they had fled because of the air strikes." Others seemed unable to speak freely, being monitored by a burly Albanian man who kept interjecting that the refugees "had fled Kosovo because of Serbs and not because of NATO bombing."
The head of the UN forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia, 1992-93, Lieutenant-General Satish Nambiar of India, commented: "I do not believe the Belgrade government had prior intention of driving out all Albanians from Kosovo. It may have decided to implement [mass deportation] only if NATO bombed, or those expulsions could be spontaneous acts of revenge and retaliation by Serb forces in the field because of the bombing." The Yugoslav government had indicated its willingness to abide by the cease-fire and grant greater autonomy to the Albanians, Nambiar notes, "but they insisted that the status of Kosovo as part of Serbia was not negotiable, and they would not agree to stationing NATO forces on the soil of Yugoslavia. This is precisely what India would have done under the same circumstances."
Apologists for the NATO bombing of Kosovo cite Milošević's fiendish plan to expel the Albanian population as justification for the bombing. The plan presumably came first. But in April 2000, in an interview with the Sunday Times of London, retired German Brigadier General Heinz Loquai stated there was no such plan, just a vague report from Bulgarian intelligence. Even the Bulgarian report, Loquai said, concluded that the Yugoslav goal was to rout the KLA not expel the entire population.
Vlada, a unit commander in the Yugoslav army, reveals his mixed feelings about the Serb paramilitaries who preceded his regular troops into various Kosovo towns, driving out the inhabitants while engaging in firefights with entrenched KLA combatants. The paramilitaries sometimes took innocent lives, Vlada acknowledges, but it was hard to know who was innocent and who was setting up an ambush. The paramilitaries may have saved his life, he thinks. "It was ugly but it happened; everyone you saw felt like an enemy. It's the worst kind of war." The KLA were "not the only ones guilty for this war, but they are among them." Yugoslav soldiers looted and burned many houses, "especially the big, rich ones," equipped with televisions, video recorders, refrigerators, and tractors. Vlada and his comrades were infuriated when they found large wellfurnished houses with Jacuzzis that contained Albanian flags, the KL.A insignia, or uniforms or pictures of men in KLA uniforms with arms. What more did the Albanian home owners want? Vlada would ask himself.
If the Milošević government had been harboring plans to forcefully evacuate one million Albanians from Kosovo all along, why did no evidence of this surface beforehand or afterward? Before March 24 (the day the NATO aerial assaults began), no opposition Yugoslav political leader, or Western leader, or humanitarian organization warned the world that a mass campaign of forced deportation was in the offing. The OSCE, with over 1,300 verifiers who regularly monitored Yugoslav communications, alerted no one. Nobody in NATO produced intelligence data indicating a systematic provincewide expulsion of refugees by Yugoslav forces.
But once the bombing began and the refugee flow started, the Clinton administration and NATO representatives suddenly claimed to have known all along that there had been a plot to ethnically cleanse the province. They would have had us believe that their bombing was a prescient punishment for a crime not yet committed. We bombed them because they were planning to force people out of Kosovo. Proof? People fled Kosovo once the bombing started. The bombing, which was a major cause of the refugee problem was now seen as the solution, an anticipatory response by precognitive policy makers. The refugee tide created in large part by the massive aerial attacks of MarchJune 1999 was also treated as post hoc justification for such attacks, a way of putting pressure on Milošević to allow "the safe return of ethnic Albanian refugees." That remains the official line to this day.
In striking contrast to its many public assertions, the German Foreign Office privately denied there was any evidence that genocide or ethnic cleansing was a component of Yugoslav policy. In its reports to administrative courts handling ethnic Albanian immigration requests, the Foreign Office wrote: "Even in Kosovo, an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable. . . . The actions of the [Yugoslav] security forces [were] not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but against the military opponent and its actual or alleged supporters. . . . There is no sufficient actual proof of a secret program, or an unspoken consensus on the Serbian side, to liquidate the Albanian people, to drive it out or otherwise to persecute it in the extreme manner presently described."
According to highly placed officials in the German government, the reasons for the flight from Kosovo were more or less equally distributed as follows:
- Fear of getting killed by NATO's bombings, and a desire to escape the general devastation and difficult conditions caused by the aerial assault, such as the lack of clean water in nearly all urban areas.
- Fear of getting caught in the crossfire between the KLA and the Yugoslav military.
- Attacks by Yugoslav soldiers and Serbian police and paramilitary, often triggered by KLA attacks carried out under cover of ethnic Albanian civilians.
- Spreading of panic and horror stories in the broadcasts of dozens of small KLA, NATO or Albanian shortwave radio stations, alongside the propaganda broadcasts of the KLA from Albania over Radio Tirana.
- Pillaging bands of Albanian mafia and the KLA, who extorted money, looted houses for anything of value, then burned the houses to create a political effect.
- KLA irregular troops, who declared a "general mobilization," forcing every available man into their military service. Those objecting were subjected to grave physical abuse and released only upon paying a ransom.
- KLA announcements that NATO was about to carry out a massive ground attack.
The New York Times reported that "a major purpose of the NATO effort is to end the Serb atrocities that drove more than one million Albanians from their homes." That number has never been verified. The figures reported at various refugee camps numbered in the thousands or tens of thousands at most. The numbers who were resettled in several other countries were even smaller. Where could these million-plus refugees have gone? And how did most of them get back into Kosovo within a matter of days after the bombing? And what of the hundreds of thousands who never left and were there to greet the NATO forces as they rolled in? The BBC reported that a surprisingly high percentage of Albanians stayed in the Kosovo capital of Pristina during the bombings, trying to survive together in peace and friendship with Serbian residents.
Whatever the size of the refugee tide, the truth is it did not begin until after the bombing commenced. Nevertheless, we were asked to believe that the exodus was caused not by the ground war against the KLA and not by the massive NATO air attacks but exclusively by a sudden rise in Serbian repression.
Many news photos inadvertently revealed that the Kosovo Albanians, who were leaving in substantial numbers, were usually well-clothed and in good health, some riding their tractors, trucks, or cars, many of them young men of recruitment age. During a fact-finding trip to the Balkans, Congressman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) remarked: "I was shocked to find out, as perhaps you were, that they are very well off, considering they are refugees. [The children] are all wearing Nikes and were very well dressed."
As an Albanian woman living in Italy wrote, "I completely agree with the articles in Liberazione...on the bad information during the Yugoslavia war...I have denounced the manipulation of information and, particularly, the role of the translators, who often deform what the interviewed persons say. As I know the [Albanian] language, I can understand the questions and the replies, and can compare them to the translations. The number of victims is often exaggerated. For instance, in a radio broadcast, a Kosovo Albanian mentions four dead, and the interpreter multiplies that to forty! In another broadcast, which RAI 3 TV also showed, a TV crew, accompanied by UCK [KLA] soldiers talks to Albanian women of Kosovo. Before the interview, they [said they were warned] by one of the soldiers 'not to talk too much'; however, that is not translated. Another example: they ask an Albanian woman: "Do you approve of the NATO bombings?" The interpreter translates, while whispering: "Say yes, say yes."
Mass-rape stories, reminiscent of the Bosnian war, were resuscitated. A headline in the San Francisco Examiner tells us "SERB TACTIC IS ORGANIZED RAPE, KOSOVO REFUGEES SAY." Only at the bottom of the story, in the nineteenth paragraph, do we read that reports gathered by the Kosovo mission of OSCE found no such organized rape policy. The actual number of rapes were in the dozens "and not many dozens," according to the OSCE representative.
NATO's spokesperson and premier fabricator, Jamie Shea, claimed that "100,000 babies" had been "born in refugee camps to Albanian women" in just two months. At that time, the total number of women in the camps was estimated at 200,000, which meant there was a phenomenal 50 per cent birthrate within a time frame of just sixty days or so. Most of these alleged births were the result of Serbian mass rapes, it was understood. But the rapes would have had to occur just at the time of month when all 100,000 women were fertile, and nine months before—antedating the time when Yugoslav security forces launched their counterinsurgency into Albanian areas. Even NATO no longer defends that story.
In May 1999 the US State Department issued a report described as the "most comprehensive record to date on atrocities in Kosovo." It said that surveillance photographs had identified "seven possible sites of mass graves," and spoke of "systematic mass rapes apparently carried out in the cities of Djakovica and Pec." Apparently? Almost in its entirety, the report was based on unconfirmed refugee accounts that had already been bandied about by the media or human rights groups. There was no suggestion that US intelligence agencies had verified most or even any of these stories. The words "reportedly" and "allegedly" appear throughout the document.
An episode of ABC Nightline in September 1999 made dramatic and repeated references to the "mass atrocities in Kosovo" perpetrated by the Serbs, while offering no specifics save one. It came when Ted Koppel asked angry Albanian refugees what they had witnessed. They pointed to an old man in their group who wore a wool hat. The Serbs had thrown the man's hat to the ground and stepped on it, "because the Serbs knew that his hat was the most important thing to him," they told Koppel, who registered an appropriately horrified expression at this war crime.
British journalist Audrey Gillan interviewed Kosovo refugees about atrocities and found an impressive lack of evidence. One woman caught Gillan glancing at the watch on her wrist, while her husband was claiming that all the women had been robbed of their jewelry and other possessions. A spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees talked of mass rapes and what sounded like hundreds of killings in three villages. When Gillan pressed him for more precise information, he reduced it to five or six teenage rape victims, then admitted that he had not spoken to any witnesses and had no way of verifying any reports of rape.
Gillan noted that some refugees had seen killings and other atrocities, but there was little to suggest that they had seen it on the scale that was being publicized. Officials told her of refugees who talked of sixty or more being killed in one village and fifty in another, but Gillan "could not find a single eyewitness who actually saw these things happen." It was always in some other village that the mass atrocities seem to have occurred. Yet Western journalists filed daily reports of "hundreds" of rapes and murders. Sometimes they noted in passing that these had yet to be substantiated, but then why did they hasten to publicize such stories?
CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] correspondent Nancy Durham made a name for herself by venturing deep into Kosovo as a one-woman news team and bringing back moving stories about both the dead and the living. Now it turns out that one of her most touching reports—about an eighteen-year-old girl named Rajmonda who vowed to avenge her sister's death at Serb hands—is based on a lie. With the cameras rolling, Rajmonda vowed to join the KLA in order to avenge the death of her six-year-old sister at Serb hands. But, as Durham discovered when she made a postwar visit to the girl's home, the sister was alive and well.
The rhetoric employed to frame the plight of the refugees seemed vastly inflated compared to the real enough hardships and losses they sustained. NPR correspondent Silvia Poggioli was asked to describe what she witnessed when accompanying an Albanian woman back to her house in a Kosovo village. "It was an indescribable nightmare," she said. "There was furniture lying around that this woman had never seen before. Precious things were broken, things that mean so much to a person, memories of one's lifetime." Surely one can sympathize with the woman's losses, but do strange furniture and broken mementos amount to an "indescribable nightmare"? Moreover do such instances of mistreatment justify a massive aerial war against a defenseless civilian population?
On May 6, 1999, President Clinton visited an Albanian refugee camp in Germany. As reported by the Associated Press, he "marveled at how much the refugees resembled Americans, especially one woman he spotted wearing a T-shirt from the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta." The president took time to share "their horrific stories." A woman told of being "alone when armed Serbian police forced her from her home." That was her entire story as reported—an injustice, but not exactly an atrocity as normally understood. Another said that the refugees "have seen massacres" (but no particulars were provided). A man told of fleeing to the railroad station to get a train out of Kosovo: "We were frightened by the police," he said (not shot, beaten, or tortured, but frightened). "On the first night," he went on, "five women delivered babies at the train station and were not allowed to go to hospitals." If only one woman was mistreated in this manner, it would be reprehensible enough. But here we are concerned also with the credibility of such reports. That there were five pregnant women in the relatively small group waiting for the train is not beyond probability. That they all gave birth on the very same night denotes a synchronization of fertility that might give one pause. Describing the Serb police, one man said, "They tried to take away all our money. They tried to kill my brother." Again, if this is an account of a horrific atrocity, the wording is puzzling. They "tried" to steal and kill but apparently did not.
A New York Times account of Clinton's visit to the camp says he encouraged the refugees to tell of the "literally almost unbelievable" things that had happened to them. "The stories came in a flood," notes the Times. One woman said "1 left my brother in the basement and he had no food." This is a serious misfortune but not exactly an unbelievable horror story. Another woman bribed the Serb police to get her father out. That was her entire account as reported. A young man said, "I'm young but my life is broken from what I've seen [in a Macedonian refugee camp]. The first day I arrived, I heard that twenty-four children, infants, had died of starvation." What he had seen has broken his life, he says, but he does not tell us what he saw, only what he heard. Nor was any explanation forthcoming as to why friendly camp authorities in Macedonia would let so many children starve, nor why this should be considered a Serb atrocity. Another woman told of her suffering: Serb police demanded five thousand German marks from her. She offered them her golden chain necklace. which they refused, being interested only in cash. That was her entire story as reported.
In sum, the refugees that Clinton spoke to certainly had endured the terrible experience of being uprooted from their homes and sent off with few possessions, in some cases separated from loved ones. But both the AP and Times stories (and Clinton himself) referred to horrific experiences that involved rape, torture, and massacre. Yet when getting down to specifics, the supporting testimony was oddly thin or nonexistent in both reports. No matter. Through a process of constant repetition, the generalities become self-confirming, making specific evidence superfluous. The story is believed because it coincides with so many others that came earlier. Leaders and media find authentication for the images they propagate in the images they have already propagated.
After the NATO bombing stopped, I went with [temporary UN Special Representative for Kosovo] Sergio de Mello to visit Kosovo. The trip lasted five days. We visited almost every village and city in Kosovo, and we saw what damage resulted from NATO bombing, and what damage resulted from gangs. I want to point out that Mr. Sergio de Mello seemed disinterested in damage from NATO bombing in Kosovo. Most of those killed due to NATO bombing were Albanians. In just one strike from NATO in the village of Korisa, they killed 105 people. Mr. de Mello wasn't interested...Albanians got hurt from all sides, but mainly from NATO bombing. More than 300 Albanians were killed by NATO bombings.