The following report clearly shows how history is made. You repeat a number quite a few times until it becomes "official". And then the NATO apologists use it to justify the aggression. I am not sure they will find 11,000 bodies if they dig out all the cemetaries in Kosovo.
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Aug 3 (AFP) - The actual number of ethnic Albanians lying in Kosovo's mass graves -- one of the key motives for NATO's air campaign -- fuelled a political storm Tuesday after the top UN administrator here claimed the dead totalled 11,000.
Bernard Kouchner, the special representative of UN chief Kofi Annan and head of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), tried Tuesday to backpedal on the estimate he had given to AFP and other journalists.
But officers in the KFOR peacekeeping force here said Kouchner had "committed an enormous blunder" and a "political mistake" in advancing the figure in the first place.
Kouchner, who is renowned in his native France for having founded the Medecins Sans Frontiers humanitarian organisation, had said here Monday that there were "around 11,000 in the mass graves. Eleven thousand people died. You must understand the feeling of that people, the proximity of the suffering."
When AFP had questioned him further over the figure, Kouchner had replied he was basing the count on a figure given by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
"This is roughly the number of the ICTY people," he said.
But that assertion prompted an expression of surprise from ICTY deputy prosecutor Graham Blewitt, who told AFP in The Hague that the ICTY has not provided any such estimates.
Blewitt underlined the lengthy process involved in first establishing a list of missing persons, then confirming which of these dead, and eventually investigating which of these were casualties of war or of war crimes.
"This work will still take months," Blewitt said.
Apart from the 340 victims of massacres mentioned in the ICTY's indictment of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic confirmed in May, the tribunal has not made known any figure relating to the number of victims in Kosovo, he added.
"The only thing that we have said is that the figure for the victims of war crimes is more likely to be in the thousands than in the hundreds."
The last number put forward by ICTY prosecutors was on July 21, when they said KFOR had found 200 suspect sites. They cautioned, however, that many of the sites did not contain many bodies and may not qualify as mass graves.
KFOR sources said in mid-July that, of the 2,150 bodies found by peacekeepers, only 850 were victims of war crimes.
And in Pec, the region that bore the brunt of the Serbian operation against the ethnic Albanians, a UN source said that, in all, 750 bodies had been found in 34 suspected mass graves.
The issue has major political overtones in Kosovo, especially as NATO used the mass murder allegations -- said to have been gathered from Kosovar refugees fleeing the province -- to justify its war against Yugoslavia.
Tuesday, Kouchner's spokeswoman, Nadia Younes, said that Kouchner's "statement reflected what many people believe to be the potential number of victims, based on reports of mass graves in Kosovo received to date from all sources."
She added: "Most of these reports are, as yet, unconfirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He did not intend to imply that the ICTY itself had provided these figures or that the ICTY had completed its investigations in Kosovo."