[They seem to have found 6,100 bodies so far]
July 17, 1999 New York Times
Inquiry Estimates Serb Drive Killed 10,000 in Kosovo
By JOHN KIFNER
P RISTINA, Kosovo -- At least 10,000 people were slaughtered by
Serbian forces during their three-month campaign to drive the
Albanians from Kosovo, according to war crimes investigators, NATO
peacekeeping troops and aid agencies struggling to keep up with
fresh reports each day of newly discovered bodies and graves.
That death toll would be more than twice the number of about 4,600
dead estimated by the State Department in late May, shortly before
the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague indicted the
Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, and four of his top aides
on charges of crimes against humanity. They were accused of
ordering the Serbs' push to purge Kosovo of its Albanians, who made
up 90 percent of the province's prewar population of 2.2 million.
"We're getting newly reported mass graves every day in all of
Kosovo," said J. Clint Williamson, a legal officer and leading
investigator for the tribunal. "The list keeps growing."
Saturday afternoon, for example, tribunal investigators and British
troops rushed off to a grassy roadside near the village of Lukare,
a few miles northeast of here, where three grave sites were
reported by local Albanians to contain possibly 100 or more bodies.
The Albanians said the valley had been along the route of a transit
march when Serb forces drove them from the north. The villagers
said their men were taken away from a column of about 500 refugees.
By late Saturday afternoon, four bodies, all extensively
decomposed, had been exhumed and Lieut. Col. Robin Hodges, a
British spokesman, said the work was likely to continue all day.
On Friday, villagers returning to Goden, a settlement near the
western town of Djakovica, discovered 20 bodies, along with
Yugoslav Army log books describing how soldiers had emptied the
village and killed people.
War crimes investigators here say they have been overwhelmed by the
constant flooding in of reports of new grave sites. They add that
the true toll may never be known, because many villagers simply
bury their relatives without telling Western officials.
Other deaths went unrecorded in the chaotic press of events when
peacekeepers and United Nations relief workers first arrived here a
month ago. Still other bodies may never be found, having been
burned or carried off by Serbs in an effort to destroy evidence, or
are still undiscovered, and maybe forever lost, in Kosovo's forests
and mountains.
"Every time a villager comes back in, there are new body findings,"
said an international official familiar with the progress of the
investigation. "You're dealing with a crime base that just keeps
growing. It's just overwhelming."
The constant reports of new grave sites and a lack of coordination
between various international agencies have meant that it is only
in the last few days that investigators, peacekeeping troops and
others have been able to compile reports giving a comprehensive
view on the ground of the scale of the killing.
On Monday, the new system of attempting to pull together the
information from all sources into an aggregate number for the
tribunal at The Hague had produced a total of 201 grave sites with
a reported 4,900 bodies, according to Lieut. Col. Robin Clifford,
spokesman for Lieut. Gen. Sir Michael Jackson, commander of the
Kosovo peacekeeping force.
By Thursday afternoon, Williamson, the tribunal official, said the
numbers had grown to 280 grave sites with more than 6,100 reported
bodies. Colonel Clifford, among others, warned that even those
numbers underreported the actual number of deaths.
"It's very difficult to keep track of this," the military spokesman
said. "At first, no one was even keeping any of these figures. A
number of these bodies are being dug up by villagers and reburied.
You could have groups of three, four or five bodies that do not get
reported. We have a group of 30 unclaimed bodies and that is not an
unusual occurrence."
Based on these kind of numbers, war crimes investigators and other
international officials say there is no doubt the number of Kosovo
Albanians estimated to have been killed during the Serbian purge
will reach 10,000, and probably somewhat higher.
That estimate far exceeds, perhaps doubles, the total that could be
estimated from refugee accounts available to reporters and others
while the war was going on.
While it is impossible to say with real certainty exactly how many
died, the estimate of 10,000 is lower than totals suggested
privately by some American and NATO officials before the war ended.
But relatively few of the killings are likely to become part of war
crimes indictments issued by the tribunal at The Hague. Its
investigators are concentrating on establishing physical evidence
that supports the testimony of witnesses in a more limited series
of killings in which they hope to prove command responsibility on
the part of Milosevic and other high-ranking officials.
Thus, many of the killings might go without full investigation or
documentation.
Initially, the teams of forensic experts and criminal investigators
sent to work for the tribunal by the United States, France,
Britain, Canada and other countries concentrated on six specific
sites of killings mentioned in the indictment brought against
Milosevic and his associates on May 27, seeking physical evidence
to corroborate the testimony given by refugees.
The indictment named the town of Djakovica and the smaller towns or
villages of Velika Krusa, Mala Krusa, Bela Crkva, Izbica and
Crkolez, and listed by name about 340 Albanians said to have been
killed in those places.
Besieged by reports of more bodies, those investigators have moved
on to new sites, which tribunal officials say privately may lead to
new indictments of middle- or lower-ranking Serbian officials.
Those officials might then testify against their superiors about
how orders were passed.
An F.B.I team, for example, was assigned two sites in Djakovica,
but investigated five more there and two in the nearby region of
Pec. French investigators were frustrated at Izbica, when a widely
publicized mass grave in which they expected to find about 150
bodies turned out to be empty -- dug up with a backhoe and the
bodies spirited off, investigators said, between the indictment and
the arrival of NATO troops. Only days later, though, they pulled
the decomposed bodies of eight women from wells in the destroyed
village of Cirez, acting on reports from local residents. "It was
not a pretty sight," said Yves Roy, a member of the French forensic
team.
Indeed, throwing bodies into wells, which poisons the water supply,
appears to have been a common Serbian tactic during the wave of
killings, along with burning down houses with bodies inside.
Of 44 villages in the district around Decani, for example, 39 had
dead bodies in their wells, one of this week's daily internal
situation reports from the field to the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees said.
While the tribunal's investigators are trying to set priorities
about which reports to investigate, they say they are becoming
overtaken by the sheer number of new accounts.
"If you start the day with a list of 10 things to do, it all gets
blown away," an investigator said. "You get reports that villagers
are going to dig up graves and rebury people on their own and you
have to rush out so they don't destroy evidence. It's just so
widespread. Every little village has been hit. You want to do the
decent thing and respond immediately and at least record what
happened."
Every international agency working here has been deluged with
similar reports, often simply to make some kind of record of who
has been killed.
For many of the tribunal's investigators, mostly hardened
detectives, the requests to identify victims have been touching.
Many people simply approach investigators, aid workers or
journalists in an attempt somehow to make the victims part of the
historical, or personal, record.
"It was very emotional," said Chief Superintendent John T. Bunn of
Scotland Yard, who said he identified at least 60 victims in the
village of Bela Crkva. "The villagers were coming out themselves to
help us exhume the graves. There was a man who uncovered his father
and he wanted to be photographed with him."
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Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company