Early Count Hints at Fewer Kosovo Deaths
By Steven Erlanger with Christopher S. Wren
Pristina, Kosovo -- In five months of investigation and exhumation of the dead in Kosovo, war crimes investigators have found 2,108 bodies in grave sites throughout the province, the chief prosecutor announced on Wednesday.
While there are several hundred more reported sites to be examined in the spring, the number of the dead found so far seems significantly lower than the estimate of 10,000 ethnic Albanians killed by the Serbs, issued by Western officials, or the suggestion by American and allied officials during the war that up to 100,000 were being killed.
In a report to the United Nations Security Council in New York, also released here, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, said that the bodies had been found in 195 sites before work stopped for the winter, and that there were a total of 529 sites reported to investigators so far.
Mrs. Del Ponte cautioned that the number of dead was an interim figure, and noted that "we have discovered evidence of tampering with graves," particularly at well-publicized suspected massacre sites like Izbica, where investigators found no bodies after the Serbian forces left Kosovo, but freshly turned earth.
"There are also a significant number of sites where the precise number of bodies cannot be counted," she said, adding that in some places bodies had been burned and other steps taken to hide the evidence.
But a long investigation of the Trepca mine, where Albanians said many bodies were brought for incineration, turned up no evidence of any crime. Similarly, at Ljubenic, near Pec, a widely publicized grave site said to hold 350 bodies only held five.
A draft report by the State Department noted that an average of only 17 bodies were found at examined sites, but says: "We would expect the total number of Kosovar Albanian deaths to be over 8,000" once all the graves are inspected.
Still, senior Western officials here say that the investigators did look at the most serious sites first. While it is unlikely that a firm and final death toll will ever be known, they suggested that a figure of between 5,000 and 7,000 will be more likely. Some suggested that 5,000 would be more logical, given what has been found to date, and noting the simple difficulty of killing large numbers of people and disposing of them quickly.
But officials also cautioned that some of the dead are fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army or may have died ordinary deaths.
Mrs. Del Ponte and her aides also noted that the tribunal's main job was not to take a census of the dead, but to prepare legal material to seek or extend indictments for war crimes against those most reponsible for the abuses of the Kosovar Albanians.
"We now have in our possession invaluable documentation of what happened to many people in many places in Kosovo," Mrs. Del Ponte said. "There is no substitute for this kind of accurate information because it is evidence that eventually will stand up in a court of law."
Kelly Moore, the tribunal spokeswoman here, said: "A prosecutor is not a statistician. The job is to gather evidence for prosecutions."
Ms. Moore noted that of the indictments on war crimes charges against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four other top Yugoslav and Serbian officials, two charges cover the killings of Albanians, but two also cover their forced expulsion, deportation and persecution.
More than 800,000 Albanians were forced from their homes and out of Kosovo, while many more thousands were living rough in the hills inside the province. Albanian human rights groups note that several thousand Albanians are reported missing, and it is unclear how many of them may still be in Serbian jails -- nearly 2,000 according to the International Committee of the Red Cross -- or abroad or dead but undiscovered.
Blerim Shala, the editor of the Albanian weekly Zeri and a member of the Kosovo Transitional Council here, said that a respected Albanian human rights group, the Kosovo Board for the Protection of Human Rights, estimates that 7,000 Albanians were killed during the war. Another 2,500 were killed in the previous year, beginning March 1998, when the conflict between the Serbs and the Kosovo Liberation Army intensified. Another 3,000 or so are believed to be missing, Shala said.
Daan Everts, the director of the mission in Kosovo for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said that morally the final number is not especially relevant, and noted that those who were killed and abused were the subject of all the powers of an organized state.
"We don't know how many people are still in the ground," he said. "And whether the number is smaller or larger doesn't take away from the massive and organized violation of human rights by a state."
Graham Blewitt, the tribunal's deputy chief prosecutor, told reporters at the United Nations that motive and method were more important legally than the number of victims in proving genocide. "It's really not a numbers game to determine whether genocide has been committed," he said.
During the war, however, estimated death figures were very high. On April 19, the State Department said that up to 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing and feared dead. On May 16, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said that up to 100,000 Albanian men in Kosovo had vanished and might have been killed. "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing," Cohen told CBS News. "They may have been murdered."
On June 17, a British Foreign Office Minister, Geoff Hoon, said: "According to the reports we have gathered, mostly from the refugees, it appears that around 10,000 people have been killed in more than 100 massacres." On Aug. 2, Bernard Kouchner, the United Nations chief administrator in Kosovo, said 11,000 ethnic Albanians were killed, and said his figure came from the Tribunal, which denied providing it.
A Spanish forensic team's experience has been typical. According to the newspaper El Pais, the team was told to prepare for at least 2,000 autopsies. But it found 187 bodies, usually buried in individual graves.
The El Pais report has led to some revise their expectations of the death toll, which Mrs. Del Ponte's report sought to clarify on Wednesday.
Wednesday, in Pristina, the NATO-led peacekeeping troops issued murder statistics since June 12, when NATO took control of the province. Of the 379 people killed, 135 were Serbs, a disproportionate number given that only about 5 percent of the province's current population is believed to be Serbian. Of the rest, 145 were ethnic Albanians, while 99 are of unknown or other ethnicity, said Maj. Ole Irgens, a spokesman for the force.
According to a report about to be released by the International Crisis Group, the number of killings now in Kosovo is comparable to the levels reported before the NATO intervention, when the Serbs were struggling to defeat the Kosovo Liberation Army. The figure is roughly 30 people killed a week in a province with a current estimated population of 1.4 million.
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