> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Carl Remick
>
> [Sorry for overposting, but I thought this story, from today's NY Times,
> warranted it. Remember, in April the U.S. State Department was
> charging the
> Serbs with killing up to half a million Kosovars.]
You are referring to the US ambassador for war crimes (David Scheffer) who argued that up to 100,000 (not 500,000) young men were unaccounted for and might be at risk- a charge he used to counter official NATO estimates of 3200 Kosovar deaths.
It appears that the official NATO estimates were more accurate, a bit low compared to the actual killings by the Serbs, but even Sheffer only referred to higher possible death rates as a possibility.
Actually, it was left critics of intervention (not left defenders) who hyped the Kosovar deaths after intervention, arguing that NATO intervention was leading to the mass murder of the very people who were supposedly being helped. Instead, the actual result of intervention seems to match relatively closely both the death rates expected by NATO and the political outcome - Kosovar autonomy.
Lower than expected Kosovar deaths is good news. It means that the Kosovars were helped with less loss than expected.
Attachment:
From: Agence France-Presse Monday, April 19, 1999
WASHINGTON, April 18 (AFP) - The scale of Serb atrocities in Kosovo may be much greater than previously thought, with the possible death toll running into tens of thousands, a senior US official indicated Sunday.
"We have upwards of 100,000 men that we cannot account for," in Kosovo, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, David Scheffer, told Fox News Sunday.
He said that NATO estimates of some 3,200 deaths in Kosovo were "very low."
--Nathan Newman