"Your story on Kosovo graves uses a statement by the chief prosecutor of the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla del Ponte, that only 2,108 bodies have been exhumed so far to imply than many fewer died of Serb atrocities than Nato's estimate of 10,000 dead (Graves put Kosovo death toll in doubt, Noveber 11)
This is a perculiar interpretation of Carla del Ponte's press conference. She pointed out that only 195 of 529 reported grave sites have yet been investigated. She herself said that the number of bodies reported to the ICTY was 11,334 (for some reason not included in your report). And she made it clear that current figures do not necessarily reflect the total number of actual victims, because we do not know if all grave sites have been discovered, and because there is evidence of tampering with graves.
No one yet knows precisely how many Kosovar Albanians were killed by the Serb forces. But NATO's estimate of around 10,000 is shared by, amongst others, the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights and your own correspondent on November 3 (who in "Death and denial in Kosovo" wrote that the figure of 10,000 was "remarkably accurate"). It is surprising and disappointing to find the Guardian now quoting figures selectively to try to minimise the scope of this appalling tragedy."
Peter Hain may will be biassed because he is a minister in the government that supported the war perhaps more than any other. Secondly, because he was an activist in campaigning against apartheid he was probably particularly offended that anyone should be deprived of their rights by reason of their skin colour, language or religion. A typical liberal. (He was a Young Liberal before joining the Labour Party).
At 11:37 11/11/99 EST, Carl Remick wrote:
>[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.]
The article however says
> On April
>19, the State Department said that up to 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were
>missing and feared dead.
Maybe the implication was there but the words appear not to have been used.
I do recall what is described here as
>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."
Bearing in mind that the Yugoslav army was using fascist paramilitaries to drive the Serbs out of villages, and these were the same paramilitaries who had operated in Bosnia, that observations by Cohen seems to me to be a reasonable one.
Forces ruthless enough to use hundreds of thousands of people for purposes of blackmail are half way towards killing the able-bodied males.
If the information was not to hand more accurately, who is to blame? The Serbian authorities were quick to take journalists down to Kosovo to see atrocities committed by Nato. Why were they not given safe conduct throughout all of Kosovo to report on the exemplary way the Serbs followed the Geneva conventions?
I am not holding a torch for the impartiality of western sources either. It is clear that the west has not been diligent in tracing the information about the victims of its own attacks and has no proposals to offer them compensation. But Hain's letter above looks as if the British Foreign Office is continuing to defend its credibility on the numbers.
We will never know the exact numbers. One source of error will be that del Ponte, as a proscutor will have to concentrate on those cases that are proved to a standard sufficient to be presented in court. That is very different from a demographic survey. As with deaths in the Soviet Union under socialism, the only serious research approach will be to have a concept of "excess deaths" which can allow that many may have died from being uprooted from their homes, and other deaths may have been the result of settling village scores. The lines would be difficult to draw in retrospect. The overall picture of an assault on a whole people however will be clear.
Kosovo was cleared of Albanians in their hundreds of thousands so quickly by means of terror. It is hardly surpising that the refugees who were the source of information for the west, carried this picture with them.
It is true that the west had the propaganda advantage of these refugees, but also it is true that the west had not prepared for this or the cruelty and ruthlessness of the Serbs.
Besides, the number of deaths is not relevant to a charge of genocide. The expulsion of the great majority of the Albanians without identity papers fits international definitions of genocide, and rightly so. The 20th century has proved that to take a stand against fascism and genocide you must not wait until you can see the smoke rising from the gas ovens. Still less till you have acquired helicopter samples containing traces of carbonised human flesh.
Chris Burford
London