"Where Are Kosovo's Killing Fields?"

[Carl Remick]

[I know many on the list receive Statfor's weekly bulletins, but I thought 
I'd post their latest anyway since the war remains such a hot topic here.]

STRATFOR.COM
Global Intelligence Update
Weekly Analysis October 18, 1999

Where Are Kosovo's Killing Fields?

Summary:

During its four-month war against Yugoslavia, NATO argued that
Kosovo was a land wracked by mass murder; official estimates
indicated that some 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in a Serb
rampage of ethnic cleansing. Yet four months into an international
investigation bodies numbering only in the hundreds have been
exhumed. The FBI has found fewer than 200. Piecing together the
evidence, it appears that the number of civilian ethnic Albanians
killed is far less than was claimed. While new findings could
invalidate this view, evidence of mass murder has not yet
materialized on the scale used to justify the war. This could have
serious foreign policy and political implications for NATO and
alliance governments.


Analysis:

On Oct. 11, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Republic of Yugoslavia (ICTY) reported that the Trepca mines in
Kosovo, where 700 murdered ethnic Albanians were reportedly hidden,
in fact contained no bodies whatsoever. Three days later, the U.S.
Defense Department released its review of the Kosovo conflict,
saying that NATO's war was a reaction to the ethnic cleansing
campaign by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. His campaign was
"a brutal means to end the crisis on his terms by expelling and
killing ethnic Albanians, overtaxing bordering nations'
infrastructures, and fracturing the NATO alliance."

The finding by The Hague's investigators and the assertion by the
Pentagon raise an important question.  Four months after the war
and the introduction of forensic teams from many countries,
precisely how many bodies of murdered ethnic Albanians have been
found? This is not an exercise in the macabre, but a reasonable
question, given the explicit aims of NATO in the war, and the
claims the alliance made on the magnitude of Serbian war crimes.
Indeed, the central justification for war was that only
intervention would prevent the slaughter of Kosovo's ethnic
Albanian population.

On March 22, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the House of
Commons, "We must act to save thousands of innocent men, women and
children from humanitarian catastrophe, from death, barbarism and
ethnic cleansing by a brutal dictatorship."  The next day, as the
air war began, President Clinton stated: "What we are trying to do
is to limit his (Milosevic's) ability to win a military victory and
engage in ethnic cleansing and slaughter innocent people and to do
everything we can to induce him to take this peace agreement."

As NATO's first intervention in a sovereign nation, the war in
Kosovo required considerable justification. Throughout the
year, NATO officials built their case, first calling the situation
in Kosovo "ethnic cleansing," and then "genocide."  In March, State
Department spokesman James Rubin told reporters that NATO did not
need to prove that the Serbs were carrying out a policy of genocide
because it was clear that crimes against humanity were being
committed. But just after the war in June, President Bill Clinton
again invoked the term, saying, "NATO stopped deliberate,
systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide."

Indeed, as the months progressed, the estimates of those killed by
a concerted Serb campaign, dubbed Operation Horseshoe, have
swollen. Early on, experts systematically generated what appeared
to be sober and conservative estimates of the dead.  For example,
prior to the outbreak of war, independent experts reported that
approximately 2,500 Kosovar Albanians had been killed in the
Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign.

That number grew during and after the war. Early in the campaign,
huge claims arose about the number of ethnic Albanian men feared
missing and presumed dead. The fog and passion of war can explain
this. But by June 17, just before the end of the war, British
Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon reportedly 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." He further clarified that these 10,000 were ethnic
Albanians killed by Serbs.

On Aug. 2, the number jumped up by another 1,000 when Bernard
Kouchner, the United Nations' chief administrator in Kosovo, said
that about 11,000 bodies had already been found in common graves
throughout Kosovo. He said his source for this information was the
ICTY. But the ICTY said that it had not provided this information.
To this day, the source of Kouchner's estimates remains unclear.
However, that number of about 10,000 ethnic Albanians dead at the
hands of the Serbs remains the basic, accepted number, or at least
the last official word on the scope of the atrocities.

Regardless of the precise genesis of the numbers, there is no
question that NATO leaders argued that the war was not merely
justified, but morally obligatory.  If the Serbs were not
committing genocide in the technical sense, they were certainly
guilty of mass murder on an order of magnitude not seen in Europe
since Nazi Germany.  The Yugoslav government consistently denied
that mass murder was taking place, arguing that the Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA) was fabricating claims of mass murder in
order to justify NATO intervention and the secession of Kosovo from
Serbia.  NATO rejected Belgrade's argument out of hand.

Thus, the question of the truth or falsehood of the claims of mass
murder is much more than a matter of merely historical interest. It
cuts to the heart of the war - and NATO's current peacekeeping
mission in Kosovo.  Certainly, there was a massive movement of
Albanian refugees, but that alone was not the alliance's
justification for war. The justification was that the Yugoslav army
and paramilitaries were carrying out Operation Horseshoe, and that
the war would cut short this operation.

But the aftermath of the war has brought precious little evidence,
despite the entry of Western forensics teams searching for evidence
of war crimes.  Mass murder is difficult to hide. One need only
think of the entry of outsiders into Nazi Germany, Cambodia or
Rwanda to understand that the death of thousands of people leaves
massive and undeniable evidence. Given that many NATO leaders were
under attack at home - particularly in Europe - for having waged
the war, the alliance could have seized upon continual and graphic
evidence of the killing fields of Kosovo to demonstrate the
necessity of the war and undercut critics.  Indeed, such evidence
would help the alliance undermine Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic, by helping to destroying his domestic support and
energizing his opponents.

As important, no one appears to really be trying to recover all of
the Kosovo war's reported victims. Of the eight human rights
organizations most prominent in Kosovo, none is specifically tasked
with recovering victims and determining the cause of death. These
groups instead are interviewing refugees and survivors to obtain
testimony on human rights violations, sanitizing wells and
providing mental health services to survivors. All of this is
important work.  But it is not the recovery and counting of bodies.

It is important to note that a sizable number of people who resided
in Kosovo before the war are now said to be unaccounted for - 17,
000, according to U.S. officials. However, the methodology for
arriving at this number is unclear.  According to NATO, many
records were destroyed by the Serbs. Certainly, no census has been
conducted in Kosovo since the end of the war.  Thus, it is
completely unclear where the specific number of 17,000 comes from.
There are undoubtedly many missing, but it is unclear whether these
people are dead, in Serbian prisons - official estimates vary
widely - or whether they have taken refuge in other countries.

The dead, however, have not turned up in the way that the West
anticipated, at least not yet. The massive Trepca mines have so far
yielded nothing.  Most of the dead have turned up in small numbers
in the most rural parts of Kosovo, often in wells. News reports say
that the largest grave sites have contained a few dozen victims;
some officials say the largest site contained far more,
approximately 100 bodies. But the bodies are generally being found
in very small numbers - far smaller than encountered after the
Bosnian war.

Only one effort now underway may shed light on just how many ethnic
Albanian civilians were - or weren't - killed by Serb forces. The
ICTY is coordinating efforts to investigate war crimes in Kosovo.
Like human rights organizations, the tribunal's primary aim is not
to find all the reported dead. Instead, its investigators are
gathering evidence to prosecute war criminals for four offenses:
grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, violations of the laws of
war, and genocide and crimes against humanity. The tribunal
believes that it will, however, be able to produce an accurate
death count in the future, although it will not say when. A
progress report may be released in late October, according to
tribunal spokesman Paul Risley.

Under the tribunal's guidance, police and medical forensic teams
from most NATO countries and some neutral nations are assigned to
investigate certain sites.  The teams have come from 15 nations:
Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany,
Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the
United Kingdom and the United States. The United States has sent
the largest team, with 62 members. Belgium, Germany and the United
Kingdom have each sent teams of approximately 20. Most countries
dispatched teams of fewer than 10 members.

So far, investigators are a little more than one quarter of the way
through their field work, having examined about 150 of 400
suspected sites. The investigative process is as follows: ICTY
investigators follow up on reports from refugees or KFOR troops to
confirm the existence of sites. Then the tribunal deploys each team
to a certain region and indicates the sites to be investigated.
Sites are either mass graves - which according to the tribunal
means more than one body is in the grave - or crime scenes, which
contain other evidence. The teams exhume the bodies, count them,
and perform autopsies to determine age, gender, cause of death and
time of death all for the purpose of compiling evidence for future
war crimes trials. The by-product of this work, then, is the actual
number of bodies recovered. The investigations will continue next
year when the weather allows further exhumations.

In the absence of an official tally of bodies found by the teams,
we are forced to piece together anecdotal evidence to get a picture
of what actually happened in Kosovo. From this evidence, it is
clear that the teams are not finding large numbers of dead, nothing
to substantiate claims of "genocide."

The FBI's work is a good example. With the biggest effort, the
bureau has conducted two separate investigations, one in June and
one in August, and will probably be called back again. In its most
recent visit, the FBI found 124 bodies in the British sector of
Kosovo, according to FBI spokesman Dave Miller. Almost all the
victims were killed by a gunshot wound to the head or blunt force
trauma to the head. The victims' ages were between 4 and 94. Most
of the victims appeared to have been killed in March and April. In
its two trips to Kosovo since the war's end, the FBI has found a
total of 30 sites containing almost 200 bodies.

The Spanish team was told to prepare for the worst, as it was going
into Kosovo's real killing fields. It was told to prepare for over
2000 autopsies. But the team's findings fell far short of those
expectations. It found no mass graves and only 187 bodies, all
buried in individual graves. The Spanish team's chief inspector
compared Kosovo to Rwanda.  "In the former Yugoslavia crimes were
committed, some no doubt horrible, but they derived from the war,"
Juan Lopez Palafox was quoted as saying in the newspaper El Pais.
"In Rwanda we saw 450 corpses [at one site] of women and children,
one on top of another, all with their heads broken open."

Bodies are simply not where they were reported to be. For example,
in July a mass grave believed to contain some 350 bodies in
Ljubenic, near Pec - an area of concerted fighting - reportedly
contained only seven bodies after the exhumation was complete.
There have been similar cases on a smaller scale, with initial
claims of 10 to 50 buried bodies proven false.

Investigators have frequently gone to reported killing sites
only to find no bodies. In Djacovica, town officials claimed that
100 ethnic Albanians had been murdered but reportedly alleged that
Serbs had returned in the middle of the night, dug up the bodies,
and carried them away. In Pusto Selo, villagers reported that 106
men were captured and killed by Serbs at the end of March. NATO
even released satellite imagery of what appeared to be numerous
graves, but again no bodies were found at the site. Villagers
claimed that Serbian forces came back and removed the bodies. In
Izbica, refugees reported that 150 ethnic Albanians were killed in
March. Again, their bodies are nowhere to be found. Ninety-six men
from Klina vanished in April; their bodies have yet to be located.
Eighty-two men were reportedly killed in Kraljan, but investigators
have yet to find one of their bodies.

Killings and brutality certainly took place, and it is possible
that massive new findings will someday be uncovered. Without being
privy to the details of each investigation on the ground in Kosovo,
it is possible only to voice suspicion and not conclusive proof.
However, our own research and survey of officials indicates that
the numbers of dead so far are in the hundreds, not the thousands.
It is possible that huge, new graves await to be discovered. But
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are presumably quick to reveal the
biggest sites in the hope of recovering family members or at least
finding out what happened. In addition, large sites would have the
most witnesses, evidence and visibility for inspection teams. Given
progress to date, it seems difficult to believe that the 10,000
claimed at the end of the war will be found. The killing of ethnic
Albanian civilians appears to be orders of magnitude below the
claims of NATO, alliance governments and early media reports.

How could this have occurred?  It appears that both governments and
outside observers relied on sources controlled by the KLA, both
before and during the war. During the war this reliance was
heightened; governments relied heavily on the accounts of refugees
arriving in Albania and Macedonia, where the KLA was an important
conduit of information. The sophisticated public relations machine
of the KLA and the fog of war may have generated a perception that
is now proving dubious.

What is clear is that no one is systematically collecting the
numbers of the dead in Kosovo even though such work would only help
NATO in its efforts to remain in Kosovo and could possibly topple
Milosevic. What can be learned of the investigations to date
indicates deaths far below expectations.  Finally, all of this
suspicion can be easily dispelled by a comprehensive report by
NATO, the United Nations, or the United States and other
responsible governments detailing the findings of the forensic
teams, and giving timeframes for completion and results. It is
unclear that, even if the ICTY releases a report soon, it will
address all these issues. The lack of an interim report indicating
the discovery of thousands of Albanian victims strikes us as
decidedly odd.  One would think that Clinton, Blair and the other
leaders would be eager to demonstrate that the war was not only
justified, but morally obligatory.

It really does matter how many were killed in Kosovo. The foreign
policy and political implications are substantial. There is a line
between oppression and mass murder. It is not a bright, shining
one, but the distinction between hundreds of dead and tens of
thousands is clear. The blurring of that line has serious
implications not merely for NATO's integrity, but for the notion of
sovereignty. If a handful - or a few dozen - people are killed in
labor unrest, does the international community have the right to
intervene by force? By the very rules that NATO has set up, the
magnitude of slaughter is critical.

Politically, the alliance depended heavily on the United States for
information about the war. If the United States and NATO were
mistaken, then alliance governments that withstood heavy criticism,
such as the Italian and German governments, may be in trouble.
Confidence in both U.S. intelligence and leadership could decline
sharply. Stung by scandal and questions about its foreign policy,
the Clinton administration is already having difficulty influencing
world events. That influence could fall further. There are many
consequences if it turns out that NATO's claims about Serb
atrocities were substantially false.

(c) 1999, Stratfor, Inc.

[end]

Carl

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