Where Are Kosovo's Killing Fields?

Nathan Newman nathan.newman at yale.edu
Tue Oct 19 13:37:57 PDT 1999


I forward this from the another list that got it from the Justwatch site

Has the Serbian Government hacked Stratfor's site?

As a person working with a project interviewing individuals to gather data on violations of international humanitarian law committed in Kosovo:

Stratfor's analysis is superficial and uninformed. Bodies appear to have been: buried, exhumed, transported and reburied; or transported to Serbia; or cremated; or mixed with animal corpses and rubble and destroyed with explosives (most frequently in wells). Thus the "10000 claimed" will probably never be found.

Although it is not possible to know exactly how many victims suffered this additional trauma, there is evidence of considerable organsiation of the disposal process, including the involvement of civilian enterprises such as waste disposal firms in the movement of bodies. Existing graves in cemeteries were also used to conceal corpses. Such an amount of preparation appears to reflect lessons learned from Bosnia and Croatia and a particularly disgusting contempt for human life.

The ICTY Office of the Prosecutor has stated that 500 potential mass grave sites have been reported, not 400. The process of examining each one is likely to take years: in Bosnia, where internationals were present throughout the conflict, graves are still being uncovered. Although the Office of the Prosecutor operates in Kosovo in a more favourable political climate than in Bosnia, the relative lack of international presence in Kosovo between March and June makes the task of identifying and prioritising sites and reconstructing events harder. It is, therefore, questionable whether any legitimate conclusions can currently be drawn about the scale of killing.

The piece speaks of a line between oppression and mass murder, yet admits that hundreds of people, if not thousands, may have been killed. What is a "large number of dead"? Why is that, or a reported second-hand comparison with Rwanda, relevant to a situation where, the evidence suggests, a State directed the full official and unofficial power of its various armed forces against civilians?

It is, moreover, a fallacy to focus on the scale of killing as the being the primary determinant for intervention in Kosovo. Genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes do not depend on numbers for their commission, nor on murder. There are villages in Kosovo where not a single structure has a roof, towns where whole suburbs have been demolished. Large areas of the province remain inaccessible as potential minefields. The water system was poisoned, fields spoiled. More than one million people were expelled in under twelve weeks. Perhaps, therefore, the analysis could more usefully have highlighted that mass murder appears to have been but one component of terror.

jon cina



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