Chris Burford
London
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>From Green Left Weekly (Australia) Jan 19 2000
By Michael Karadjis
“The massacres that never were”, ran the headline in the right-wing London Spectator. The article reported claims by journalist John Laughland that “only” hundreds of Albanians had been killed in Kosova during the NATO-Serbia war last year, rather than the figure of 10,000 estimated by the United Nations. Laughland told readers, “A whole string of sites where atrocities were allegedly committed have revealed no bodies at all”.
This is hardly surprising from the Spectator, which represents the views of those disgruntled Tories who felt the traditional ties between the British and Serbian ruling classes were more important than British Labour's ambitions to put a “human face” on imperialist slaughter.
Similar stories also turned up in the Sunday Times and the New York Times, and it was taken up by the pro-Milosevic wing of the left. The view was also peddled by the US right-wing think-tank Stratfor, which had long advised Washington that its war would be counterproductive because it would help, rather than hinder, the struggle of the Kosova Liberation Army for an independent Kosova. Preventing Kosovan independence and disarming the KLA were key reasons NATO wanted its troops in Kosova, to do the job Milosevic had failed to do.
According to Stratfor, since “only” a few hundred bodies have been found, NATO's use of the term “genocide” to justify its war has “serious implications not just for NATO integrity, but for the notion of sovereignty”. It is certainly true that NATO's brutal war on Serb civilians casts much doubt on its “integrity,” but this right-left alliance to deny the Kosovan genocide has little integrity of its own.
The revisionists' main argument was that a Spanish forensic team returned home having discovered “only 187 bodies”. This pseudo-journalism left the reader to believe this was the only team searching. In fact, there were 20 such teams in different parts of the country -- a team in Djakovica discovered 200 bodies in five days.
When the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) recently released the figure of 2108 bodies so far discovered, rather than admit their mistake these revisionists continued. Maybe not “hundreds”, but “only 2000”, rather than 10,000.
Of course, the forensic teams had to pause their work for the winter. The 2108 figure was only from the 195 graves so far dug up -- out of the 529 so far identified. If that trend continued, there would something like 6000 bodies.
But, according to ICTY, this is just the bare minimum, because there was also widespread evidence of tampering with grave sites, of digging out bodies, of burning and scattering them. The 2108 bodies had been discovered in sites where Albanians had given accounts of 4256 murders of relatives -- the whereabouts of the other 2000 is still unknown.
In fact, the 10,000 figure was not invented by NATO, but based on figures produced by ICTY of 11,334 killings actually identified by relatives. How accurate this is it is difficult to say, but it is rarely mentioned that there are still 17,000 Kosovar Albanians completely unaccounted for. While up to 5000 are still rotting in Serbian jails, this leaves a figure for the presumed dead which is similar to the usual estimate.
But what has this to do with genocide? Are the revisionists saying that “only” 2000 dead is not genocide, but 10,000 dead is? In the UN Genocide Convention, “genocide” is defined as acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. Such acts, with these aims, are not restricted to killing, but include “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, such as uprooting people from their homes.
The Nuremberg Tribunal Charter explicitly lists deportation of the civilian population as one of its “crimes against humanity”. The genocide in Kosova was not a question of numbers of dead, but the fact that half the population of Kosova had been driven across borders, and around 80% of those remaining inside Kosova had also been uprooted from their homes.
Ironically, by doing a hatchet job on the brutalised Albanians in order to criticise NATO, these revisionists let NATO off the hook. NATO did not act in response to the genocide; the NATO bombing precipitated it. And when Milosevic launched his genocide using the NATO pretext, NATO did nothing to defend the Albanian victims for fear that actions against Serb military forces in Kosova would aid the KLA, the main thing NATO wanted to avoid.
Veteran Kosovan human rights campaigner Veton Surroi described an average day in the war: “It doesn't take much for a Serbian police unit to burn a village, but they [NATO] were up there 15,000 feet away bombing television transmitters. It was very annoying.”