Cheers, Ken Hanly
Chris Burford wrote:
> I commend this article as a critique of the leftist line on Kosovo:
>
> Chris Burford
>
> London
>
> ___________________________
>
> >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.”