WASHINGTON—To hear some of the generals talk today, the Kosovo Liberation Army and NATO could scarcely have worked more closely during the alliance’s 78-day air war in Kosovo.
KLA guerrillas constantly were on the phone to NATO “to tell us there were 15 bad guys down the road,” U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short, North Atlantic Treaty Organization air operations boss, told a conference in Virginia last month. And NATO itself “instigated” the KLA’s biggest offensive of the war in May 1999, German Gen. Klaus Naumann, former head of the NATO military committee, told an interviewer.
This collaboration might not be noteworthy—except that NATO leaders so emphatically denied it during the war. And the revisionist accounts are but one example of the way the official accounts have been rewritten or contradicted by insiders since the war.
While the air war is history, the issue is not just academic: The alliance can’t afford widespread doubts about its conduct of the war as it struggles to continue a peacekeeping effort that is likely to drag on for years in the province.
During the conflict, officials of NATO countries said that as many as 700,000 of Kosovo’s 1.9 million people had been internally displaced. Now, NATO officially puts the figure at 500,000, and sources within the alliance acknowledge that it could be much smaller—perhaps fewer than 100,000.
Likewise, during the war, U.S. officials said “tens of thousands” of Albanian men might have been slaughtered by the Serbs. Now, the official estimate is a maximum of 10,000 killed. A number of analysts believe the figure is 6,000 or fewer.....[from Jack Smith: actually during the war NATO was spreading the rumor that “hundreds of thousands” of Kosovo Albanians may have been killed. Also, regarding the possibility of 6,000 deaths, keep your eyes on the phrase that follows: “...or fewer.”]