Young women are being separated from the refugee columns,' he said, 'and forced to undergo systematic rape in an army camp. I know of several tabloid reporters who were despatched to Macedonia and Albania with the sole purpose of finding a rape victim. We were aware of the implications of some of our more despicable behaviour. We knew that one woman, raped by Serbian soldiers then forced to leave her country, was traumatised all over again by a journalist looking for a good story. The things you come to know as a journalist do not march in single file.
Facts are often renegade.
But among the rape victims arriving in Macedonia nobody spoke of anything like the camps the British Foreign Secretary referred to. Benedicte Giaever told me there had been rape, but not systematic and not on a grand scale. It's not to say it didn't happen. Another senior OSCE source spoke even more clearly than any of us were inclined to do. He told me he suspected that the Kosovo Liberation Army had been persuading people to talk in bigger numbers, to crank up the horror so that Nato might be persuaded to send ground troops in faster.