Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Kosmet: dal Sunday Times (2)

October 31 1999 EUROPE 
As doubts rise about the number of dead in Kosovo, Jon Swain, who reported 
the war, says Serbian barbarity must not be forgotten 
Lost in the Kosovo numbers game 
 
IN A grim and icy-cold corner of northern Kosovo is the site of what was 
suspected to be the country's largest mass grave. To date, however, four 
months later, the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague has had to 
admit that its investigation of the site has turned up no evidence of 
bodies or of any wrongdoing by the Serbs. 
Back in June, in the full heat of a Balkan summer, some Nato officials and 
local residents said the deep shafts, the vats and the hydrochloric acid 
tanks of the Trepca mining complex where gold, silver, lead and zinc are 
extracted, were used as a disposal site to hide the bodies of ethnic 
Albanians killed by Serbian forces. The bodies were brought in trucks in 
the dead of night escorted by Serbian jeeps and troop carriers. They were 
dropped down the shafts, incinerated or dissolved by the acid. 
The first day local Kosovan Albanians said they saw the trucks was back in 
September 1998 and they said they continued to enter the mine until a few 
days before Nato troops arrived in June. Some reports at the time said as 
many as 1,000 bodies a day had been incinerated in the mine over the past 
two months. 
"There are Kosovar witnesses and still photos of these trucks," an 
anonymous American official was quoted as saying in Koha Ditore, the Kosovo 
Albanian daily, giving the report the imprint of authenticity. 
The idea that the Serbs were using Trepca to hide the evidence of mass 
killings quickly caught on in western newspapers. "Trepca - the name will 
live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka," said The Mirror. 
"It will be etched in the memories of those whose loved ones met a bestial 
end in true Nazi final solution fashion." Another report, in The New York 
Times, said residents on the edge of the mine reported an "unusual, pungent 
bittersweet smell, which they assumed to be burning bodies". 
Trepca is near the town of Kosovska Mitrovica, in the sector of Kosovo 
assigned to the French forces. It was one of the first places to be 
searched by Nato peacekeeping troops after the war's end. And the French 
troops who entered the mines were certainly suspicious of Serb activities. 
They informed the Hague tribunal (ICTY) that they had uncovered piles of 
Albanians' clothing, shoes, family photographs and identity documents when 
they searched the smelting area and mine shafts. The French also found that 
the vats had been cleaned before the Serb troops stationed in the complex 
had left, suggesting they had destroyed the evidence of their crimes. 
Trepca was clearly earmarked to be one of the keys to documenting mass 
killings of ethnic Albanians by Serbs in Kosovo, and the mine was 
immediately made a priority investigation site for the ICTY's forensic 
scientists, who began arriving in Kosovo in droves in June on the heels of 
the Nato victory. Their mission was to conduct a war crimes investigation 
unprecedented in military history. 
The finding by the tribunal that there are no bodies at Trepca, and the 
fact that another infamous mass grave site at Ljubenic, near Pec, which was 
widely publicised as containing 350 bodies and which turned out to hold 
only five, are now being presented as evidence that the number of civilian 
ethnic Albanians killed by the Serbs is much lower than Nato had originally 
claimed. 
One analysis by Stratfor, a private analytical group that looked at reports 
from the FBI and other police agencies sent to Kosovo to exhume bodies, 
suggests that the final death toll might be in the hundreds, not thousands. 
And the estimate of a Spanish forensic surgeon, Emilio Perez Pujol, who has 
just returned home, disillusioned after investigating war crimes in Kosovo, 
is that as few as 2,500 civilians were killed. 
In an outspoken interview, Pujol complained he had been sent to head a 
large investigation team attached to the ICTY, consisting of pathologists 
and police specialists, to work in the north of the country. But he found 
that what was publicised as a search for mass graves was "a semantic 
pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one - not 
one - mass grave". 
Pujol said his team had material for 2,000 autopsies and had expected to be 
in Kosovo for two and a half months. But in mid-September, after digging up 
97 bodies in a cemetery, which showed "no signs of mutilation or torture, 
but rather death from shrapnel or bullets", he decided to go home. 
"I called my people together and said: 'We've finished here.' I informed my 
government and told them the real situation. We had found a total of 187 
bodies, 97 in one place, eight in another, four in another and so on. Four 
or five had died from natural causes." He added: "A military action 
prejudices truth and I want to stress that trying to manipulate an 
international court does not benefit anyone." 
There never was much doubt in many reporters' minds, including my own, that 
the final death toll in Kosovo would turn out to be significantly lower 
than the more outrageous claims made by Nato. How much lower is still a 
question that cannot yet be answered. 
As we roamed the devastated countryside we calculated that it probably was 
somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000. There are 2,000 villages in Kosovo 
and, if each village lost on average five people, perhaps a conservative 
figure, that would suggest 10,000 killed. 
The ICTY is rightly cautious about revealing its findings, although Kelly 
Moore, a spokeswoman, said thousands of bodies had been exhumed. The 
American State Department says international investigators have recovered 
just 1,400 bodies, but these come from only 20% of the suspected grave 
sites. 
The ICTY was never mandated, however, to do a proper body count. Its role 
is to prosecute individuals accused of serious human rights violations in 
Kosovo, including genocide and crimes against humanity. What is important 
so far is that it has been able to turn up valuable forensic and 
documentary evidence of war crimes that it believes will help it establish 
a chain-of-command responsibility that will help in its indictment of 
President Slobodan Milosevic and four of his top aides. 
In May the tribunal indicted Milosevic on charges of crimes against 
humanity and war crimes committed by his forces in Kosovo, and further 
indictments of figures in the Serbian war machine are in the pipeline. 
The tribunal has now packed up for the winter as snow and cold weather 
grips Kosovo. It will resume next summer when the bulk of its work will be 
done, said Paul Risley, another spokesman. 
In the past four months the tribunal has investigated 150 of 400 crime 
sites. There have been many chilling discoveries of grievous human rights 
abuses. Even though no evidence of disposed human remains were found down 
the Trepca mine shafts, in a mass grave nearby French troops recently 
discovered 28 bodies of ethnic Albanians, all believed to be the victims of 
a raid by Serbian paramilitaries. Four people have been arrested. 
It is a pity that, during the war, Nato and western politicians repeatedly 
and deliberately overstepped the mark in their passionate justification of 
military action against Serbia to end atrocities in Kosovo. 
The gap between the hyperbole of the western propaganda machine and the 
realities of Kosovo were wide throughout the air campaign and led to the 
publication of wild, misleading and just plain untrue stories. Above all, 
there was a tendency to claim there was a systematic campaign of genocide 
in Kosovo. 
Just some examples. On April 19, in the midst of Nato airstrikes against 
Serbia, the American state department reported that up to 500,000 Kosovar 
Albanians were missing and feared to be victims of Serbian genocide. On May 
16, William Cohen, the American defence secretary, said that up to 100,000 
ethnic Albanian men in Kosovo had vanished and might have been killed by 
the Serbs. "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing," Cohen 
told CBS. "They may have been murdered." A column of 35,000 refugees 
vanished and Kosovar Albanian sources reported that tens of thousands of 
people had been rounded up in a sports stadium and were never heard from 
again. 
The war in Kosovo was Nato's first intervention in a sovereign country, so 
building a case to sway public opinion was crucial for it and member 
governments. "Public opinion wins wars," General Eisenhower said during the 
second world war; a remark that is as apt today as it was then. 
War reporting is now experiencing extraordinary changes. In the case of 
Kosovo, western military officers, officials and ministers all conspired to 
push out the party line. There was spin-doctoring on an unprecedented 
scale, which has damaged Nato's reputation for fairness and truth. And 
journalists as well as some military officers have been angered by the way 
Nato tried to stop its own mistakes and incompetences being exposed. 
All this has left a dedicated forensic scientist such as Pujol, who had 
come to Kosovo to help establish the truth, deeply irritated. In an 
interview with El Pais, he says: "We had been working with two parallel 
problems. One was the propaganda war. This allowed them to lie, to fake 
photographs for the press, to publish pictures of mass graves, or whatever 
they had to influence world opinion in favour or against Milosevic or in 
favour of the Nato bombings. At first, based on the 'witnesses' who arrived 
in Albania, they spoke of the massacre of 22,000 people by the troops of 
Milosevic. Later, when the Nato troops entered, they spoke of 11,000 dead. 
Later they started to talk of 9,000, but I believe they will arrive at a 
much lower figure." 
There never was a genocide in Kosovo. It was dishonest and wrong for 
western leaders to adopt the term in the beginning to give moral authority 
to the operation. Contrast the stark and emotive language over Kosovo, 
accompanying intervention, with the inaction of western governments when 
faced with a real genocide, as in Rwanda. When at least 500,000 people 
perished in 13 weeks in 1994, the American government forbade its officials 
to use the word "genocide" because of the moral and legal imperatives 
attached to it. The extermination continued. 
The only point that has ever needed to be made over Kosovo is that Serbian 
forces were committing atrocities on a scale that had to be stopped 
militarily because Milosevic was impervious to all forms of diplomatic, 
economic or moral pressures since the war began early in 1998. 
They rounded up and executed young and old men. They murdered children and 
expelled tens of thousands of people from their villages and then burnt 
them in a systematic ethnic-cleansing campaign which the tribunal's 
evidence suggests was planned in advance at a high level. In Kosovo, as in 
Bosnia, aid workers and journalists came across conduct reminiscent of the 
holocaust. 
Personal observation and the evidence of refugees was much more telling 
than Nato's dubious information campaign. 
A lower death toll, if indeed there is one, which has yet to be proved, 
does not erase the culpability of the Serbian leadership and its military 
forces in trying to destroy Kosovo. One western doctor I have talked to 
can, from her own experience, account for at least 50 deaths, mostly 
elderly people, women and children. 
In Glina, for example, the doctor has a young patient who says 93 people 
were taken from a convoy. He personally was in a group of 10-15 boys and he 
escaped. He does not know what happened to the rest, but included in the 
doctor's list of patients are the female relatives who cannot find the 
bodies of the 93. Perhaps they are in prison in Serbia. Their relatives 
would be delighted if they were. 
In Kosovo, it was not often necessary for the Serbs to kill masses of 
people in large-scale massacres, because they could be driven out at speed. 
Small amounts of terror were horribly effective. But there was also 
deliberate killing, for example the rounding up of a family who had rented 
their house to the OSCE, which I know about personally. 
Today there is one surviving member of that family. She watched while they 
were gunned down, including her four children. All of them were under 14 
and they clung to her body as the bullets flew. She was then put in a lorry 
with all the bodies. The Serbs thought she was dead as well, but she 
managed during the journey to throw herself off the lorry. 
So what the Kosovar revisionists may be forgetting, as they bandy about 
lower death-toll figures, is that the quality and nature of the Serbian 
attacks is more significant than the numbers of dead. How one incident like 
the murder of that woman's children resonates through her village. 
My doctor friend still has five children in hospital undergoing treatment 
because they managed to survive while the rest of their family was gunned 
down - 22 people, in all, including the eldest girl's mother, brothers and 
sisters. They saw it happen in their garden. The dead are buried and they 
wish the war crimes investigators would come and interview them. It would 
make some sense of the tragedy and help them come to terms with their loss. 
The bottom line in Kosovo has to be that one murder is one murder too many. 
It is not the size of the figures that matters, but what was done: and that 
was the murder of civilians. 
Nato was wrong to exaggerate as it did. The final death toll will never 
match its hyperbole. But just because fewer Kosovar Albanians may have been 
murdered than was originally thought can never mean that we should not 
pursue the normal course of criminal justice. 

them come to terms with their loss.
Anche questa non e' "pulizia etnica".
E se non troveranno i cadaveri si dira' che era tutta una invenzione.
Che non hanno mai avuto 5 bambini e che e' stata pagata dalla NATO/CIA
per fare tali accuse e aumentare il numero dei morti scandalizzando
l'opinione pubblica.
Ma la gente preferisce chiudere gli occhi davanti a questi orrori e
credere che sono tutte invenzioni di quegli sporchi imperialisti
americani che fanno tutto per il proprio gusto perverso di distruggere e
di uccidere.
-Stefano

Quindi si suppone che i cadaveri siano stati inceneriti o sciolti
dall'acido.
Geniale: POICHE' non si trovano cadaveri, vuol dire che ci sono. Continua
cosi', falsario.
Giuseppe Lucchesini

Continua cosi', falsario.
Continua cosi' imbecille :)
-Stefano