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GMT, 991017 – Where Are Kosovo’s Killing Fields?
Summary
During its four-month war against Yugoslavia, NATO
argued that Kosovo was a land wracked by mass murder; official estimates
indicated that some 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in a Serb rampage
of ethnic cleansing. Yet four months into an international investigation,
bodies numbering only in the hundreds have been exhumed. The FBI has found
fewer than 200. Piecing together the evidence, it appears that the number
of civilian ethnic Albanians killed is far less than was claimed. While
new findings could invalidate this view, evidence of mass murder has not
yet materialized on the scale used to justify the war. This could have
serious foreign policy and political implications for NATO and alliance
governments.
The Justification
for War
On Oct. 11, the International Criminal Tribunal for
the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (ICTY) reported that the Trepca mines
in Kosovo, where 700 murdered ethnic Albanians were reportedly hidden,
in fact contained no bodies whatsoever. Three days later, the U.S. Defense
Department released its review of the Kosovo conflict, saying that NATO’s
war was a reaction to the ethnic cleansing campaign by Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic. His campaign was "a brutal means to end the crisis
on his terms by expelling and killing ethnic Albanians, overtaxing bordering
nations' infrastructures, and fracturing the NATO alliance."
The finding by The Hague’s investigators and the
assertion by the Pentagon raise an important question. Four months after
the war and the introduction of forensic teams from many countries, precisely
how many bodies of murdered ethnic Albanians have been found? This is not
an exercise in the macabre, but a reasonable question, given the explicit
aims of NATO in the war, and the claims the alliance made on the magnitude
of Serbian war crimes. Indeed, the central justification for war was that
only intervention would prevent the slaughter of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian
population.
On March 22, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told
the House of Commons, "We must act to save thousands of innocent men, women
and children from humanitarian catastrophe, from death, barbarism and ethnic
cleansing by a brutal dictatorship." The next day, as the air war began,
President Clinton stated: "What we are trying to do is to limit his (Milosevic’s)
ability to win a military victory and engage in ethnic cleansing and slaughter
innocent people and to do everything we can to induce him to take this
peace agreement."
As NATO’s first intervention in a sovereign nation,
the
war in Kosovo required considerable justification. Throughout the year,
NATO officials built their case, first calling the situation in Kosovo
"ethnic cleansing," and then "genocide." In March, State Department spokesman
James Rubin told reporters that NATO did not need to prove that the Serbs
were carrying out a policy of genocide because it was clear that crimes
against humanity were being committed. But just after the war in June,
President Bill Clinton again invoked the term, saying, "NATO stopped deliberate,
systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide."
The Claims Grow
Indeed, as the months progressed, the estimates of
those killed by a concerted Serb campaign, dubbed Operation Horseshoe,
have swollen. Early on, experts systematically generated what appeared
to be sober and conservative estimates of the dead. For example, prior
to the outbreak of war, independent experts reported that approximately
2,500 Kosovar Albanians had been killed in the Serbian ethnic cleansing
campaign.
That number grew during and after the war. Early
in the campaign, huge claims arose about the number of ethnic Albanian
men feared missing and presumed dead. The fog and passion of war can explain
this. But by June 17, just before the end of the war, British Foreign Office
Minister Geoff Hoon reportedly said: "According to the reports we have
gathered, mostly from the refugees, it appears that around 10,000 people
have been killed in more than 100 massacres." He further clarified that
these 10,000 were ethnic Albanians killed by Serbs.
On Aug. 2, the number jumped up by another 1,000
when Bernard Kouchner, the United Nations’ chief administrator in Kosovo,
said that about 11,000 bodies had already been found in common graves throughout
Kosovo. He said his source for this information was the ICTY. But the ICTY
said that it had not provided this information. To this day, the source
of Kouchner’s estimates remains unclear. However, that number of about
10,000 ethnic Albanians dead at the hands of the Serbs remains the basic,
accepted number, or at least the last official word on the scope of the
atrocities.
Regardless of the precise genesis of the numbers,
there is no question that NATO leaders argued that the war was not merely
justified, but morally obligatory. If the Serbs were not committing genocide
in the technical sense, they were certainly guilty of mass murder on an
order of magnitude not seen in Europe since Nazi Germany. The Yugoslav
government consistently denied that mass murder was taking place, arguing
that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was fabricating claims of mass murder
in order to justify NATO intervention and the secession of Kosovo from
Serbia. NATO rejected Belgrade’s argument out of hand.
Thus, the question of the truth or falsehood of the
claims of mass murder is much more than a matter of merely historical interest.
It cuts to the heart of the war – and NATO’s current peacekeeping mission
in Kosovo. Certainly, there was a massive movement of Albanian refugees,
but that alone was not the alliance’s justification for war. The justification
was that the Yugoslav army and paramilitaries were carrying out Operation
Horseshoe, and that the war would cut short this operation.
But the aftermath of the war has brought precious
little evidence, despite the entry of Western forensics teams searching
for evidence of war crimes. Mass murder is difficult to hide. One need
only think of the entry of outsiders into Nazi Germany, Cambodia or Rwanda
to understand that the death of thousands of people leaves massive and
undeniable evidence. Given that many NATO leaders were under attack at
home – particularly in Europe – for having waged the war, the alliance
could have seized upon continual and graphic evidence of the killing fields
of Kosovo to demonstrate the necessity of the war and undercut critics.
Indeed, such evidence would help the alliance undermine Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic, by helping to destroy his domestic support and energize
his opponents.
As important, no one appears to really be trying
to recover all of the Kosovo war’s reported victims. Of the eight human
rights organizations most prominent in Kosovo, none is specifically tasked
with recovering victims and determining the cause of death. These groups
instead are interviewing refugees and survivors to obtain testimony on
human rights violations, sanitizing wells and providing mental health services
to survivors. All of this is important work. But it is not the recovery
and counting of bodies.
It is important to note that a sizable number of
people who resided in Kosovo before the war are now said to be unaccounted
for – 17,000, according to U.S. officials. However, the methodology for
arriving at this number is unclear. According to NATO, many records were
destroyed by the Serbs. Certainly, no census has been conducted in Kosovo
since the end of the war. Thus, it is completely unclear where the specific
number of 17,000 comes from. There are undoubtedly many missing, but it
is unclear whether these people are dead, in Serbian prisons – official
estimates vary widely – or whether they have taken refuge in other countries.
The Investigation
The dead, however, have not turned up in the way
that the West anticipated, at least not yet. The massive Trepca mines have
so far yielded nothing. Most of the dead have turned up in small numbers
in the most rural parts of Kosovo, often in wells. News reports say that
the largest grave sites have contained a few dozen victims; some officials
say the largest site contained far more, approximately 100 bodies. But
the bodies are generally being found in very small numbers – far smaller
than encountered after the Bosnian war.
Only one effort now underway may shed light on just
how many ethnic Albanian civilians were – or weren’t – killed by Serb forces.
The ICTY is coordinating efforts to investigate war crimes in Kosovo. Like
human rights organizations, the tribunal’s primary aim is not to find all
the reported dead. Instead, its investigators are gathering evidence to
prosecute war criminals for four offenses: grave breaches of the Geneva
Convention, violations of the laws of war, and genocide and crimes against
humanity. The tribunal believes that it will, however, be able to produce
an accurate death count in the future, although it will not say when. A
progress report may be released in late October, according to tribunal
spokesman Paul Risley.
Under the tribunal’s guidance, police and medical
forensic teams from most NATO countries and some neutral nations are assigned
to investigate certain sites. The teams have come from 15 nations: Austria,
Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Luxembourg,
Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United
States. The United States has sent the largest team, with 62 members. Belgium,
Germany and the United Kingdom have each sent teams of approximately 20.
Most countries dispatched teams of fewer than 10 members.
So far, investigators are a little more than one
quarter of the way through their field work, having examined about 150
of 400 suspected sites. The investigative process is as follows: ICTY investigators
follow up on reports from refugees or KFOR troops to confirm the existence
of sites. Then the tribunal deploys each team to a certain region and indicates
the sites to be investigated. Sites are either mass graves – which according
to the tribunal means more than one body is in the grave – or crime scenes,
which contain other evidence. The teams exhume the bodies, count them,
and perform autopsies to determine age, gender, cause of death and time
of death all for the purpose of compiling evidence for future war crimes
trials. The by-product of this work, then, is the actual number of bodies
recovered. The investigations will continue next year when the weather
allows further exhumations.
In the absence of an official tally of bodies found
by the teams, we are forced to piece together anecdotal evidence to get
a picture of what actually happened in Kosovo. From this evidence, it is
clear that the teams are not finding large numbers of dead, nothing to
substantiate claims of "genocide."
The FBI’s work is a good example. With the biggest
effort, the bureau has conducted two separate investigations, one in June
and one in August, and will probably be called back again. In its most
recent visit, the FBI found 124 bodies in the British sector of Kosovo,
according to FBI spokesman Dave Miller. Almost all the victims were killed
by a gunshot wound to the head or blunt force trauma to the head. The victims’
ages were between 4 and 94. Most of the victims appeared to have been killed
in March and April. In its two trips to Kosovo since the war’s end, the
FBI has found a total of 30 sites containing almost 200 bodies.
The Spanish team was told to prepare for the worst,
as it was going into Kosovo’s real killing fields. It was told to prepare
for over 2000 autopsies. But the team’s findings fell far short of those
expectations. It found no mass graves and only 187 bodies, all buried in
individual graves. The Spanish team’s chief inspector compared Kosovo to
Rwanda. "In the former Yugoslavia crimes were committed, some no doubt
horrible, but they derived from the war," Juan Lopez Palafox was quoted
as saying in the newspaper El Pais. "In Rwanda we saw 450 corpses [at one
site] of women and children, one on top of another, all with their heads
broken open."
Bodies are simply not where they were reported to
be. For example, in July a mass grave believed to contain some 350 bodies
in Ljubenic, near Pec – an area of concerted fighting – reportedly contained
only seven bodies after the exhumation was complete. There have been similar
cases on a smaller scale, with initial claims of 10 to 50 buried bodies
proven false.
Investigators have frequently gone to reported killing
sites, only
to find no bodies. In Djacovica, town officials claimed that 100 ethnic
Albanians had been murdered but reportedly alleged that Serbs had returned
in the middle of the night, dug up the bodies, and carried them away. In
Pusto Selo, villagers reported that 106 men were captured and killed by
Serbs at the end of March. NATO even released satellite imagery of what
appeared to be numerous graves, but again no bodies were found at the site.
Villagers claimed that Serbian forces came back and removed the bodies.
In Izbica, refugees reported that 150 ethnic Albanians were killed in March.
Again, their bodies are nowhere to be found. Ninety-six men from Klina
vanished in April; their bodies have yet to be located. Eighty-two men
were reportedly killed in Kraljan, but investigators have yet to find one
of their bodies.
What Happened?
Killings and brutality certainly took place, and
it is possible that massive new findings will someday be uncovered. Without
being privy to the details of each investigation on the ground in Kosovo,
it is possible only to voice suspicion and not conclusive proof. However,
our own research and survey of officials indicates that the numbers of
dead so far are in the hundreds, not the thousands. It is possible that
huge, new graves await to be discovered. But ethnic Albanians in Kosovo
are presumably quick to reveal the biggest sites in the hope of recovering
family members or at least finding out what happened. In addition, large
sites would have the most witnesses, evidence and visibility for inspection
teams. Given progress to date, it seems difficult to believe that the 10,000
claimed at the end of the war will be found. The killing of ethnic Albanian
civilians appears to be orders of magnitude below the claims of NATO, alliance
governments and early media reports.
How could this have occurred? It appears that both
governments and outside observers relied on sources controlled by the KLA,
both before and during the war. During the war this reliance was heightened;
governments relied heavily on the accounts of refugees arriving in Albania
and Macedonia, where the KLA was an important conduit of information. The
sophisticated public relations machine of the KLA and the fog of war may
have generated a perception that is now proving dubious.
What is clear is that no one is systematically collecting
the numbers of the dead in Kosovo, even though such work could possibly
topple Milosevic and would only help NATO in its efforts to remain in Kosovo.
What can be learned of the investigations to date indicates deaths far
below expectations. Finally, all of this suspicion can be easily dispelled
by a comprehensive report by NATO, the United Nations, or the United States
and other responsible governments detailing the findings of the forensic
teams, and giving timeframes for completion and results. It is unclear
that, even if the ICTY releases a report soon, it will address all these
issues. The lack of an interim report indicating the discovery of thousands
of Albanian victims strikes us as decidedly odd. One would think that Clinton,
Blair and the other leaders would be eager to demonstrate that the war
was not only justified, but morally obligatory.
It really does matter how many were killed in Kosovo.
The foreign policy and political implications are substantial. There is
a line between oppression and mass murder. It is not a bright, shining
one, but the distinction between hundreds of dead and tens of thousands
is clear. The blurring of that line has serious implications not merely
for NATO’s integrity, but for the notion of sovereignty. If a handful –
or a few dozen – people are killed in labor unrest, does the international
community have the right to intervene by force? By the very rules that
NATO has set up, the magnitude of slaughter is critical.
Politically, the alliance depended heavily on the
United States for information about the war. If the United States and NATO
were mistaken, then alliance governments that withstood heavy criticism,
such as the Italian and German governments, may be in trouble. Confidence
in both U.S. intelligence and leadership could decline sharply. Stung by
scandal and questions about its foreign policy, the Clinton administration
is already having difficulty influencing world events. That influence could
fall further. There are many consequences if it turns out that NATO’s claims
about Serb atrocities were substantially false. |