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THE MASSACRES THAT NEVER WERE
Contrary to propaganda, mass graves in Kosovo are a myth, says
John Laughland
IT was a lonely job, being Prime Minister, Tony Blair told the Labour party conference. He had sleepless nights. Sometimes, he said, there were 'life and death decisions to take'; which delicate hint is the closest he has so far come to taking the credit for having fought the war against Yugoslavia - and no wonder. He must realise that Kosovo has not proved to be his Falklands. This is not least because, as the province continues to languish in corruption and chaos, it is now obvious that Mr Blair's crude Manichaeism during the war was very wide of the mark. But maybe his insomnia is also connected with the fact that the extravagant claims then made for Serb evil are now proving difficult to substantiate.
On 16 May, the US defence secretary William Cohen said that Yugoslav army forces had killed up to 100,000 Albanian men of military age. This number was declared missing, the refugees having all claimed that their menfolk had been separated from them as they fled Kosovo. Tony Blair himself implied that the numbers might be even higher when he wrote in the Times on 5 June, 'We must be ready for what we know will be clear evidence of ... as yet unknown numbers of people missing, tortured and dead.' On 17 June, the then minister of state in the Foreign Office, Geoff Hoon, announced that some 10,000 people had been killed in more than 100 massacres but added, 'The final toll may be much worse.'
As journalists followed Nato troops into the province, the newspapers were strewn with maps showing scores of mass graves. There was particular excitement when 'the biggest mass grave ever' was announced to have been discovered in Ljubenic. It was said to contain 350 bodies, a figure which was blazed across the world's media. Reporting was markedly less energetic however, when the true figure turned on to be only seven. Billed as the 'biggest mass grave in Kosovo', Ljubenic was in fact not a mass grave at all. Similarly, on 11 October, a spokesman for the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague announced that no bodies or bones had been found in the mines at Trepca in northern Kosovo: rumours had been circulating in Kosovo that Serbian forces had dumped the bodies of as many as 700 Kosovars into its shafts.
Various experts have confirmed that the more extravagant claims were fantasy. In August, Pdrez Pujol, a Spanish forensic expert, told El Pais, 'I have been reading the data from the UN. They began with 44,000 deaths. Then they lowered it to 22,000. And now they're going with 11,000. I look forward to seeing what the final count will really be.' The chief Spanish inspector, Juan Lopez Palafox, added, 'They told us that we should prepare ourselves to perform more than 2,000 autopsies. The result is very different. We only found 187 cadavers and now we are going to return [to Spain].' Later the same month, a German doctor who had spent the war in the Stenkovac refugee camp in Macedonia cast light on the allegation that all the men of military age in Kosovo had been murdered. He told Die Welt, 'It was very surprising that a large number of journalists either could not or would not perceive the majority of the people in the refugee camps were men of military age. It was always represented as if there were no men in the camps at all. Even when the journalists were told this they refused to take account of it.'
So what is the final body count? A senior intelligence source in Croatia insists that, with 20 forensic teams active in Kosovo throughout the summer - some 500 professional criminologists altogether - the total number of bodies exhumed in Kosovo to date is 670. Yet, as a matter of policy, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia refuses to play the numbers game.
One might consider the Tribunal's coyness justified, since forensic investigations and autopsies are serious matters which take time. But such judicial circumspection was notoriously thrown to the wind on 22 May 1999 when the Tribunal issued its highly politically charged indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and other Yugoslav leaders at the height of Nato's war. That indictment listed the names of hundreds of Albanians allegedly murdered by Serbs: it is not clear why the Tribunal's rules of evidence are different from what they were five months ago.
Paul Risley, the spokesman for the Tribunal's prosecutor, vehemently denies a recent report by a Texas-based think-tank, Stratfor, that the number of bodies discovered to date is in the hundreds. Yet he confirms all the other data, which include the revelation that a whole string of sites where atrocities were allegedly committed have revealed no bodies at all. Risley also concedes that the number of 'mass graves' - i.e. single trenches into which numerous bodies have been thrown - is 'not very many'. However, while refusing to give a body count, he insists that the Tribunal's overall findings are consistent with the figure of 10,000 given by Geoff Hoon in June and that the autopsies indicate execution.
The main problem is that the Tribunal cannot be considered impartial. It has invested too much of its own credibility as an institution in the indictment of the Yugoslav leaders, and its efforts are overwhelmingly devoted to substantiating that charge. Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing and racial murder of Kosovo Serbs and gypsies by Albanians has been quietly proceeding under its very nose. Only two weeks ago, a Bulgarian UN official was mistaken for a Serb in Pristina and promptly beaten and murdered by Albanians. Despite reassurances given at the time of the massacre of 14 Serbs near Lipljan in July, and despite the fact that Kosovan towns are littered with death notices of Serb civilians killed during the war and in the KLA insurrection which preceded it, no indictment of the KLA leaders by the Tribunal has been forthcoming. It is even less likely that it will bring war-crime charges against Nato itself, even though several groups have called for Nato to be prosecuted. It is difficult to see how the Tribunal could confidently affirm in May, from the safety of its offices in The Hague, that Serb leaders were personally teleguiding massacres, while it has been unable to investigate the KLA's role in murdering Serbs and gypsies after the war at a time when Tribunal investigators were actually physically present in Kosovo itself.
Suspicion must therefore remain. As an Albanian man said, whose daughter had admitted lying to the American TV channel CBC when she claimed that her sister had been killed by the Serbs: 'Against the Serbs, you had to fight in every way, even with propaganda like this' - a thought with which Alastair Campbell is unlikely to disagree. The story about Rajmonda avenging the death of her sister by indiscriminately killing Serbs had been beamed around the world at the height of the conflict. As a friend of the family said, 'If this small lie ... made some kind of impact on what Western countries did in Kosovo, then it's worth it.' Of the impact such stories had, there can certainly be no doubt whatever; their veracity, however, is a different matter.
1
Posted on 10/28/1999 15:00:04 PDT by Gael
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To: Gael
Of course, Wesley Clark is claiming that over 10,000 bodies HAVE ALREADY BEEN COUNTED. Next year, when the final tally is done, there will be no coverage, no reminder of the claims of today.
2 Posted on 10/28/1999 15:04:28 PDT by ftrader
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To: Gael
Bump. I would love to see this reported in the American mainstream media, but I have a feeling I shouldn't hold my breath.
3 Posted on 10/28/1999 15:08:49 PDT by Ditto
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To: ftrader
bttt
4 Posted on 10/28/1999 15:11:18 PDT by Mmmike
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To: ftrader
It's simple. All those missing bodies, those lost souls, have served their God-given purpose in the great scheme of things.
They got Juanita Broaddrick out of the headlines...
5 Posted on 10/28/1999 15:20:25 PDT by okie01
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To: Ditto
The American media would report on this but Christmas is only 2 months away and they have a backlog of consumer reports on unsafe toys. Thank God for the watchdog press.
6 Posted on 10/28/1999 16:23:22 PDT by Burkeman1
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To: Burkeman1
<laughing>... good article, good post. BUMP
7 Posted on 10/28/1999 16:59:18 PDT by George W. Bush (boygeorge@nwo.net)
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To: Gael
What happened to those thousands of women that were raped? I'll always remember that heifer on CNN crying so about the wives being raped while the men and children were forced to watch.
No. I still don't love Big Brother and I'll be going off to Room 101 tomorrow.
8 Posted on 10/28/1999 17:23:28 PDT by powell
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To: Gael
The Tribunal reminds me of an old Polish joke:
A little two-seater aircraft with a student and instructor was buzzing the local countryside when the engine quit and they crashed into a cemetary. When initial rescue teams on the scene called back to their base to ask for reinforcements and were questioned as too the number of fatalities;........... they reported that it was 97 so far but they were still digging.
Thats probably where the Tribunal is now concentrating its body count search!
9 Posted on 10/28/1999 18:37:10 PDT by GhostSoldier
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To: Gael
You mean there wasn't a genocide, there weren't any rape camps, we didn't destroy 3/4 of the Serb army, and the KLA aren't well-meaning democratic liberators? And I'm living on a planet of people who bought into the lies hook, line and sinker? Beam me up, Scotty!
10 Posted on 10/28/1999 18:47:53 PDT by Clinton's a rapist
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To: Clinton's a rapist
"Energize"
11 Posted on 10/28/1999 19:09:34 PDT by GhostSoldier
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To: okie01
Here's another take(this shortly after 3/24):
Longtime Clinton nemesis Larry Nichols, seems to have developed a reliable White House source for the latest on the Kosovo crisis.
For instance, Nichols knew that Clinton's war on Slobodan Milosevic would commence precisely on March 24 -- and said so up and down the radio dial nearly a week before it happened.
And now other events Nichols described to Inside Cover early last week are being confirmed by the mainstream press.
Last Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the CIA warned Clinton that bombing would only accelerate Kosovo's refugee problem. Now stories swirl about how Clinton overruled even his Pentagon advisors on the advisability of military action.
Days before any of this hit the media Nichols told us, "The morning the bombing started, I found out there was a huge rift inside the administration."
Then the onetime Clinton crony added, "In fact, if you start looking into this you'll find that the White House staff even called Hillary to come home because they hoped she'd get Bill to stop it."
Mrs. Clinton was touring Africa when her husband ordered the NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia. Nichols says network reporters were able to confirm what his White House source told him about the call to Hillary -- but have sat on the story.
It was White House fears over expected Chinagate bombshells in the soon-to-be released Cox report that prompted Clinton to order "bombs away" over Belgrade.
After a March 19 press conference where the President was queried about ongoing Chinese espionage, he and his advisors met and examined their options for a "bankable issue", Nichols said. "They expected the Cox report to come out the next Wednesday and they needed something big."
A week later Kosovo had replaced China on the front pages. According to Nichols, Clinton was giving high fives to his staff, telling them, "We hit a home run."
12 Posted on 10/28/1999 21:22:08 PDT by jedi
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To: jedi
I'd like to give billy j. a high five up side his head! He is worse than a murderer...he even tries to kill the spirit of his victims. What a bloody PIG...pink face and all.
13 Posted on 10/28/1999 22:41:45 PDT by crazykatz
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To: crazykatz
bmp
14 Posted on 10/28/1999 22:46:17 PDT by Joe Montana
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To: Gael
If no one challenges the present, you'll never have to account for the past.
15 Posted on 10/28/1999 22:50:35 PDT by Bush2000
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To: jedi
The Summer/Fall issue of "The Resister" has some scoop that the next target is Montenegro with the usual CIA sponsored anti-Serb demonstrations and then a "peacekeeping" force sent in to expel the FRY from the province. Only Pat Buchanan and his run for president keeps them at bay.
16 Posted on 10/28/1999 23:19:45 PDT by wile
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To: wile
Since there are so many Serbs in Montenegro, it will be a bloodbath. Plus, many citizens of that province do want to be separated from FRY...it could be different, very different than all the other "wars". The Serbs might win and NATO/UN/EU can not take that chance. My bet is that they will encourage the leader of Montenegro to make some compromise with FRY. In other words,PAY HIM OFF.
17 Posted on 10/29/1999 13:05:38 PDT by crazykatz
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To: Gael
Do you have the link to this article? I'd like to include it in my "protest" efforts. Thanks in advance.
18 Posted on 10/29/1999 18:51:32 PDT by Balto_Boy
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To: Clinton's a rapist
"You mean there wasn't a genocide, there weren't any rape camps, we didn't destroy 3/4 of the Serb army, and the KLA aren't well-meaning democratic liberators? And I'm living on a planet of people who bought into the lies hook, line and sinker? Beam me up, Scotty!"
If ClinToon and John McCain say it, it must be true!
Note that this piece should not come as revelation if the average person had an attention span any longer than that of a housefly. 6 months before ClinToon started bombing Serbia, the press portrayed the KLA as terrorists sponsored by Bin Laden and financing their armaments through the heroin trade. Suddenly, in most Orwellian fashion, when ClinToon and the lickspittle Republicans who failed to oppose him began their war crimes, the press began to chime about the heroic freedom fighters of the KLA.
And then there was the genocide myth. Well, if you define any civil war action as genocide, I guess that was true (was the US Civil War then genocide)? But who could argue with our exalted Commander in chief and the honorable McCain who egged the war crimes on even further...we were stopping the next Hitler after all. The press told us so, thus it must be true!
19 Posted on 10/29/1999 18:56:57 PDT by Gecko
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To: powell
At the beginning of the bombing there was a lecture for military personnel (by supposed 'serb expert' -- but he was really from Army Artillery) to explain all the evils of the Serb.
He mentioned the Rape Camps and said that it is a method of genocide: you see, the women get raped, and then the men, being good Moslems, will never touch the women again, and the race dies out. Everyone was fresh from sensitivity training so they were suitably sympathetic.
20 Posted on 11/05/1999 09:49:10 PST by eniapmot
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Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
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