THE SPECTATOR (UK), Saturday, November 20, 1999
"I Was Right About Kosovo"
John Laughland
"The guy's a complete asshole." Spectator readers, who are simple souls, may be unfamiliar with the sophisticated legal terminology and carefully weighed judicial arguments employed by the Spokesman for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the body upon which all future international law and civilisation is to be based. Yet this was how Paul Risley described your correspondent when confronted with a recent article in this magazine on the low body count in Kosovo. In it, I alleged that the number of Albanians massacred by Serbs had been inflated by Nato propaganda and that the International Criminal Tribunal is so deep inside Nato's pockets as to make kangaroo courts look like models of due process.
Last week, the Tribunal's Prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, made a statement to the United Nations in New York to counter the article's allegations. She claimed that the findings of the forensic investigators were helping to establish both the total number of dead and the overall pattern of the killing. In fact what the report establishes is both the overall pattern - and indeed the detail - of the deception practised by the leading Nato governments.
In May 1999, at the height of the attacks on Yugoslavia, the US State Department published a detailed report entitled "Erasing History, Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo." Its political impact was immense, contributing to the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and the other Yugoslav leaders. The report is still available on the State Department's web site, suggesting that it remains authoritative. But what the Tribunal's findings now prove is that the report contained little but the wild imaginings - or deliberate lies - of the men and women whose fingers are on the buttons of the world's most powerful military alliance.
[...]The total body count reported by the Tribunal is 2,108.
Even if one assumes that all these people are Albanians murdered for ethnic reasons by Serbs, this is 1/5 of the number alleged by the Foreign Office in June; 1/50 of the number alleged by William Cohen in May; and 1/250 of the number suggested by the State Department in April. However, even this assumption is unjustified.
First, in the vast majority of cases, the bodies were buried in individual, not mass graves.
Second, the Tribunal will not say what sex or age the alleged victims are, let alone what nationality. There were many causes of violent death in the province: over 100 Serb and Albanian civilians have been killed in terrorist attacks by the Albanian KLA since its insurrection began in 1998; 462 Serb soldiers and 114 Serb Interior Ministry police were killed during the war; the KLA, which had tens of thousands of men under arms, also sustained casualties, as death notices in Kosovo towns announcing Albanian men killed in combat testify; and finally, hundreds of Serb and Albanian civilians were killed by the Nato bombing. (For that matter, over 200 hundred people have also been killed since the war by stepping on unexploded Nato cluster bombs.) Many of the excavations have been carried out in what are obviously Christian cemeteries (with gravestones rather than posts) while several corpses have been wearing blue (i.e. Serb police) uniforms.
The Prosecutor insists that this figure is not a final body count nor even a full census of the dead. As she says with remarkable candour, her office's first priority has been "to gather evidence relevant to the criminal charges against President Milosevic and other leaders" - in other words to look the other way if atrocities are committed by Albanians against Serbs or gypsies. (To underline the organic connection between the Tribunal and Nato, indeed, the former's web page has a link to the latter's.) Instead, she implies that the final body count may be higher when examinations of the remaining "crime scenes" resume in the spring. Paul Risley claims the exhumations have been shelved "because the ground is frozen". However, there has been no frost in Kosovo and the ground is not frozen: on the day this article was written (15th November) it was raining heavily in the province and the temperature was 10 degrees Centigrade. The exhumations must, therefore, have been interrupted for some other reason and the suspicion must be that the winter break is an attempt to kick the embarrassing question of the low body count into touch for a few months, in the hope that people will soon forget about it.
The pattern which is emerging, in other words, is not so much of a systematic attack on the Albanian population as such - Nato's declared casus belli - but rather of a low-level civil war with casualties on both sides, a situation greatly aggravated by Nato's attacks. The fighting was of an utterly different scale from that in either Bosnia or Croatia. Yes, crimes were committed by Serbs during the war, as they indisputably have been by Albanians before and after it. But the most accurate depiction of the nature of the Kosovo conflict is probably that given by a series of court rulings in Germany between January and March of this year, when a series of applications for political asylum by Kosovar Albanians were rejected because political persecution could not be proven. On 12th January 1999, for instance, the German Foreign Ministry gave the following opinion to the Administrative Court in Trier: "An explicit political persecution of the Albanian population cannot be established, even in Kosovo. The actions of the security forces are not directed against Kosovo Albanians as an ethnically defined group but instead against military opponents and their real or supposed supporters." Now, that's what I call legal reasoning.
