Serb killings 'exaggerated' by west Claims of up to 100,000 ethnic Albanians massacred in Kosovo revised to under 3,000 as exhumations near end Special report: Kosovo Jonathan Steele Guardian Friday August 18, 2000 The final toll of civilians confirmed massacred by Yugoslav forces in Kosovo is likely to be under 3,000, far short of the numbers claimed by Nato governments during last year's controversial air strikes on Yugoslavia. As war crimes experts from Britain and other countries prepare to wind down the exhumation of hundreds of graves in Kosovo on behalf of the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, officials concede they have not borne out the worst wartime reports. These were given by refugees and repeated by western government spokesmen during the campaign. They talked of indiscriminate killings and as many as 100,000 civilians missing or taken out of refugee columns by the Serbs. The fact that far fewer Kosovo Albanians were massacred than suggested by Nato will raise sharp questions about the organisation's handling of the media and its information strategy. However, commentators yesterday stressed that the new details should not obscure the fact that the major war crime in the tribunal's indictment of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, and four other Serb officials is the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo and forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of people. "The point is did we successfully pre-empt or not," Mark Laity, the acting Nato spokesman, said last night. "I think the evidence shows we did. We would rather be criticised for overestimating the numbers who died than for failing to pre-empt. Any objective analysis would say there was a clear crisis. There was indiscriminate killing. There were attempts to clear hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes." When Yugoslav forces withdrew from Kosovo in June last year, Nato spokesmen estimated that the Serbs had killed at least 10,000 civilians. While the bombing was under way William Cohen, the US defence secretary, announced that 100,000 Kosovo Albanian men of military age were missing after being taken from columns of families being deported to Albania and Macedonia. "They may have been murdered," he said. The fear was they might share the fate of the men who were separated from their wives and children and executed when Serb forces overran the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia. But while some 7,000 Bosnian Muslims died in the week-long Srebrenica massacre in 1995, less than 3,000 Kosovo Albanian murder victims have been discovered in the whole of Kosovo. "The final number of bodies uncovered will be less than 10,000 and probably more accurately determined as between two and three thousand," Paul Risley, the Hague tribunal's press spokesman, said yesterday. In three months of digging this summer, the tribunal's international forensic experts found 680 bodies at 150 sites. This was in addition to the 2,108 bodies found at 195 sites last year before exhumations were called off because of winter frosts. "By October we expect to have enough evidence to end the exhumations by foreign teams, and they will not be necessary next year," Mr Risley added. Although the tribunal has received reports of another 350 suspected grave sites, it believes the cost and effort of uncovering them would not be justified. Some suspicious mounds or patches of rough earth in fields where villagers reported a foul stench turned out to contain dead animals or to be empty. When the tribunal's teams reached Kosovo last summer, shortly after the international peacekeepers, they were given reports of 11,334 people in mass graves, but the results of its exhumations fall well short of that number. In a few cases, such as the Trepca mine where hundreds of bodies were alleged to have been flung down shafts or incinerated, they found nothing at all. The tribunal's indictment of President Milosevic includes the charge that during Nato's bombing campaign Serb police shot 105 ethnic Albanian men and boys near the village of Mala Krusa in western Kosovo. Witnesses claimed hay was piled on the bodies and set alight. Tribunal experts believe the remains may have been tampered with later, since the bones of only a few people were found. Motives questioned The exhumation of less than 3,000 bodies is sure to add fuel to those who say Nato's intervention against Yugoslavia was not "humanitarian" and that it had other motives such as maintaining its credibility in a post-cold war world. Others say Nato's air strikes revealed a grotesque double standard since western governments did nothing when hundreds of thousands were being massacred in Rwanda. Carla del Ponte, the tribunal's chief prosecutor, told the UN security council: "Our task is not to prepare a complete list of war casualties. Our primary task is to gather evidence relevant to criminal charges." Evidence of the forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of people was overwhelming before the tribunal gained access to Kosovo but the exhumations are aimed at finding evidence for the charges of mass murder. "Their benefit is to link forensic evidence to particular units of the police and army operating in particular parts of Kosovo. It wasn't a case of rogue units. The Serbian police state was fully involved," Mr Risley said. But officials will not say how many of the 2,788 bodies exhumed show clear signs of being victims of summary execution such as being shot in the head from close range. No Nato government has sought to produce a definitive total of murdered ethnic Albanian civilians since the Serb offensives began in March 1998, a year before the bombing. "No one is interested," complained a senior international official in Kosovo involved in helping victims' families. "Nato doesn't want to admit the damage wasn't as extensive as it said. Local Albanian politicians have the same motive. If you don't have the true figure, you can exploit the issue." http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4052755,00.html 'Motivated to believe the worst' Special report: Kosovo Jonathan Steele Guardian Friday August 18, 2000 The horror in Kosovo was "a story that has not yet been fully told," the US defence secretary, William Cohen, told American marines on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt a few days after Nato ended its bombing campaign. "When it is, people all over the world will understand why it was that America believed it had to take action." Flushed with victory after 78 days of air strikes finally led President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, Mr Cohen was still in combative mood as he visited US units around the Adriatic. Yet, as new details about the war emerge, Mr Cohen's "untold story" reveals the opposite of what he predicted. The reality of what was going on in Kosovo was less, not more, appalling than Nato claimed. The International Criminal Tribunal's disclosure that the final toll of bodies dug up in Kosovo would be under 3,000 contrasts starkly with the estimates of mass murder given by Nato while the bombs were falling. Mr Cohen told a CBS interviewer in May that 100,000 men of military age were missing, and "may have been murdered". David Scheffer, the US envoy for war crimes issues, put the figure even higher. He told reporters at Nato headquarters on May 18 last year that more than 225,000 ethnic Albanian men between the ages of 14 to 59 were unaccounted for. In fact, the atrocities during the Bosnian war were on a larger scale than Kosovo. Ethnic cleansing accounted for more people in Bosnia, and some 200,000 were murdered. The hyperbole over the atrocities in Kosovo seemed to flow from Nato's need to shore up public support for its bombing, especially when the air strikes failed to secure Mr Milosevic's surrender after the first few days. "It was hard to know what was going on. But we were motivated to believe the worst," recalls Jack Seymour, a former US state department official who works for the non-governmental British American Security Information Council. Although most Nato allegations of atrocities were covered by caveats that the reports could not be verified, officials knew these reservations were the equivalent of the small print in a contract. Headlines and soundbites were what counted. Nato also had the authority, spurious or otherwise, of data from intelligence. Brendan Paddy of Amnesty International says: "During the war people were asking us to stand up the figures of deaths and we said we couldn't corroborate them because we had no access to Kosovo. We didn't know to what extent Nato statements were based on military intelligence. If there was intelligence to back it up at the time, it would be useful if Nato would come forward now." When the war ended, Geoff Hoon, then a junior minister at the Foreign Office, said on June 17 last year that "at least 10,000" Albanian civilians were killed. Five months later the Foreign Office in a memorandum to the House of Commons repeated the phrase, saying it was based "on a variety of intelligence and other sources". But it continued to make assertions without providing evidence. The memorandum claimed that a "high proportion of bodies will never be recovered, given the degree to which Serb forces, fearing war crimes charges, attempted to destroy bodies". Was this unverifiable statement an alibi to explain the relatively low number of bodies being dug up? The Hague war crimes tribunal itself refuses to give a toll of murdered civilians. It is not its job to come up with a figure, officials say. Besides the bodies exhumed, the search for a final total would have to include the people reported missing and still unaccounted for. The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), which has a mandate to trace missing people, has received 4,941 requests from families in Kosovo. In 1,573 cases the file was closed, with 199 missing people being confirmed dead and the Serb authorities admitting they were holding 1,374 Albanian men in prisons in Serbia. Of the remaining 3,368 cases some 370 are of people reportedly abducted by the Kosovo Liberation Army or Kosovo Albanian civilians. Neither the Red Cross or the Hague tribunal can say how many of the missing 3,000 coincide with the bodies unearthed. "Between 60 and 80% of the bodies which the tribunal unearthed last year were identified but they haven't given us the lists of names," says Victoria Romano, the ICRC's protection officer in Pristina, Kosovo. Even if no names on the two lists coincided, this would raise the total of the Serbs' potential victims to a maximum of 6,000, still substantially less than the Foreign Office's "at least 10,000". http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4052753,00.html Figures put on Serb killings too high Special report: Kosovo Jonathan Steele Guardian Friday August 18, 2000 Nato officials conceded last night that their wartime estimates of the number of Kosovo Albanian civilians massacred by Serb forces might have been too high. They were reacting to findings by forensic experts for the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague who are preparing to complete their work in Kosovo after exhuming about 3,000 bodies. Not all of the dead can be proved to be victims of murder or execution. The war crimes teams have dug up 680 corpses this year at 150 sites. Added to the 2,108 found last year, the total is well below the murder estimates, ranging from 10,000 to 100,000, made during the war. Paul Risley, the Hague tribunal's press spokesman, said yesterday: "The final number of bodies uncovered will be less than 10,000 and probably more accurately determined as between two and three thousand." Nato's intervention against Yugoslavia was prompted by massive Serb offensives against Albanian villages in Kosovo, which caused hundreds of thousands of civilians to hide in forests or flee across the border. There were frequent killings of unarmed civilians. During the Nato airstrikes, when the Serbs restricted access to Kosovo, there was no way to verify atrocity reports. But Nato officials talked of 100,000 missing men and said at least 10,000 had been killed. Mark Laity, the acting Nato spokesman, said last night: "Nato never said the missing were all dead. The figure we stood by was 10,000. If it's wrong, I'm prepared to put up with a little bit of egg on our face if thousands are alive who were thought to be killed. He added: "Nato is always going to lose. If there were 100,000 dead we would be criticised for entering Kosovo late. If it's a few thousand, we're criticised because people say there wasn't a crisis." http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4052759,00.html The washing line of death Special report: Kosovo Jonathan Steele Guardian Friday August 18, 2000 In ones and twos Kosovo Albanians approach the mortuary at Pristina's main hospital every day and look at the clothes hanging out to dry. Usually they go away frustrated but sometimes they recognise a T-shirt or a pair of trousers and break down in tears. It is proof at last that a husband, father, or son is dead. For Detective Superintendent Steve Watts, the head of the British forensic team which has been exhuming bodies on behalf of the war crimes tribunal in the Hague, the scenes have been heart-rending. "By now most bodies are skeletal and there are very sparse dental records in Kosovo. So items of clothing are often the only chance to identify people'" he said. The exhumers photograph the remains, count the bodies and check for signs of the cause of death. When it comes to identifying people, usually they can do little more than determine the age and sex - except for bits of clothing, which are examined and then washed. Remarkable Clothing displays have been organised elsewhere in Kosovo. At the most recent, at the bread factory in Fushe Kosove, grieving families recognised 15% of the articles. "I thought this was a remarkable proportion," said Det Supt Watts. In the first year of the tribunal's operations in Kosovo, when bodies were fresher, the rate was higher. Roughly two-thirds of the 2,108 bodies exhumed in 1999 were identified. This year the British team, the largest in the territory, has been concentrating on two sites. It has dug up 180 bodies at a cemetery in Dragodan, a suburb of Pristina. They were found in unmarked pits, and often one hole had two or three bodies in it. "Was it intended to hide the bodies?", Det Supt Watts asked. At Makoc, near Pristina, the team reopened graves dug by Albanian villagers shortly after the war to give a dignified burial to 61 people who had last been seen when Serb forces separated them from a refugee column. Here the tribunal team's aim was to determine the cause of death. Many had gunshot wounds in the skull, apparently fired at close range. This year's digging by the British team has produced no evidence of bodies having been burnt. This would be a strong clue to deliberate tampering.