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PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Aug 3 (AFP) - The head of the UN interim administration in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, on Tuesday backpedalled over comments he made the day before that "11,000 people died" in the province in the Serb military operation against ethnic Albanians.
His spokeswoman, Nadia Younes, said Kouchner's "statement reflected what many people believe to be the potential number of victims, based on reports of mass graves in Kosovo received to date from all sources."
She added: "Most of these reports are, as yet, unconfirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He did not intend to imply that the ICTY itself had provided these figures or that the ICTY had completed its investigations in Kosovo."
Kouchner, who is renown in his native France for having founded the Medecins Sans Frontiers humanitarian organisation, had told AFP and other journalists here Monday that there were "around 11,000 in the mass graves. Eleven thousand people died. You must understand the feeling of that people, the proximity of the suffering."
When AFP had questioned him further over the figure, Kouchner had replied: "This is roughly the number of the ICTY people."
That assertion surprised ICTY deputy prosecutor Graham Blewitt, who told AFP in The Hague that the ICTY had not provided any such estimates.
Blewitt underlined the lengthy process involved in first establishing a list of missing persons, then confirming which of these were dead and eventually investigating which were casualties of war or victims of war crimes.
"This work will still take months," Blewitt said.
Apart from the 340 victims of massacres mentioned in the ICTY's indictment of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic confirmed in May, the tribunal has not made known any figure relating to the number of victims in Kosovo, he added.
"The only thing that we have said is that the figure for the victims of war crimes is more likely to be in the thousands than in the hundreds."