Kosovo's 'genocide' -- where are the bodies?

Last weekend, I briefly attended a Toronto conference sponsored by the pro-Serb, Canadian Centre for Peace in the Balkans on the aftermath of the war against Yugoslavia.

The Centre's president, the soft-spoken Stevan Ivancevic, had the unenviable task during NATO's 78-day bombing campaign of trying to explain Serbia's position to Canadians, something he was only able to do with modest success, given the generally anti-Serb mindset of the public and media.

The brief time I spent at the conference was interesting - although some of it struck me as the converted preaching to the converted. One thing Ivancevic said stuck with me - his contention that few, if any, mass graves have been found in Kosovo and that the number of ethnic Albanians killed by so-called "rampaging Serb paramilitaries" may only have been in the hundreds, not the thousands earlier claimed.

In the week since, it's become clear that a growing controversy is developing among the world media regarding the number of people actually killed. While one death in war is one too many, this number is important because public opinion in the West in support of bombing Yugoslavia was largely built on NATO and Western claims that Slobodan Milosevic was unleashing the worst genocide in Europe since Hitler.

If so, where are the bodies? Estimates have been steadily dropping since the war. During the war, U.S. President Bill Clinton told American vets that 600,000 ethnic Albanians were "trapped within Kosovo itself lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or buried in mass graves."

In May, U.S. Defence Secretary William Cohen suggested up to 100,000 ethnic Albanians of military age had been killed.

Ever since, the number of reported dead has been dropping - 44,000, 22,000, and now, between 10,000 and 11,000.

But as TVO's Diplomatic Immunity reported on Oct. 29, followed last week by pieces by Richard Gwyn in the Star and John Laughland in The Spectator (as reprinted in the National Post), evidence to date suggests the number of bodies actually found is around 500, although many U.S. media, some with reporters on scene, still use the 10,000 figure.

While the excavation of hundreds of reported "mass grave" sites continues, the low figure suggests the possibility, since the worst sites were examined first, that NATO bombs may have actually killed at least as many civilians as Serbian paramilitaries did. If so, this would undermine the moral imperative of the war and suggest NATO intervened for self-interest.

It may also provide a case study in how war propaganda is used to shift public opinion. While TV footage of ethnic Albanian refugees also created outrage against Yugoslavia in the West, think of all the slaughtering and ethnic cleansing we routinely ignore in the world when our potential opponent, unlike Yugoslavia, is able to fight back. For example, Russia, given its latest brutal invasion of Chechnya.

TVO producer Dan Dunsky told me he was unable to get anyone to talk about body counts in Kosovo despite calls to NATO headquarters in Pristina, the local police force (who referred calls to NATO after NATO referred calls to it), the UN mission in Kosovo and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which is probing war crimes.

Dunsky said he could understand the Tribunal not wanting to get into "a numbers game" but one would think the UN and NATO especially would want to get out numbers to verify earlier claims. (Another Tribunal spokesman while refusing to discuss specifics, told The Spectator the findings are consistent with 10,000 dead.) There have also been claims that bodies were subsequently moved, destroyed, hidden.

But where? With war crimes experts now combing Kosovo, ethnic Albanian refugees having returned and with aerial reconnaissance photographs taken during the war showing what NATO generals and politicians said were mass graves with individual burial plots (although a mass grave site with individual plots in war time doesn't make much sense) you have to start wondering why it's taking so long to find evidence of genocide. That is, if there was genocide in the sense that NATO military and political leaders led us to believe, as opposed to individual atrocities that occur in all civil wars.

Lorrie can be reached at (416) 947-2212, by fax at (416) 947-3228 or by e-mail at [email protected].