The final death toll in Kosovo? It's sinking fast

LONDON - Extravagant claims about the extent of Serb evil in Kosovo, made during the confrontation with NATO this year, are now proving difficult to substantiate.

On May 16, William Cohen, the U.S. defence secretary, said Yugoslav army forces had killed up to 100,000 Albanian men of military age. This number was declared missing, the refugees having all claimed their menfolk had been separated from them as they fled Kosovo.

Tony Blair, the British prime minister, implied that the numbers might be even higher. "We must be ready for what we know will be clear evidence of ... as yet unknown numbers of people missing, tortured and dead," when he wrote in the Times on June 5.

On June 17, Geoff Hoon, the minister of state in Britain's Foreign Office, 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 that was blazed across the world's media. Reporting was markedly less energetic, however, when the true figure turned out to be only seven. Billed as the "biggest mass grave in Kosovo," Ljubenic was in fact not a mass grave at all.

Similarly, on Oct. 11, 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 the more extravagant claims were fantasy. In August, Perez 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]."

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, 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 that take time. But such judicial circumspection was ignored in May, when the tribunal issued its indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and other Yugoslav leaders at the height of the 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 that the number of bodies discovered to date is in the hundreds. Yet he confirms all the other data, which includes the revelation that a whole string of sites where atrocities were allegedly committed have revealed no bodies at all. Mr. Risley also concedes that the number of mass graves -- is "not very many." While refusing to give a body count, he insists the tribunal's overall findings are consistent with the figure of 10,000 given 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 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 the fact Kosovar towns are littered with death notices of Serb civilians killed during the war and in the KLA insurrection that 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. 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 physically present in Kosovo itself.

Suspicion must therefore remain. As an Albanian man said, whose daughter had admitted lying to a U.S. TV channel when she claimed her sister had been killed by the Serbs: "Against the Serbs, you had to fight in every way, even with propaganda like this."