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NEW YORK - Chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague Carla Del Ponte said Wednesday that she had received a large number of reports calling for establishing facts about the crimes that NATO committed while bombing Yugoslavia.
Asked by a Boston Globe reporter at a news conference held at the United Nations' New York headquarters whether the tribunal planned to establish the truth about the crimes committed by NATO in Yugoslavia, Del Ponte said that she was carefully analysing the reports but that she could not say anything at this point.
She said she would decide whether there were grounds to launch an investigation against the aliance or not. She refused to further comment on the matter, despite a Yugoslav reporter's remark that the killing of more than 1,000 civilians during NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia should be a good enough reason for the tribunal to launch an investigation against the alliance.
Del Ponte, who reported to the Security Council on alleged mass graves in the Yugoslav republic of Serbia's Kosovo and Metohija province o Wednesday, evidently did not want to condemn NATO.
What Del Ponte reiterated at the news conference clearly indicates that there are no mass graves with bodies of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and Metohija. She said that a large number of bodies had not been found in any single location.
She said that 2,108 bodies had been so far discovered throughout the province. Reporters responded by asking why she insisted on 11,000 missing persons if there was no evidence that the number of persons listed as missing was that high.
Del Ponte conceded that she did know who launched the figure, trying to pin the blame on others. She said that the tribunal and herself received reports on and estimates about the number of victims mainly from humanitarian and non-governmental organisations.
Asked to comment on who these victims were, Del Ponte said that they were not all ethnic Albanians and that they included also Serbs.
Under pressure by reporters, Del Ponte conceded also that a number of victims were suspected to have been killed by the ethnic Albanian terrorist organisation calling itself Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and by Moslems.