[Gael]

The only “uninformed or willfully deceptive commentator” is you, big fella, and I’m calling BS on ya. Brigadier Bo said “it cannot be stated that any ethnic cleansing or genocide was taking place in Kosovo before the war started.” That statement comports completely with the piece you cited, in which the 400,000 refugees (the number sounds high but I’ll assume arguendo that it’s correct) are described as the result of fighting throughout the province:

“The fighting caused additional displacement both within Kosovo and across its borders”;

“So far, the fighting in Kosovo has displaced about 400,000, according to UNHCR.”

No mention of “genocide” as a cause, and the only “ethnic cleansing” noted in the piece was by Albanians against Serbs: “The souring of negotiations also brought with it Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) attacks aimed at trying to ‘cleanse’ Kosovo of its ethnic Serb civilian population.” Looks like we bombed the side that was undergoing the ethnic cleansing, not the perps thereof – but we both know the ethnic cleansing canard had nothing to do with the bombing, right Hopster?

In short, your entire premise is that the existence of refugees reflects “ethnic cleansing or genocide”. The report you cite tells the exact opposite story than what you claim and corroborates rather than refutes Bo’s statement. Given that, you might want to work on your reading comprehension skills before pulling your fake righteous schtick on Jane.

[Hoplite]

At one Kosovo border town, Ivaja, Serb forces burned most of the houses. Reuters news agency found the only remaining civilian in the town, Ramadan Muljoki, an 84-year-old man. Still in shock and caked with blood, Muljoki told the Reuters reporter, "They beat me with rifles and asked me if I knew anyone from the KLA. They asked me if my son was in the KLA and I said no and they beat me again."

About nine miles from the Macedonian border, Serb forces rounded up about 400 of the displaced people who had fled their homes in Ivaja. They separated the military-age men from the women, children, and elderly men, and loaded them onto trucks and took them to a nearby school in Kacanik. The police took about 100 of the younger men in armored cars to a police station, telling international monitors on the scene that they would "root out terrorists."

Hmm... Help me out here, Gael - my reading comprehension skills aren't apparently all I thought they were.

Either that, or you're still suffering from that particularly Serb version of HUA syndrome I've been treated to ever since wandering into these Balkan threads on FR.

What happened in Ivaja was ethnic cleansing. If you want to call it fighting, then you're just conforming to the idiocy endemic on these threads, aren't you.

By early March the VJ and police were carrying out acts of deliberate destruction and looting sometimes in plain sight of the OSCE-KVM, and the mission was recording such destruction, looting and pillage in many locations in Kosovo. source

Don't worry Gael - it wasn't ethnic cleansing, it's all some misunderstanding or conspiracy by Serbia's enemies to make her look bad.

Yeah, that's the ticket.