Posted on 03/13/2006 2:57:16 AM PST by Fred Nerks
Claims of up to 100,000 ethnic Albanians massacred in Kosovo revised to under 3,000 as exhumations near end Special report:
Kosovo The final toll of civilians confirmed massacred by Yugoslav forces in Kosovo is likely to be under 3,000, far short of the numbers claimed by Nato governments during last year's controversial air strikes on Yugoslavia.
As war crimes experts from Britain and other countries prepare to wind down the exhumation of hundreds of graves in Kosovo on behalf of the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, officials concede they have not borne out the worst wartime reports. These were given by refugees and repeated by western government spokesmen during the campaign. They talked of indiscriminate killings and as many as 100,000 civilians missing or taken out of refugee columns by the Serbs. The fact that far fewer Kosovo Albanians were massacred than suggested by Nato will raise sharp questions about the organisation's handling of the media and its information strategy. However, commentators yesterday stressed that the new details should not obscure the fact that the major war crime in the tribunal's indictment of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, and four other Serb officials is the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo and forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of people. "The point is did we successfully pre-empt or not," Mark Laity, the acting Nato spokesman, said last night. "I think the evidence shows we did. We would rather be criticised for overestimating the numbers who died than for failing to pre-empt.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Although the tribunal has received reports of another 350 suspected grave sites, it believes the cost and effort of uncovering them would not be justified.
Some suspicious mounds or patches of rough earth in fields where villagers reported a foul stench turned out to contain dead animals or to be empty. When the tribunal's teams reached Kosovo last summer, shortly after the international peacekeepers, they were given reports of 11,334 people in mass graves, but the results of its exhumations fall well short of that number. In a few cases, such as the Trepca mine where hundreds of bodies were alleged to have been flung down shafts or incinerated, they found nothing at all. The tribunal's indictment of President Milosevic includes the charge that during Nato's bombing campaign Serb police shot 105 ethnic Albanian men and boys near the village of Mala Krusa in western Kosovo. Witnesses claimed hay was piled on the bodies and set alight.
Tribunal experts believe the remains may have been tampered with later, since the bones of only a few people were found. Motives questioned The exhumation of less than 3,000 bodies is sure to add fuel to those who say Nato's intervention against Yugoslavia was not "humanitarian" and that it had other motives such as maintaining its credibility in a post-cold war world. Others say Nato's air strikes revealed a grotesque double standard since western governments did nothing when hundreds of thousands were being massacred in Rwanda. Carla del Ponte, the tribunal's chief prosecutor, told the UN security council: "Our task is not to prepare a complete list of war casualties. Our primary task is to gather evidence relevant to criminal charges." Evidence of the forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of people was overwhelming before the tribunal gained access to Kosovo but the exhumations are aimed at finding evidence for the charges of mass murder. "Their benefit is to link forensic evidence to particular units of the police and army operating in particular parts of Kosovo. It wasn't a case of rogue units. The Serbian police state was fully involved," Mr Risley said. But officials will not say how many of the 2,788 bodies exhumed show clear signs of being victims of summary execution such as being shot in the head from close range. No Nato government has sought to produce a definitive total of murdered ethnic Albanian civilians since the Serb offensives began in March 1998, a year before the bombing. "No one is interested," complained a senior international official in Kosovo involved in helping victims' families. "Nato doesn't want to admit the damage wasn't as extensive as it said. Local Albanian politicians have the same motive. If you don't have the true figure, you can exploit the issue."
I think I mussed it up. Delete if you think you need to, thanks.
Sounds like New Orleans after Katrina.
Didn't they also predict that HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS Afghani's were going to starve or freeze to death just before we went into Afghanistan?
You may be interested in this?
Serb killings 'exaggerated' by west the Clinton Administration
There. That's better.
When was this ever a 'point'? Not until we discovered that the number of deaths by ethnic cleansing were deemed completely erroneous did this idiotic cover-our-ass point ever mentioned.
The ONLY pre-empt, which was the original reason for bombing Bosnia, was to keep the Senate from carrying forth impeachment sentencing and allowing Clinton's sorry ass to remain in the White House.
Clinton lied and people died.
Where were the lefty moonbats when Clinton was lying to rush us into a war? Where were they when NATO was intentionally bombing civilian targets? I often ask the lefties this when I encounter them, but they never have a satisfactory answer.
He wanted to FOIL the impeachment effort. No blood for foil!
I don't recall any lefties denouncing Clinton because his search for mass graves didn't turn up what he said it would.
Well, that's not such a bad crime. We should let President Milosevic go free! DOH!
I wonder how many of the vaunted Albanians were member of the Marxist Islamic KLA.
Killing 3,000 Islamic lunatics is no crime at all.
But even these 3,000 include bodies of people who died from natural causes, who were not Muslims and who were killed by NATO bombings.
A Clinton legacy bump!
LOL!
Nobody questions these ridiculous statements! Nobody! I believe that people should be free to speak their mind, but she -- and countless others -- should be held accountable for their lies. Her claims are pure fiction. Somebody should charge her and bring her to justice.
100,000 is way too high. The largest atrocity was the massacre and expulsion of Krajina Serbs but even with NATO planes strafing the refugee columns the number of dead was much smaller.
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