<nettime> Where Are the Dead?

[Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>]

"Where Are All the Corpses?"  It Seems Like a Reasonable Question *8-/


STRATFOR.COM
Global Intelligence Update
Weekly Analysis October 18, 1999

Where Are Kosovo's Killing Fields?

Summary:

During its four-month war against Yugoslavia, NATO argued that Kosovo was
a land wracked by mass murder; official estimates indicated that some
10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in a Serb rampage of ethnic cleansing.
Yet four months into an international investigation bodies numbering only
in the hundreds have been exhumed. The FBI has found fewer than 200.
Piecing together the evidence, it appears that the number of civilian
ethnic Albanians killed is far less than was claimed. While new findings
could invalidate this view, evidence of mass murder has not yet
materialized on the scale used to justify the war. This could have serious
foreign policy and political implications for NATO and alliance
governments. 


Analysis:

On Oct. 11, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of
Yugoslavia (ICTY) reported that the Trepca mines in Kosovo, where 700
murdered ethnic Albanians were reportedly hidden, in fact contained no
bodies whatsoever. Three days later, the U.S.  Defense Department released
its review of the Kosovo conflict, saying that NATO's war was a reaction
to the ethnic cleansing campaign by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
His campaign was "a brutal means to end the crisis on his terms by
expelling and killing ethnic Albanians, overtaxing bordering nations'
infrastructures, and fracturing the NATO alliance." 

The finding by The Hague's investigators and the assertion by the Pentagon
raise an important question.  Four months after the war and the
introduction of forensic teams from many countries, precisely how many
bodies of murdered ethnic Albanians have been found? This is not an
exercise in the macabre, but a reasonable question, given the explicit
aims of NATO in the war, and the claims the alliance made on the magnitude
of Serbian war crimes.  Indeed, the central justification for war was that
only intervention would prevent the slaughter of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian
population. 

On March 22, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the House of Commons,
"We must act to save thousands of innocent men, women and children from
humanitarian catastrophe, from death, barbarism and ethnic cleansing by a
brutal dictatorship."  The next day, as the air war began, President
Clinton stated: "What we are trying to do is to limit his (Milosevic's)
ability to win a military victory and engage in ethnic cleansing and
slaughter innocent people and to do everything we can to induce him to
take this peace agreement." 

As NATO's first intervention in a sovereign nation, the war in Kosovo
required considerable justification. Throughout the year, NATO officials
built their case, first calling the situation in Kosovo "ethnic
cleansing," and then "genocide."  In March, State Department spokesman
James Rubin told reporters that NATO did not need to prove that the Serbs
were carrying out a policy of genocide because it was clear that crimes
against humanity were being committed. But just after the war in June,
President Bill Clinton again invoked the term, saying, "NATO stopped
deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide." 

Indeed, as the months progressed, the estimates of those killed by a
concerted Serb campaign, dubbed Operation Horseshoe, have swollen. Early
on, experts systematically generated what appeared to be sober and
conservative estimates of the dead.  For example, prior to the outbreak of
war, independent experts reported that approximately 2,500 Kosovar
Albanians had been killed in the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign. 

That number grew during and after the war. Early in the campaign, huge
claims arose about the number of ethnic Albanian men feared missing and
presumed dead. The fog and passion of war can explain this. But by June
17, just before the end of the war, British Foreign Office Minister Geoff
Hoon reportedly said: "According to the reports we have gathered, mostly
from the refugees, it appears that around 10,000 people have been killed
in more than 100 massacres." He further clarified that these 10,000 were
ethnic Albanians killed by Serbs. 

On Aug. 2, the number jumped up by another 1,000 when Bernard Kouchner,
the United Nations' chief administrator in Kosovo, said that about 11,000
bodies had already been found in common graves throughout Kosovo. He said
his source for this information was the ICTY. But the ICTY said that it
had not provided this information.  To this day, the source of Kouchner's
estimates remains unclear.  However, that number of about 10,000 ethnic
Albanians dead at the hands of the Serbs remains the basic, accepted
number, or at least the last official word on the scope of the atrocities. 

Regardless of the precise genesis of the numbers, there is no question
that NATO leaders argued that the war was not merely justified, but
morally obligatory.  If the Serbs were not committing genocide in the
technical sense, they were certainly guilty of mass murder on an order of
magnitude not seen in Europe since Nazi Germany.  The Yugoslav government
consistently denied that mass murder was taking place, arguing that the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was fabricating claims of mass murder in
order to justify NATO intervention and the secession of Kosovo from
Serbia.  NATO rejected Belgrade's argument out of hand. 

Thus, the question of the truth or falsehood of the claims of mass murder
is much more than a matter of merely historical interest. It cuts to the
heart of the war - and NATO's current peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. 
Certainly, there was a massive movement of Albanian refugees, but that
alone was not the alliance's justification for war. The justification was
that the Yugoslav army and paramilitaries were carrying out Operation
Horseshoe, and that the war would cut short this operation. 

But the aftermath of the war has brought precious little evidence, despite
the entry of Western forensics teams searching for evidence of war crimes. 
Mass murder is difficult to hide. One need only think of the entry of
outsiders into Nazi Germany, Cambodia or Rwanda to understand that the
death of thousands of people leaves massive and undeniable evidence. Given
that many NATO leaders were under attack at home - particularly in Europe
- for having waged the war, the alliance could have seized upon continual
and graphic evidence of the killing fields of Kosovo to demonstrate the
necessity of the war and undercut critics.  Indeed, such evidence would
help the alliance undermine Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, by
helping to destroying his domestic support and energizing his opponents. 

As important, no one appears to really be trying to recover all of the
Kosovo war's reported victims. Of the eight human rights organizations
most prominent in Kosovo, none is specifically tasked with recovering
victims and determining the cause of death. These groups instead are
interviewing refugees and survivors to obtain testimony on human rights
violations, sanitizing wells and providing mental health services to
survivors. All of this is important work.  But it is not the recovery and
counting of bodies. 

It is important to note that a sizable number of people who resided in
Kosovo before the war are now said to be unaccounted for - 17, 000,
according to U.S. officials. However, the methodology for arriving at this
number is unclear.  According to NATO, many records were destroyed by the
Serbs. Certainly, no census has been conducted in Kosovo since the end of
the war.  Thus, it is completely unclear where the specific number of
17,000 comes from.  There are undoubtedly many missing, but it is unclear
whether these people are dead, in Serbian prisons - official estimates
vary widely - or whether they have taken refuge in other countries. 

The dead, however, have not turned up in the way that the West
anticipated, at least not yet. The massive Trepca mines have so far
yielded nothing.  Most of the dead have turned up in small numbers in the
most rural parts of Kosovo, often in wells. News reports say that the
largest grave sites have contained a few dozen victims;  some officials
say the largest site contained far more, approximately 100 bodies. But the
bodies are generally being found in very small numbers - far smaller than
encountered after the Bosnian war. 

Only one effort now underway may shed light on just how many ethnic
Albanian civilians were - or weren't - killed by Serb forces. The ICTY is
coordinating efforts to investigate war crimes in Kosovo.  Like human
rights organizations, the tribunal's primary aim is not to find all the
reported dead. Instead, its investigators are gathering evidence to
prosecute war criminals for four offenses:  grave breaches of the Geneva
Convention, violations of the laws of war, and genocide and crimes against
humanity. The tribunal believes that it will, however, be able to produce
an accurate death count in the future, although it will not say when. A
progress report may be released in late October, according to tribunal
spokesman Paul Risley. 

Under the tribunal's guidance, police and medical forensic teams from most
NATO countries and some neutral nations are assigned to investigate
certain sites.  The teams have come from 15 nations:  Austria, Belgium,
Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Luxembourg,
Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United
States. The United States has sent the largest team, with 62 members.
Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom have each sent teams of
approximately 20. Most countries dispatched teams of fewer than 10
members. 

So far, investigators are a little more than one quarter of the way
through their field work, having examined about 150 of 400 suspected
sites. The investigative process is as follows: ICTY investigators follow
up on reports from refugees or KFOR troops to confirm the existence of
sites. Then the tribunal deploys each team to a certain region and
indicates the sites to be investigated.  Sites are either mass graves -
which according to the tribunal means more than one body is in the grave -
or crime scenes, which contain other evidence. The teams exhume the
bodies, count them, and perform autopsies to determine age, gender, cause
of death and time of death all for the purpose of compiling evidence for
future war crimes trials. The by-product of this work, then, is the actual
number of bodies recovered. The investigations will continue next year
when the weather allows further exhumations. 

In the absence of an official tally of bodies found by the teams, we are
forced to piece together anecdotal evidence to get a picture of what
actually happened in Kosovo. From this evidence, it is clear that the
teams are not finding large numbers of dead, nothing to substantiate
claims of "genocide." 

The FBI's work is a good example. With the biggest effort, the bureau has
conducted two separate investigations, one in June and one in August, and
will probably be called back again. In its most recent visit, the FBI
found 124 bodies in the British sector of Kosovo, according to FBI
spokesman Dave Miller. Almost all the victims were killed by a gunshot
wound to the head or blunt force trauma to the head. The victims' ages
were between 4 and 94. Most of the victims appeared to have been killed in
March and April. In its two trips to Kosovo since the war's end, the FBI
has found a total of 30 sites containing almost 200 bodies. 

The Spanish team was told to prepare for the worst, as it was going into
Kosovo's real killing fields. It was told to prepare for over 2000
autopsies. But the team's findings fell far short of those expectations.
It found no mass graves and only 187 bodies, all buried in individual
graves. The Spanish team's chief inspector compared Kosovo to Rwanda.  "In
the former Yugoslavia crimes were committed, some no doubt horrible, but
they derived from the war,"  Juan Lopez Palafox was quoted as saying in
the newspaper El Pais.  "In Rwanda we saw 450 corpses [at one site] of
women and children, one on top of another, all with their heads broken
open." 

Bodies are simply not where they were reported to be. For example, in July
a mass grave believed to contain some 350 bodies in Ljubenic, near Pec -
an area of concerted fighting - reportedly contained only seven bodies
after the exhumation was complete.  There have been similar cases on a
smaller scale, with initial claims of 10 to 50 buried bodies proven false. 

Investigators have frequently gone to reported killing sites only to find
no bodies. In Djacovica, town officials claimed that 100 ethnic Albanians
had been murdered but reportedly alleged that Serbs had returned in the
middle of the night, dug up the bodies, and carried them away. In Pusto
Selo, villagers reported that 106 men were captured and killed by Serbs at
the end of March. NATO even released satellite imagery of what appeared to
be numerous graves, but again no bodies were found at the site. Villagers
claimed that Serbian forces came back and removed the bodies. In Izbica,
refugees reported that 150 ethnic Albanians were killed in March. Again,
their bodies are nowhere to be found. Ninety-six men from Klina vanished
in April; their bodies have yet to be located.  Eighty-two men were
reportedly killed in Kraljan, but investigators have yet to find one of
their bodies. 

Killings and brutality certainly took place, and it is possible that
massive new findings will someday be uncovered. Without being privy to the
details of each investigation on the ground in Kosovo, it is possible only
to voice suspicion and not conclusive proof.  However, our own research
and survey of officials indicates that the numbers of dead so far are in
the hundreds, not the thousands.  It is possible that huge, new graves
await to be discovered. But ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are presumably
quick to reveal the biggest sites in the hope of recovering family members
or at least finding out what happened. In addition, large sites would have
the most witnesses, evidence and visibility for inspection teams. Given
progress to date, it seems difficult to believe that the 10,000 claimed at
the end of the war will be found. The killing of ethnic Albanian civilians
appears to be orders of magnitude below the claims of NATO, alliance
governments and early media reports. 

How could this have occurred?  It appears that both governments and
outside observers relied on sources controlled by the KLA, both before and
during the war. During the war this reliance was heightened; governments
relied heavily on the accounts of refugees arriving in Albania and
Macedonia, where the KLA was an important conduit of information. The
sophisticated public relations machine of the KLA and the fog of war may
have generated a perception that is now proving dubious. 

What is clear is that no one is systematically collecting the numbers of
the dead in Kosovo even though such work would only help NATO in its
efforts to remain in Kosovo and could possibly topple Milosevic. What can
be learned of the investigations to date indicates deaths far below
expectations.  Finally, all of this suspicion can be easily dispelled by a
comprehensive report by NATO, the United Nations, or the United States and
other responsible governments detailing the findings of the forensic
teams, and giving timeframes for completion and results. It is unclear
that, even if the ICTY releases a report soon, it will address all these
issues. The lack of an interim report indicating the discovery of
thousands of Albanian victims strikes us as decidedly odd.  One would
think that Clinton, Blair and the other leaders would be eager to
demonstrate that the war was not only justified, but morally obligatory. 

It really does matter how many were killed in Kosovo. The foreign policy
and political implications are substantial. There is a line between
oppression and mass murder. It is not a bright, shining one, but the
distinction between hundreds of dead and tens of thousands is clear. The
blurring of that line has serious implications not merely for NATO's
integrity, but for the notion of sovereignty. If a handful - or a few
dozen - people are killed in labor unrest, does the international
community have the right to intervene by force? By the very rules that
NATO has set up, the magnitude of slaughter is critical. 

Politically, the alliance depended heavily on the United States for
information about the war. If the United States and NATO were mistaken,
then alliance governments that withstood heavy criticism, such as the
Italian and German governments, may be in trouble.  Confidence in both
U.S. intelligence and leadership could decline sharply. Stung by scandal
and questions about its foreign policy, the Clinton administration is
already having difficulty influencing world events. That influence could
fall further. There are many consequences if it turns out that NATO's
claims about Serb atrocities were substantially false. 


(c) 1999, Stratfor, Inc. 
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