THE JOHN PILGER COLUMN: US and British officials told us that at least 100,000 were murdered in Kosovo. A year later, fewer than 3,000 bodies
have been found
AFTER MORE THAN A YEAR, the silence of those who wrote and broadcast the
propaganda for Nato's "humanitarian war" over Kosovo remains
unbroken: they who answered the Prime Minister's call to join "a great
moral crusade" against a regime that was "set on a Hitler-style genocide
equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World War Two".
Something had to be done, they insisted. After all, by March last
year, 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missed, feared dead, according to
the
US State Department. In mid-May, the US defence secretary, William Cohen,
said: "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing ... They
may have been murdered." Two weeks later, David Scheffer, the US
ambassador at large for war crimes, increased the 100,000 figure to as
many as "235,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59". The British
press took their cus. "Flight from genocide," said the Daily Mail.
"Echoes of the Holocause," chorused the Sun and the Mirror.
As the bombing dragged on, the facade began to crack; British
television viewers were shown the ruins of trains and refugee convoys
attacked by Nato aircraft and their victims. "We have a public relations
meltdown," said someone at Downing Street. On cue, the Foreign Office
minister, Geoffrey Hoon, announced that, "in more than 100 massacres",
about 10,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed, adding that "the final toll
may be much worse". Although inexplicably reduced from the original
claims of 500,000 and 100,000, this was a substantial and utterly
unsubstantiated figure.
By mid-June, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams
began subjecting the province to minute examination. The American FBI
arrived to investigate what was called the "largest crime scene in the
FBI's forensic history". Several weeks later, having found bodies but
not
a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also
returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues
had become part of "a semantic pirrouette by the war propaganda machines,
because we did not find one -- not one -- mass grave".
At grave site after grave site, the story was similar. Reports in
the western media, sourced to local people were often traced back to the
Kosovo Liberation Army (as with the figures quoted above), became
unbelievable. One explanation was that the Serbs had come in the night
and taken the bodies away. "Where," wrote Michael Parenti in his review
of the investigation, "was the evidence of mass grave sites having been
disinterred? Where were the new grave sites now presumably chock full
of
bodies?"
Perhaps the most significant disclosure, confirmed by the
International Criminal Tribunal last October, was that the Trepca lead
and
zinc mines contained no bodies. Trepca was central to the drama of the
"genocide" investigation: the corpses of more than 1,000 murdered
Albanians were presumed there, many of them disposed of in vats of
hydrocholoric acid, according to Nato and American officials. According
to the Mirror, there was evidence of the "mass dumping of executed
corpses" and "Auschwitz-style furnaces". Not a single body was found:
no
teeth, no remains.
Last November, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its
own investigation and dismissed "the mass-grave obsession". Instead of
"the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the
pattern is of scattered killing [mostly] in area where the separatist
Kosovo Liberation Army has been active". The Journal concluded that "Nato
stepped up its claims about Serb "killing fields" when it "saw a fatigued
press corps dfrifting towards the contrary story: civilian killed by
Nato's bombs". The propaganda, said the newspaper, could be traced back
to the KLA; many of the most lurid and prominently published atrocity
reports attributed to refugees and other sources were untrue. "The war
in
Kosovo was cruel, bitter, savage," said the paper. "Genocide it
wasn't". Such honest was rare.
Nato bombed, according to George Robertson, the then defence
secretary, "to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe" of mass expulsion and
killing. In December, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in
Europe, whose monitors were in Kosovo until just before the bombing,
released its report on the war. This received almost no publicity in
Britain. It confirmed that mot of the crimes against the Albanian
population had taken place after the bombing began: that is, they were
not a cause but a consequence of the Nato campaign.
Western gravediggers have found a total of 2,788 bodies, and not
all
of them war crimes victims. On 7 June this year, the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) published a list of 3,868 missing
persons whose names had been given to it by families from all communities
in Kosovo, spanning January 1998 to mid-May this year. The ICRC says that
a substantial numver could be alive, among refugees scattered throughout
Eruope.
What is now beyond doubt is that the figures used by London and
Washington, and by much of the media, were ludicrous inventions. The
killings in Kosovo were despicable and tragic, but to equate them with
genocide and the Holocaust is to mock the truth with profanity. With the
exception of the Guardian, almost none of this has been reported in
Britain. The Red Cross report was virtually ignored in this
country. This is understandable; among the journalists who swalloed
Nato's and their government's lies were the truly committed and
triumphant, who wrote that "when the mass graves were opened, the
opponents of this humanitarian war should apologise".
The defenceless population upon whom Nato's bombs rained down night
after night, the 400 to 600 who died, blown up in crowded passenger trains
and buses, in factories, television stations, libraries, old peoples'
homes, schools and 18 hospitals, many cut to pieces by the RAF's thousands
of "unaccounted for" cluster bombs, which fragment into shrapnel, require
an apology from the propagandists; because, as Nato's planners never
tired of saying at their post-bombing seminars, without journalism "on
board", they could never have pulled it off.
Roert Fisk, Britain's greatest war reporter, has called them sheet,
gulled by professional manipulations. Take the bombing of the Belgrade
TV
headquarters and the murder of staff such as make-up ladies. Amenesty
International, in a rare departure, called this "a deliberate attck on
a
civilian object, and as such constitutes a war crime". Shortly after the
bombing, the Nato mouthpiece Jamie Shea had given a written assurance that
the TV station would not be attacked.
With the media on board, Nato could go forth. At one "private
preliminary review by by Nato experts" of the bombing (reported in the
Daily Telegraph), it was agreed that "any future operation by Nato is
likelier to involve heavier, more ruthless attacks on civilian targets..."
Having taken sides in what was a bitter but low-level civil war on
the scale of Ireland in the 1970s, and having deliberately blocked a
peaceful solution at the phoney Rambouillet "talks", Nato was able to
finish off the west's "strategic concept" of destroying Yugoslavia --
without recourse to the United Nations or international law. It was all
based on a marriage of lies, thanks largely to those journalists who acted
as the handmaidens of great and murderous power.
Kosovo is today, more than ever, a terror state, run by Mafia-style
criminals with links to the KLA: the people who last year could call
Robin Cook directly on their mobile phones.
More than 200,000 Serbs and Roma hae since been driven out, with
few
headlines here. The Americans have built one of their biggest military
bases in the world, Camp Bondsteel, which achieves a long-held strategic
aim of Washington to straddle the Balkan transit routes. Stand by for
the
next humanitarian adventure.
