Sunday Times October 31 1999:
"The US State Department said this weekend that about 1,400 bodies have been recovered from about 20% of suspected massacre sites. There are about 500 suspected sites and priority has been given to those that were believed to contain the most bodies."
Sunday Times har to artikler om Kosovos dødsmarker i siste utgave, begge er svært interessante. "Lost in the Kosovo numbers game" er lang og grundig, jeg legger bare ved korte utdrag fra artiklene her.
Øistein Holen
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Sunday Times October 31 1999
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/10/31/stifgneur01004.html?999
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Lost in the Kosovo numbers game
"The gap between the hyperbole of the western propaganda machine and the realities of Kosovo were wide throughout the air campaign and led to the publication of wild, misleading and just plain untrue stories. Above all, there was a tendency to claim there was a systematic campaign of genocide in Kosovo.
Just some examples. On April 19, in the midst of Nato airstrikes against Serbia, the American state department reported that up to 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing and feared to be victims of Serbian genocide. On May 16, William Cohen, the American defence secretary, said that up to 100,000 ethnic Albanian men in Kosovo had vanished and might have been killed by the Serbs. "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing," Cohen told CBS. "They may have been murdered." A column of 35,000 refugees vanished and Kosovar Albanian sources reported that tens of thousands of people had been rounded up in a sports stadium and were never heard from again. "(...)
"All this has left a dedicated forensic scientist such as Pujol, who had come to Kosovo to help establish the truth, deeply irritated. In an interview with El Pais, he says: "We had been working with two parallel problems. One was the propaganda war. This allowed them to lie, to fake photographs for the press, to publish pictures of mass graves, or whatever they had to influence world opinion in favour or against Milosevic or in favour of the Nato bombings. At first, based on the 'witnesses' who arrived in Albania, they spoke of the massacre of 22,000 people by the troops of Milosevic. Later, when the Nato troops entered, they spoke of 11,000 dead. Later they started to talk of 9,000, but I believe they will arrive at a much lower figure." (...)
"...what the Kosovar revisionists may be forgetting, as they bandy about lower death-toll figures, is that the quality and nature of the Serbian attacks is more significant than the numbers of dead. (...)
Nato was wrong to exaggerate as it did. The final death toll will never match its hyperbole. But just because fewer Kosovar Albanians may have been murdered than was originally thought can never mean that we should not pursue the normal course of criminal justice. "
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Sunday Times October 31 1999
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/10/31/stinwenws01033.html?999
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Cook accused of misleading public on Kosovo massacres
ROBIN COOK, the foreign secretary, is under pressure to answer claims that ministers misled the public over the scale of deaths among civilians in Kosovo to justify the Nato bombing of Belgrade.
The all-party Balkans committee of MPs will ask the Foreign Office this week to comment on reports that the number of bodies of victims of Serbian ethnic cleansing is lower than the figures of dead issued during the conflict.
At the height of the war, western officials spoke of a death toll as high as 100,000. President Bill Clinton said the Nato campaign had prevented "deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide". Geoff Hoon, then a Foreign Office minister and now the defence secretary, later scaled down the estimates. "It appears that about 10,000 people have been killed in more than 100 massacres," he said.
The most outspoken challenge to these figures has come from Emilio Perez Pujol, a pathologist who led the Spanish team looking for bodies in the aftermath of the fighting. He said: "I calculate that the final figure of dead in Kosovo will be 2,500 at the most. This includes lots of strange deaths that can't be blamed on anyone in particular." (...)
There is still no clear picture, however. Some of the forensic teams sent by 15 different countries say they have discovered fewer bodies than they anticipated. Others say there is more work to do and believe the death toll will rise.
The US State Department said this weekend that about 1,400 bodies have been recovered from about 20% of suspected massacre sites. There are about 500 suspected sites and priority has been given to those that were believed to contain the most bodies. (...)
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