Siste nytt om dødstallene i Kosovo, ifølge Stratfor:
Krigsforbryterdomstolen har nå valgt å offentliggjøre antallet kropper de har funnet, 2108 kropper tilsammen. Det opplyses ikke i uttalelsen fra del Ponte hvorvidt alle disse er ofre for serbiske overgrep, har falt i kamp, eller er ofre for NATOs bomber. Del Ponte sier at færre enn en tredjedel av gravstedene er åpnet.
Øistein Holen
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http://www.stratfor.com/CIS/commentary/c9911110034.htm
0034 GMT, 991111 Kosovo’s Killing Fields: ICTY Reports
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) announced Nov.10 that it has exhumed 2,108 corpses in its investigation in Kosovo, the first official accounting of alleged atrocities in the war-ravaged province. The tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, presented the figure to the U.N. Security Council in New York.
She said that the tribunal had received reports of 11,334 bodies in 529 gravesites. But she added that to date only 2,108 bodies have been exhumed and that work has been completed at fewer than one-third of the sites. Del Ponte also said that the international investigation involving forensic specialists from 14 countries would resume after the winter. Work on exhuming sites ended in October.
Last month, Stratfor.com published the results of its own review of alleged war atrocities. We found that four months into the investigation, teams had found far fewer victims than the 10,000 that Western officials had claimed in justifying the war against Yugoslavia. According to the reports available from the forensic teams that had entered Kosovo, the number of victims attributable to Serb atrocities had numbered only in the hundreds. This had important foreign policy implications both for NATO and its member governments and for the concept of national sovereignty.
The ICTY’s interim accounting is a step in the direction of uncovering what really happened. But many outstanding issues remain unresolved. It is not clear from del Ponte’s briefing if the bodies found so far are all the victims of Serb atrocities, combatants, Serb troops killed in NATO raids or some combination. Since many were killed in the fighting between Serbs and KLA during the war and, according to NATO, many Serb troops were killed in the bombing campaign, the location of bodies does not, by itself, explain how many of those killed were the victims of Serb war crimes.
Using the evidence obtained by forensics teams, The ICTY must now determine how many of those killed died at the hands of the Serbs. This report does not shed any light on that question. We would expect more information to be available shortly, since presumably forensic teams have already provided the ICTY with a great deal of information on that subject.
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