Wall Street Journal skrev 31. desember om medias dekning av Kosovo-krigen,
og kommer der med mye ny og interessant informasjon. Raskt slår avisen fast
at jugoslaviske styrker begikk grusomheter, de fordrev hundretusener av
etniske albanere, brant hus og begikk summariske henrettelser. Deretter
står det:
"It may well be enough to justify the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
bombing campaign and the war crimes indictment of Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic.
But other allegations -- indiscriminate mass murder, rape camps,
crematoriums, mutilation of the dead -- haven't been borne out in the
six months since NATO troops entered Kosovo. Ethnic-Albanian
militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed
off each other to give genocide rumors credibility. Now, a different
picture is emerging."
Noen poenger fra artikkelen:
- Nyheten om de 700 døde i Trepca-gruvene kan muligens tilbakeføres en
enkelt kilde, Halit Berani, leder for en avdeling av det Kosovo-baserte
"Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms" i byen Mitrovica.
Berani hadde hørt fra landbybeboere rundt gruvene at fullastede lastebiler
kjørte inn og kom tomme ut, og at det luktet rart fra gruva. Han ringte
deretter opp internasjonale radiostasjoner tidlig i april, og foreslo at
gruvene var et sted kropper ble destruert. Deutche Welle videreformidlet
saken. Nyheten ble plukket opp internasjonalt. Kosova Press hevdet i juni
at en talsmann ved den amerikanske ambassaden i Athen hadde uttalt at det
fantes bilder av og vitner til at kropper ble fraktet på lastebiler. Når
journalister kontaktet ambassaden kjente ingen til kilden. I dag sier
Berani: "Jeg fortalte alle at det var en antagelse, ikke bekreftet
informasjon". "Men for serberne er alt mulig".
Krigsforbrytertribunalets undersøkelser av gruvene fant som kjent ingenting.
- Ifølge "internasjonale menneskerettighetsgrupper" deltok KLA-tjenestemenn
i "Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms", som var blant de
første som intervjuet flyktninger som kom til Makedonia, og KLA kunne slik
bidra til å forme krigsbildet av Kosovo. Estimatet på 10 000 drepte, som
gjentas fra offisielt hold i vest, er identisk med antallet på en liste
over savnede personer som "Council for the Defence of Human Rights and
Freedoms" skal sitte inne på. Men vestlige etterforskere av
krigsforbrytelser må stole på denne organisasjonens ord, siden disse nekter
å dele materialet sitt med andre.
- Qemail Aliu, tidligere korrespondent i den KLA-tilknyttede Radio Free
Kosova, forteller hvordan han og andre journalister ute i felten fikk
rapporter fra KLA-offiserer, og sendte disse til Pristina, hvor de ble
oversatt til engelsk for nettsida til KLAs "Kosova Press". Når Aliu siden
så NATOs pressekonferanser på TV, var tallene Jamie Shea ga over antallet
dødsofre ofte hentet direkte fra Kosova Press nyhetsmeldinger.
Øistein Holen
----------
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a386c976f6ffa.htm
Despite Tales, the War in Kosovo Was Savage, but Wasn't Genocide
Wall Street Journal
Published: December 31, 1999
Author: Daniel Pearl and Robert Block, WSJ staff reporters
TREPCA, Yugoslavia -- When the blanket-covered trucks rolled toward the
mining complex near this northern Kosovo town in April, Bexhet Kurti didn't
give them much thought. The Yugoslav army had a military base there, after all.
It was in July, after the fighting ended and Mr. Kurti returned to
battle-scarred Trepca, that the young house painter started hearing the
whispers. "Did you hear there are 700 bodies in the mine?" asked one
acquaintance in the hilltop cafe above the mine-shaft tower. "No, not in
the mine, but in the furnace" on the other side of the mountain, said another.
By late summer, stories about a Nazi-like body-disposal facility were so
widespread that investigators sent a three-man French Gendarmerie team
spelunking half a mile down the mine to search for bodies. They found none.
Another team analyzed ashes in the furnace. They found no teeth or other
signs of burnt bodies.
In Kosovo last spring, Yugoslav forces did heinous things. They expelled
hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians, burning houses and committing
summary executions. It may well be enough to justify the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization bombing campaign and the war crimes indictment of
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
But other allegations -- indiscriminate mass murder, rape camps,
crematoriums, mutilation of the dead -- haven't been borne out in the six
months since NATO troops entered Kosovo. Ethnic-Albanian militants,
humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to
give genocide rumors credibility. Now, a different picture is emerging.
Selective Terror
"Rwanda was a true genocide. Kosovo was ethnic cleansing light," says
Emilio Perez Pujol, a Spanish pathologist who exhumed bodies after both
conflicts. In his sector of western Kosovo, he says, the United Nations
told him to expect as many as 2,000 victims. His team found 187 corpses,
none of which showed evidence to confirm local accounts of mutilations.
Some human-rights researchers now say that most killings and burnings
occurred in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been
active, or in urban streets that backed into rural areas where KLA fighters
could infiltrate. They say the Serbs were trying to clear out areas of KLA
support, using selective terror, robberies and sporadic killings.
"We believed NATO was using the KLA as its invasion force," says retired
Gen. Radovan Radinovic, a former chief strategist for the Yugoslav Army who
advised military planners during the war with NATO. Gen. Radinovic says
individuals may have committed abuses, while killing "thousands" of KLA
guerrillas. (A successor organization to the KLA says it lost 2,400 dead
over two years.)
Official Estimates
British and American officials still maintain that 10,000 or more
ethnic-Albanian civilians died at Serb hands during the fighting in Kosovo.
The U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has
accused Serbs of covering up war crimes by moving bodies. It has begun its
own military analysis of the Serb offensive.
But the number of bodies discovered so far is much lower -- 2,108 as of
November, and not all of them necessarily war-crimes victims. While more
than 300 reported grave sites remain to be investigated, the tribunal has
checked the largest reported sites first, and found most to contain no more
than five bodies, suggesting intimate acts of barbarity rather than mass
murder.
The KLA helped form the West's wartime image of Kosovo. International
human-rights groups say officials of the guerrilla force served on the
Kosovo-based Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms, whose
activists were often the first to interview refugees arriving in Macedonia.
Journalists later cited the council's missing-persons list to support
theories about how many people died in Kosovo, and the State Department
this month echoed the council' recent estimate of 10,000 missing. But the
number has to be taken on faith: Western investigators say the council
won't share its list of missing persons.
Reports From the Field
Even more closely connected to the KLA was Radio Free Kosova, set up in
January as outsiders were cut off from Kosovo hot spots. A former
correspondent for the radio, Qemail Aliu, says he and five other
journalists holed up with the KLA in the central Kosovo mountains, using
satellite phones to take reports from KLA regional commanders. The radio
broadcasts were just strong enough to reach the provincial capital,
Pristina, where a correspondent translated the reports into English for the
KLA's Kosova Press Internet site.
When the guerrilla encampment had electricity, Mr. Aliu watched NATO
briefings on TV. "Many times we saw Jamie Shea talking about the number of
people killed, and many times they were the numbers from Kosova Press," he
says.
NATO says Mr. Shea, its spokesman, didn't get information directly from
Kosova Press. But officials acknowledge that NATO's member governments had
little independent information about what was happening on the ground. "We
were all hamstrung," a NATO official says. As the war dragged on, he says,
NATO saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story:
civilians killed by NATO's bombs. NATO stepped up its claims about Serb
"killing fields."
Human-rights groups fed the information chain directly. As human-rights
researchers assembled in neighboring Macedonia and Albania to interview
refugees, State Department officials handed them proposed survey forms,
trying to get everybody to ask standard questions about violence to aid
war-crimes cases. Among the groups cooperating was Physicians for Human
Rights, which had long been calling for a ground force to protect ethnic
Albanians.
Kosovo was a "genocide to come," warned Holly Burkhalter, Washington
director of Physicians for Human Rights, in a National Public Radio
commentary in April. "I was wrong," she says now. "But if you wait until
it's proved to you six ways to Sunday, you haven't prevented it, have you?"
Human-rights groups at least used some scientific rigor, asking refugees
what they personally saw. The news media's standards were more mixed. Many
journalists had experience in Bosnia, where the mass slaughter of an
estimated 7,000 men from the "safe area" at Srebrenica in 1995 was a
warning not to be too skeptical about reports of Serb atrocities. Bosnia
yielded three Pulitzer Prizes for reporters who proved atrocities. When
Kosovo was finally opened to the foreign press in June, "fixers" cruising
through the lobby of Pristina's Grand Hotel offered to take correspondents
to burial sites.
Incident at Ljubenic
An example of the mass-grave obsession is Ljubenic, a poor western-Kosovo
village of 200-odd homes below the Cursed Mountains, which KLA fighters had
used as a supply route. On the morning of April 1, Serb forces surrounded
the town, villagers say, and three heavily armed militiamen walked up the
village's main dirt road. They say the Serbs corralled village men at a
crossroads, questioning them about weapons and the KLA. Two villagers who
spoke up were shot. One of the Serbs then said, "The KLA killed my
brother," and the Serbs started mowing down the men with machine guns,
survivors say.
Eleven wounded men later staggered away in two groups, says survivor Sadik
Jahmurataj, who adds that his group found a KLA hospital in the hills a day
later. When a KLA commander asked how many were killed, "the others were in
a panic and said '150 to 200.' I said, 'No, that can't be. One hundred at
the most.' "
Over the next weeks, Mr. Jahmurataj and others told their stories to
investigators from several human-rights groups. And after the war,
returning villagers, who found 12 bodies scattered around Ljubenic, told
Italian peacekeeping troops that 350 people were still missing from
Ljubenic and the surrounding hamlets. One villager told of seeing worms
coming from the ground in a field where the grass was unusually short.
On July 9, after getting an "operations report" from the Italians, Dutch
Army Maj. Jan Joosten mentioned during a regular press briefing in Pristina
that a suspected grave had been found, and there could be as many as 350
bodies. He says journalists started packing their bags for Ljubenic before
he even finished. "Biggest grave site holds 350 victims," London's
Independent newspaper proclaimed the next day. Concern Worldwide, a charity
working in Ljubenic, claimed that three-fourths of families lost their main
wage-earner.
In fact, investigators found no bodies in the field. It now appears that
the number killed in Ljubenic was about 65. That is how many names are
listed in KLA-printed memorial posters.
Plea for Remembrance
Mr. Jahmurataj, sitting on the lawn beside the Concern Worldwide tent, says
villagers who weren't there distorted the story. When a U.N. van pulls up,
Mr. Jahmurataj trots over to greet Alistair Graham, a war-crimes-tribunal
official who had interviewed him in an Albanian refugee camp. Mr. Graham is
just dropping off candy for children, but Mr. Jahmurataj pleads with him to
continue the investigation.
"If other people exaggerated, that's bad," Mr. Jahmurataj says. "But
everything I told you was exactly true." Mr. Graham says the tribunal will
return in the spring.
Kosovo would be easier to investigate if it had the huge killing fields
some investigators were led to expect. Instead, the pattern is of scattered
killings. Many cases defy simple explanation: two blanket-covered bodies
pulled out of a farmer's yard in a village where nobody was missing; a body
that a child discovered by chance along a river; a semiclad torture victim.
Human-rights groups didn't give so much attention to the small killings.
From Macedonia, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, Benjamin Ward, wrote
report about the slaying of two youths during a Serb-ordered exodus from
he southeast-Kosovo village of Malisevo. Townspeople say Serb gunmen forced
20 or so young men to lie face-down in a field, fired a machine gun inches
from their heads demanding information about KLA fighters, and killed two
teenagers who trotted up the road from a nearby village. But Mr. Ward's
report never left his computer; he says "it wasn't compelling" when reports
of bigger massacres arrived.
Serbs' Own Inquiries
Meanwhile, the Yugoslav government in Belgrade is pursuing its own
investigations and war-crimes trials, which skeptics regard as either an
effort to deflect blame from President Milosevic or a warning to
disaffected Serbian reservists to stay in line lest they be accused.
In one trial, Serbian police reservist Boban Petkovic is accused of
murdering four ethnic Albanians in the western-Kosovo village of Rija on
May 9, and policeman Djordje Simic is charged as an accomplice. The
prosecution's documents charge that Mr. Petkovic, during a battle with the
KLA, saw an ethnic Albanian running toward the forest and being grabbed by
a Yugoslav soldier.
"Petkovic, believing the man to be a captured terrorist, approached the
prisoner, took a sidearm from Mr. Simic, and shot the man in the head," the
documents charge. They say Mr. Petkovic later heard voices from a house,
and, "believing they were terrorists, Petkovic took his machine gun and
killed all three people inside." The prosecution says the victims were
"obviously civilians."
Mr. Petkovic's defense is that he was in battle, and that the chronic
stress from being under attack by KLA terrorists affected his judgment. Mr.
Simic says his gun was used without his permission.
The Mine-Shaft Story
Though brutal, these incidents don't have the impact of accounts of Serbs
rounding up Albanian men and dumping their corpses down a mine shaft. The
world may owe that image to Halit Berani, head of a branch of the Council
for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms in the city of Mitrovica. Mr.
Berani is a former actor with a Karl Marx beard who summarizes Serb war
crimes by showing a photo of a baby with a smashed skull.
Mr. Berani spent the war moving from village to village with his manual
typewriter, calling in reports to foreign radio services and diplomats with
his daily allotment of three minutes on a KLA satellite phone. He says he
heard from villagers near Trepca that trucks were rolling in full and
rolling out empty, and that a strange smell was coming from the mine
complex. He phoned in a report in early April suggesting that the mines had
become a body-disposal site, and Deutsche Welle, a Germany-based radio
service, carried the report in Albanian.
The story spread. In June, Kosova Press's Internet site quoted a U.S.
embassy official in Athens as saying there are "witnesses and still photos"
of trucks carrying bodies. Western journalists phoned the embassy, but a
spokeswoman said she couldn't find the supposed source.
London's Observer ran a similar story, citing a KLA commander, a girl who
got a call from an elderly resident, and a Kosovar who heard the story from
refugees. A Pentagon spokesman, quizzed about Trepca at the time, said,
"There have been several reports throughout the last 10 weeks of bodies
being burned in former industrial sites in Kosovo." Some commentators
stated the theory as fact.
When French troops took over the mines, they reported to the tribunal that
they had found well-scrubbed vats and piles of clothing. Tribunal
investigators weren't impressed: Clothes are found everywhere in
trash-strewn Kosovo, and why would the Serbs clean vats but not burn
clothes? After the fruitless search, "we don't see any need to do further
investigation at this point," a tribunal official says.
Mr. Berani doesn't completely stand by his story. "I told everybody it was
supposition, it was not confirmed information," he says. But he adds, "For
the Serbs, everything is possible."
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