Reed Irvine - Editor
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President Clinton and Madeleine Albright, with the help of a compliant media, have persuaded a lot of intelligent people that the war against Yugoslavia was necessary to halt or forestall massive ethnic cleansing and murder of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. George Kenney, the State Department desk officer for Yugoslavia who resigned in 1992 because of a disagreement over policy, says that he has been told by sources within the government that Albright and her advisers deliberately raised the bar at Rambouillet, putting in the agreement provisions that Milosevic would not accept, because they wanted to bomb. Donald Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, has said that he has heard the same thing.
This might be dismissed as absurd if it were not for the fact that just five years ago, when Clinton was determined to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in Haiti, Dante Caputo, the UN's special representative to Haiti, said that Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and other senior advisers had told him they wanted to invade Haiti to accomplish this. In a confidential memo to the Secretary General, Caputo said, “The Americans see in this type of action a chance to show, after the strong media criticism of the administration, the President's decision-making capability and the firmness of leadership in international political matters.”
The invasion of Haiti could have been carried out with very few casualties, at least on the American side, and it might have improved the image of the President, who had suffered a serious embarrassment in having to withdraw U.S. troops from Somalia. Two days of bombing in Yugoslavia, which is what Congressional leaders were told would be all that was required, according to House Republican whip, Tom DeLay, would have helped distract attention from impeachment, Chinese espionage and Juanita Broaddrick's rape charge against Clinton.
The Fraudulent Excuse For Bombing
On the NBC Nightly News on May 18, Tom Brokaw asked who would be the winners and losers if a peace agreement were negotiated. The biggest losers of all, correspondent Andrea Mitchell said, were the people of Kosovo, who had suffered “hundreds of thousands dead.” Former Clinton aide Paul Begala, now co-host with Oliver North on the MSNBC program “Equal Time,” said the goal of NATO's bombing had been “to stop the slaughter.” Chris Matthews, host of CNBC's “Hardball,” put this question to House Majority Leader Dick Armey: “Suppose you were president and you were informed by the CIA ...that this guy Milosevic... is over in Europe and he's knocking off an ethnic group he doesn't like á la Hitler, if on a smaller scale, he's just knocking people off. He's just going to their houses with his henchmen, para-military wearing ski masks and killing people by the tens of thousands.In principle, should we go in?” Rep. Armey did not challenge the accuracy of the assumption that Milosevic was engaged in genocide in Kosovo.Instead, he pointed out that such atrocities were being committed in many other countries and suggested that it would be better to try to use diplomacy to stop them.
This is a fair sample of the reporters, commentators and officials who appear on television to inform and help shape public opinion. Journalists who for seven years have insisted that it is improper to report charges of wrongdoing by our President in the absence of solid corroboration, confidently assert that tens of thousands orhundreds of thousands of Albanians were being slaughtered in Kosovo in the year prior to March 24, 1999, when NATO began to bomb to halt the killing. Words such as genocide, mass murder and slaughter have been used recklessly by supposedly well-informed,influential people who have no idea of the actual number of people killed in 1998. They are equally confident that the killing has continued on a large scale since March 24. One never sees the charge of genocide backed up by official figures on the number killed in Kosovo.
This is not an accidental oversight. If the figures were given, the charge of mass slaughter would collapse like a punctured balloon because the numbers do not support the charge of genocide in the sense that most people understand it-mass killings with the intent of wiping out or drastically shrinking a population The State Department's estimate of the number killed in Kosovo in 1998 is only 2,000 on both sides. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), led by Maoists and supported by Albanian heroin traffickers, had become a well-armed terrorist group comparable to the Vietcong in South Vietnam. It had established strongholds in many Albanian villages in Kosovo and was at war with the Yugoslavian security forces. Most of the 2,000 deaths occurred from late February 1998 until a cease-fire was negotiated in October. The government does not claim that use of lethal force to combat terrorism is a war crime, but it has succeeded in creating the impression that the bombing was necessary to halt the slaughter of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians, “á la Hitler on a lesser scale.”
The editor of the op-ed page of The New York Times let President Clinton get away with a falsification of history in an article published on May 23. The KLA had broken the cease fire, but Clinton wrote, “Mr. Milosevic broke his promises, poured more troops into Kosovo, poised for an offensive he had been planning for months. When it began, we had to act.” The fact is that the “offensive” consisted of retaliatory attacks by Serb security forces on two villages controlled by the KLA, killing 45 in one and 24 in the other. The killing of 45 at Racak in mid-January has been portrayed by our government as a massacre of innocent civilians. That has been challenged by French reporters on the scene, but our media have ignored their reports.
On May 17, the headline on the lead story in The Washington Times read, “Serbs may have killed 100,000 inside Kosovo.” This was based on this statement made by Secretary of Defense William Cohen on CBS: “We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing....They may have been murdered.” Not until the 22nd paragraph of the 29-paragraph story did the reader discover that Mr. Cohen had also said he had a report “that up to 4,600 Kosovar men have been murdered, but 'I suspect it's far higher than that.'” (The May 27 war crimes tribunal indictment put the number of identified Albanians murdered at “over 340.”)
Secretary of Defense Cohen's mention of the 4,600 men allegedly murdered since the bombing started was unusual. The superheated rhetoric has given the impression that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands have been killed, and giving the figure deflates the rhetoric. It does not convey the impression of a bloodletting of Hitlerian proportions. A State Department spokesman said this figure is based on information provided by Albanian refugees. He did not know who did the interviewing and whether any effort was made to screen out deaths of KLA guerrillas and supporters killed in combat with Yugoslavian security forces. He said that the security forces had overrun KLA strongholds and had no doubt killed many KLA guerrillas, but he said there were no figures on the number killed in combat or the number of civilians killed by NATO bombs and missiles.If the interviewers are told to seek out only war-crime-related deaths, this could encourage exaggeration and the inclusion ofcombat-related deaths in their tabulations. Without verification on the ground, these figures must be viewed with caution. The Pentagon has obtained a home video which it says, together with satellite imagery of graves, confirms the mass murder of about 100 elderly ethnic Albanian men at Izbica, but this is the only case in which such corroboration has been obtained, and neither the video nor the graves reveal how old the men were or prove that they were not killed in combat.
Cohen's claim that about 100,000 military-aged men are missing in Kosovo andmay have been murdered suffered a setback on May 23, when1,002 Albanian men who were in their late teens or early twenties were released from prison in Kosovo and sent to Albania. The Post quoted international aid officials in Albania as saying they were baffled by the release of the men. One of them said, “One possible explanation is that the Serbs want to undermine NATO propaganda (sic) that they are taking men off of convoys and just killing them.”
One of the released prisoners, a 23-year-old was interviewed by a Washington Post reporter. He said that he and his father and three sisters had been part of a convoy of several thousand who had been heading for Albania on April 25 when Serbian police pulled him and 53 others aside. He feared they were going to kill him, but they were all taken to a jail in Kosovska Mitrovica, where they were held before being moved north to the prison where about 3,000 prisoners were held. He said prison conditions were terrible, but he felt lucky because the Mitrovica jail where he was first incarcerated was later bombed by NATO planes and several prisoners were killed wounded.
Since the figures for deaths in Kosovo do not jibe with the contention that Milosevic is a mass murderer à la Hitler, they are mentioned almost as rarely as the number killed in 1998. The Hitlerian image has been conveyed by using such words as genocide and mass murder while hiding the numbers. Other techniques include blaming Milosevic for all the deaths in the Croatian and Bosnian wars, greatly exaggerating the number, and almost always tossing in the number of refugees and displaced persons he is accused of creating in Kosovo.
For example, on Fox News Sunday on May 16, NATO Secretary General Javier Solana was asked how many ethnic Albanians Slobodan Milosevic had killed since the bombing began. He replied, “I have no idea of the exact figures. You know that Slobodan Milosevic, this is not the first time he is killing people. He started in 1992, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia. The figures go into the hundreds of thousands at that time. But specifically Kosovo, no doubt beyond a thousand, no question about that. But on top of that, he has expelled out of his country, out of Kosovo, hundreds of thousands of people.” Buried between the mention of the hundreds of thousands Milosevic is alleged to have killed in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and the hundreds of thousands he has allegedly expelled from Kosovo, was the Secretary General's claim that all he knew about the number killed this year in Kosovo was that it was “beyond a thousand.” Apparently he realizes that the actual number of deaths in Kosovo is too small to justify the war.
Solana's claim that hundreds of thousands of deaths in other parts of the former Yugoslavia are the fault of Milosevic is one that President Clinton, Secretary Cohen and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have all used. In his op-ed article in The New York Times on May 23, Clinton said: “By the time NATO acted (in Bosnia), 250,000 people were dead, more than two million displaced, and many have still not returned. People will look back on Kosovo and say that this time, because we acted soon and forcefully enough, more lives were saved and the refugees all came home.”
The alleged 250,000 deaths in the Bosnian war is the only death statistic that Clinton gave in this 1,400-word article. It overstates the actual number by 160,000 to 180,000 according to George Kenney. He says the 250,000 figurefirst appeared during the Bosnia war. He has researched the casualties thoroughly and has found that the actual number of deaths, civilian and military for all sides, fell within a range of 70,000 to 90,000 and that about a third of them were Serbs.
Speaking at the National Defense University on May 13, President Clinton said, “It is no accident that Mr. Milosevic has not allowed the international media to see the slaughter and destruction in Kosovo.” The fact is that a number of foreign journalists, including Paul Watson, a Canadian who writes for The Los Angeles Times, and Steven Erlanger of The New York Times have reported from Kosovo. Watson had 25 stories published by The Los Angeles Times from the beginning of April to May 17. Erlanger, who was there for about a week in May, had 10 stories about Kosovo published in The New York Times between May 4 and May 13. Their stories have challenged official claims about the justification for the war.
It has been claimed that the displacement of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from their homes from February 1998 to March 24, 1999, waspart of a plan to cleanse Kosovo of Albanians. The Watson and Erlanger stories suggest that there isno evidence of such a plan. Reporting on a firefight between the KLA and Serbian security forces that had taken place on the outskirts of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, on March 30, Watson said the KLA fight for an independent Kosovo had “erupted into a full scale war in late February 1998” and that “hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians had been displaced from their homes over the past year.” Serb security forces attacked and did a lot of damage to villages which they identified as KLA strongholds. This intensified after the bombing started on March 24. Watson visited the central Drenica region of Kosovo, the KLA's main stronghold, on April 12. He said that apart from a few soldiers and police, it was “empty of people.” He wrote, “Less than two months ago, it was the stronghold of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army.”
Watson said this was one of the areas “where NATO says Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has ordered his security forces to carry out a 'final solution' to the Kosovo problem by expelling ethnic Albanians.” The Watson and Erlanger stories show that it would be more accurate to say that the security forces were ordered to do all that was necessary to eliminate the KLA. That was achieved by destroying the KLA “fish” by draining the lake in which they were swimming, to use a Maoist metaphor appropriate to this Maoist organization. A State Department refugee expert has acknowledged that in war, displaced persons are a frequent by-product of attacks on populated areas. Some of the Albanians displaced by the fighting that began in 1998 no doubt fled from Kosovo, but many of themtook refuge in Kosovo's forests and mountains.
In a May 17 article, Watson reported that an estimated 15,000 displaced Albanians were living in and around Svetlje, a former KLA stronghold in northern Kosovo. This included hundreds of young men who were seen everywhere. “So many fighting-age men in a region where the Kosovo Liberation Army fought some of its fiercest battles against Serbian forces are a challenge to the (NATO) black and white versions of what is happening here,” Watson wrote. He said that by their own accounts they were not doing forced labor for the Serbs or serving as human shields. “Instead,” he said, “they are waiting with their families for permission to follow thousands who have risked going back home to nearby villages because they do not want to give up and leave Kosovo.” NATO claims it will take a heavily equipped army of occupation to guarantee the safety of Albanians before they return to Kosovo.
Blame For Refugees Shared By All
Watson said that as many as 100,000 Albanians had fled Podujevo in the early days of the air war. Erlanger wrote, “In Podujevo, a city near the northern border of Kosovo that was 95 percent Albanian, Serbs were upset when the Albanians celebrated the NATO bombing by cheering and shooting guns into the air.” He said Serb resentment “burst forth in a fierce week of violence when the bombing began and the KLA killed ten people in Podujevo. Heavy battles ensued and by the time the situation was brought under control the city was practically emptied. Many of the Albanian shops had been burned and looted.” Watson says, “Some said Serbs drove them from their homes, while others said they were simply scared and left on their own. They all moved from one village to another, trying to escape fighting between KLA guerrillas and Serbian security forces.”
While Secretary Cohen was speaking ominously of 100,000 missing men, Watson was writing that thousands of ethnic Albanians were coming out of hiding and either going back home or waiting for permission to do so. He quoted Fatmir Seholi, the spokesman of the Kosovo Democratic Initiative, an ethnic Albanian party opposed to the KLA that is helping and recruiting the returning refugees, as saying: “As an Albanian, I am convinced that the Serbian government and security forces are not committing any kind of genocide. But in a war, even innocent people die...Here there is a minority of people who wanted to steal, but that's not genocide. These are only crimes.” He said that 80,000 Albanians are estimated to be living in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and that 20,000 of them are persons displaced from the Podujevo area, where an 32,000 Albanians are still living.
When the bombing started the Serb army, police and para-military forces ordered many ethnic Albanians to leave the country. Watson describes them escorting some 7,000 men, women and children to the Pristina train station one week after the bombing started and putting them on trains bound for Macedonia. Erlanger calls that the first wave. “The second wave,” he says, “left because of the bombing downtown on the night of April 6, with everyone who owned a car taking off and as many as 5,000 people at the bus and train stations. The third wave left in a general panic because everyone else seemed to be leaving.” He said, “Thousands of Serbs left too, and those who stayed sent their wives and children north out of Kosovo.” Watson said that most, but not all, Albanians had fled from the capital, but many who had driven to the Macedonian border found it closed, and after a few days they turned around and headed back home.
Erlanger reported on May 4 that Prizren, a city near the Albanian border had suffered neither ethnic strife nor bombing during the first five weeks of the war. But on April 30, a bomb struck a house just behind the Buzshila family home and they decided to flee. Erlanger said the Serbs had stepped up their expulsions of Albanians from Prizren, but Silvia Buzshila told him that what caused them to leave their home was not pressure from Serbs, but “the bomb that made life in Kosovo seem impossible.” They took a bus for Montenegro. At a police checkpoint, a bus just ahead of them was rocketed and strafed, killing at least 17 and wounding 40. Their close call with death twice in four days left the family in a state of shock.
Conciliatory Words From Both Sides
On May 9, Erlanger had a story about a purely Albanian village, Velika Dobranja, where the KLA “was never much of a presence.” The Serbian security forces had given the 2,500 villagers no trouble. Erlanger wrote, “There is anxiety here, but thus far, at least, no brutality or panicked flight. But there has been no electricity or fuel for weeks now, either for travel or for the tractors. There are severe shortages of food, money and medicine. Even with no ethnic purging, the village is an emergency in embryo.” The Serbs had left the village untouched, but NATO didn't. Three weeks earlier, a missile had struck a house, wounding six people, including three children and killing a six-year-old girl. Despite that, the father said he felt safe enough, and he would not change his opinion of the Serbs. “We have to live together,” he said.
Erlanger also wrote about Andrei Andjelkovic, who is serving as the president of the Temporary Executive Council of Kosovo, a position equivalent to governor. He is serving until Belgrade can put together a new temporary government for Kosovo headed by a moderate Albanian. Andjelkovic claimed that NATO's bombing and an attempted uprising by the KLA were responsible for the flight of the refugees. It was multiethnic criminal gangs dressed in stolen or purchased uniforms, not regular army personnel or paramilitaries, who had ordered Albanians to leave so they could rob their dwellings. He said that over 380 people had been arrested in Kosovo for such crimes and had been given sentences of 5 to 20 years by military courts. He said that about 30 percent of the Albanian population had left Kosovo, which is 150,000 less than the UN estimate of 700,000. He expressed confidence that they would come back when the bombing stopped and a climate of trust was restored. Neither Erlanger nor Watson mentioned the fact that Milosevic himself gave interviews to two American journalists in April in which he said all the refugees who had fled Kosovo were welcome to return.
The Watson and Erlanger stories show that some Serbs, outraged by the bombing, and others motivated by their eagerness to loot abandoned property, played a significant role in threatening the Albanians and ordering them to leave. Erlanger also wrote that the Serb denial that there was any organized effort to expel Albanians from Kosovo was ludicrous. Andjelkovic's effort to exculpate all the army, police and paramilitary personnel certainly doesn't square with Watson's account of 7,000 Albanians being herded to the Pristina train station and put on outbound trains. It is impossible to believe that anything on that scale could have been organized and carried out in the capital of Kosovo without the knowledge and approval of the authorities.
Erlanger wrote in his first story, “NATO denies that its bombs cause anyone to flee, but that is a dubious notion to anyone who has had one land nearby, when it feels like one's head is coming off and one's stomach is so clenched it strains a muscle.” His and Watson's stories show that it is also ludicrous for Washington and Brussels to deny that NATO's air war precipitated the Serb violence against the Kosovo Albanians that caused many of them to flee. They also show that thebombing itself caused many Albanians and Serbs to abandon their homes and seek safety internally or beyond Kosovo's borders.
Belgrade, like Brussels and Washington, needs to learn that harmful truths are better than useful lies. They build credibility. The problem for NATO is that the truth makes it impossible for them to justify the enormous damage and the loss of life the air war has caused.