Http://www.siri-us.com


Who Guards The Guardian?

Regarding "Counting Corpses in Kosovo"


Aug. 26, 2000



Dear Sir,


Regarding "Counting Corpses in Kosovo," which I read with considerable
interest: "If you cannot attack the facts, attack the person." Such a
classic ad hominem -- to attack your opponents as "revisionists." And
how Marxist.

You show the same sensitivity for ad misericordiam, but only
for families of the KLA and not for the thousands relatives of Albanian,
Roma, Gorani, Serb and Turkish victims of those homicidal Geg
xenophobes.

Who else is to guard The Guardian from the likes of your propaganda? We
"revisionists" began our attempts to counter a blatantly racist
anti-Serb propaganda long before Nato's illegal air war began and based
our
fight on provable facts, not propaganda constructed out of fallacies of
vicious abstraction, ambiguity and emotion. We have an evidence trail
leading
back to 1986 demonstrating the lies told by American politicians to
misrepresent the facts in Kosovo. News reports from the New York Times
and Washington
Post document Albanian ethnic cleansing of Serbs and others, plus
general
misrule in Kosovo, back to 1980.

It remains that the Geg clans of the KLA are directly linked to the Nazi
SS Skanderbeg of World War 2, as well as to other fascist gangs and to
today's Kosovo heroin Mafia, which also traffics in white slavery and
immigrant
smuggling. You would do well to do a better job of choosing your allies
and designated "victims."

Who was practicing genocide and ethnic cleansing before and after the
air war? Kosovo's Jewish community has been cleansed, as have two
thirds of
its Roma, Serbs, Turks, Gorani and others. It is clear that Muslims as
well
as Christians have been cleansed by the KLA, even non-Geg Albanophones
have
been attacked, such as the Egyptian communities. Where are the hundred
thousand dead victims of "the Serbs?"

Human rights are a charter for those who behave, it is not carte blanche
for racists and xenophobes. The Gegs are the lords of misrule, as every
soldier in K-For and every policeman in UNMIK now knows. --Those
unbiased
personnel, by the way, found no death camps or rape camps, while the
forensics
teams found plenty of dead Serbs and victims of Nato bombs in your
alleged
"mass graves" --most of which featured coffins and individual grave
holes.

You frame your argument by quoting other liars, including US propaganda
inserted in Lancet --why would someone have to extrapolate a body count
of
12,000 when the UN and Nato occupy the ground? (Why too, did Lancet
allow
itself to become a propaganda vehicle?) You elide nicely over the
inconvenient
fact that all such numbers include the thousands of victims of the KLA
and
Nato's humanitarian bombing.

The only "strong evidence" of "incineration" of victims was found at
Klecka
in the summer of 1998, and it was a little KLA death camp
for Serbs, not Serb "einsatzgruppen" cleaning up massacre sites.

History reflects human nature, which gets even with propaganda and
propagandists over time. You have picked the wrong legal and
intellectual side, and thus, have no credibility. Keep braying to
protect your
journalistic "integrity:" the more strident you get, the more pathetic
your outcome. It is civilization's shame that people are still dying so
that
the reputations of politicians and journalists may be protected by a
smokescreen of spin doctoring.

How dare you call us "revisionists?" You, as a propagandist for the "new
left" are such a little-minded creature, pretending as a man and
"journalist." We "revisionists" shall be delighted to stop having to
tell the truth about the KLA and about you, once you stop lying about
the
people of Yugoslavia and about us.


Sincerely,

Benjamin Works
Executive Director
The Strategic Issues Research Institute
WWW.SIRI-US





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Counting corpses in Kosovo
Jukian Borger. The Guardian

The last indignity for these sufferers is to be disbelieved Those who
are
digging up Kosovo's corpses know what the truth is Special report:
Kosovo

by Julian Borger, in The Guardian / Guardian Unlimited, Aug 25, 2000

(URL of original article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,358691,00.html)

Fate has saved up one last indignity for the people of Kosovo. They
lost
relatives in last year's bloodletting, they saw loved ones executed
before
their eyes, and they were driven from their homes. Now - just as they
are
struggling to rebuild their lives - they are being called liars and
accused
of faking their grief for political gain.

The Kosovo backlash is in full swing. The criticism of last year's Nato

campaign against the Serbs - quite properly - opened a debate over
"humanitarian intervention" and whether such intervention should involve

dropping cluster bombs from high altitude.

But the backlash has gone further, casting doubt on the scale and
nature of
Serb atrocities and calling into question eyewitness accounts of the
killing.
The allegations are serious - hinting at a conspiracy between Nato, the
press, the humanitarian agencies and the refugees themselves - yet they
are
based on no more than partial and misconstrued evidence.

The starting point for the wave of revisionism has been the exhumations

carried out by the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague. As of

mid-July, tribunal investigators confirmed they had recovered the
remains of
2,808 bodies, believed to be victims of the Serb ethnic cleansing
campaign.
That routine announcement triggered reports that the total death toll
had
been less than 3,000 and that Nato (with the aid of its co-conspirators)
had
deliberately inflated the casualty figures, with estimates of 10,000
dead and
more, to justify its intervention.

No one is more bemused by these claims than their supposed source - the

Hague tribunal itself. Paul Risley, the chief prosecutor's spokesman,
says he
is unsure how his tally of exhumations to date came to be portrayed as a

final toll.

The search for bodies is continuing. Seven forensic teams are currently

probing Kosovo's tortured earth, and aim to investigate another 150
reported
grave sites before winter sets in. That will leave 200 sites to go. And
more
are being reported all the time.

In October, the tribunal will make a decision as to whether to continue
its
forensic work. If the digging is called off, it will be because the
prosecutors believe they have enough evidence to mount a war crimes case

against the Serb leadership in Belgrade. It will not be because there
are no
more bodies to find.

According to Risley, there is a rule of thumb among those whose job it
is to
literally pick up the pieces after such bloody conflicts. You seldom
find
more than half the bodies. Kosovo is unlikely to be an exception.
Returning
refugees found the bodies of their friends and relatives lying in their
houses or gardens, in roadside ditches, or scattered through the forests
and
mountains. The remains were quickly buried in individual graves, prayers

spoken and word was passed about who had been found. There was no reason
to
seek out the Red Cross to add their names to the list of the missing.
Their
fate was known.

In nearby Bosnia, five years after the war, war crimes investigators
are
still stumbling across more graves, still finding bones on hillsides.
The
search will take years in Kosovo as well, and there is reason to believe
that
even fewer of the bodies will be found. If there was one lesson
President
Milosevic took from Bosnia, it was to make more of an effort to hide the

evidence.

Several mass graves in Kosovo were systematically emptied last summer
by the
retreating Serb troops. In the village of Izbica, there was
well-documented
evidence, including videotape and satellite photographs, of the killing
and
burial of nearly 150 Kosovans in an open pasture. By the time Nato
arrived,
the field was a mass of churned earth scarred by the caterpillar tracks
of
heavy diggers. The same happened in Pusto Selo, near Orahovac, and the
hamlet
of Rezalla, north of Pristina. There is strong evidence that some of the

bodies were incinerated in factories, or in some cases burnt on bonfires
at
the murder scene.

Sure enough, some wild figures did fly about for a few days. The US
defence
secretary, William Cohen, said in May that 100,000 military-aged men
were
missing and "may have been murdered". That was clearly an exaggeration,
but
not much of a conspiracy. The 100,000 figure never gained wide
circulation
and the estimate most often quoted by Nato officials was 10,000 dead, a
guess
shared by many humanitarian workers on the borders at the time. Today,
it
still looks like a reasonable assessment.

In the absence of complete forensic evidence, the only feasible
scientific
way of gauging the extent of the bloodshed is to take sample surveys of
the
population and extrapolate. One such epidemiological survey was
published in
the Lancet in July, estimating that 12,000 people had been killed by
"war-related trauma" in Kosovo from February 1998 to June 1999.

On one issue, human rights organisations are agreed. The testimony
provided
by the traumatised refugees as they arrived at the Macedonian, Albanian
and
Montenegrin borders last year was eventually borne out by the facts.
There is
no evidence of any concerted effort to deceive or exaggerate. The idea
that
these exhausted terrified people had time to concoct coherent,
corroborated
testimony is as absurd as it is offensive.

Joanne Mariner, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who trudged across
Kosovo for months checking and rechecking reports of atrocities, said:
"The
refugees never cited numbers. They talked about who they had seen
killed. All
the reports I investigated based on what I was told - they all turned
out to
be true. I went to the villages and checked them out."

We have been here before. There has been a campaign to deny the
existence of
death camps in Bosnia. There was talk that the death toll from the
Srebrenica
massacre had been inflated. Rumours were spread that the Bosnian Muslims
in
Sarajevo were shelling themselves. None of these claims, of course,
turned
out to be true.

The west stopped the killing in Bosnia three years too late, after
100,000
or more victims were already dead. In Kosovo, an attempt was made to
learn
from the past, and to act sooner rather than later. It is a tough
decision to
take, but one that could not and should not be dodged. Or should we
watch
from afar as the victims wail with grief on our television screens, and
then
a year or so later - when the dead have long been buried and memories
have
blurred - decide that maybe all those screaming foreigners were just
trying
to fool us after all?

julian.borger@guardian.co.uk