October 16, 2006
A falsified massacre story
Suzanne Field's Op-Ed, "The Journalist and the jihadi," (Thursday) was a fitting tribute to the honest, unbiased reporting that separated Daniel Pearl from so many in today's media.
It is ironic that those attributes of his reporting of the war in Kosovo may have led to his gruesome and barbaric murder in Pakistan. The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 31, 1999, carried Mr. Pearl's article, "War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage; Genocide It Wasn't." The subtitle of the article that stated, "Tales of Mass Atrocity Arose And Were Passed Along Often With Little Proof," also went against the anti-Serb hysteria of the mainstream media in this country.
Mr. Pearl exposed as a hoax the purported massacre of 700 Kosovo Albanians at the Trepca mines, which claimed that the victims' bodies were either incinerated in the mine's furnaces or thrown down the mine shaft. In his article, Mr. Pearl wrote, "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."
Why is this important? Because the Trepca mine massacre story is another example of media disinformation designed to get the American people to take sides in a tragic civil war in Kosovo, a war between the Christian Serbs and Islamic jihadists who now have taken control of the territory and are seeking independence. If independence is granted, Kosovo will become another radical Muslim state in the underbelly of Europe, a mini-Iran, able to freely infiltrate terrorists throughout Europe.
STELLA L. JATRAS
Camp Hill, Pa.
