It took awhile to find any articles. Isn't it amazing how Clinton's verifiable lies got so much less coverage than the coverage that the press is giving the democRATs' unverifiable claims that Bush lied?
10/20/99 World Net Daily: Where are the bodies? Report: Few 'mass graves' found thus far in Kosovo
Where are the bodies?
Report: Few 'mass graves' found thus far in Kosovo
By Jon E. Dougherty
© 1999 WorldNetDaily.com
October 20, 1999
An independent intelligence report issued by a U.S.-based firm says that ethnic Albanians "numbering only in the hundreds" have been found in mass graves after four months of investigation by, among others, the FBI.
The Stratfor report calls into question the validity of claims made by NATO and the Clinton administration as justification for launching an air war against Yugoslavia that ultimately led to renewed political tensions with Russia, and a bombed Chinese embassy.
"During its four-month war against Yugoslavia, NATO argued that Kosovo was a land wracked by mass murder," said the report. "Official estimates indicated that some 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in a Serb rampage of ethnic cleansing."
"Yet four months into an international investigation bodies numbering only in the hundreds have been exhumed," the report said, with the FBI having found "fewer than 200."
"Piecing together the evidence, it appears that the number of civilian ethnic Albanians killed is far less than was claimed," said the report.
The report noted that "new evidence could invalidate this view," but so far nowhere near the number of Albanians reported killed by Serb troops has "materialized on the scale used to justify the war." The report concluded the new evidence "could have serious foreign policy and political implications for NATO and alliance governments."
The U.S. State Department did not return phone calls seeking comment on the report. But Dave Miller, a spokesman for European affairs at the FBI, told WorldNetDaily the investigation in Kosovo consisted only of "laboratory support for the International Criminal Tribunal (ICT)."
"They requested that we look at a finite number of locations, and within those locations there were 124 bodies -- 100 of which have been identified" so far, he said. "The FBI was not sent there to conduct mass grave exhumations or to locate and find the missing populace of Kosovo." He added that the FBI's role was to "prove the charges contained in the ICT indictment."
The Stratfor report admitted that "the tribunal's primary aim is not to find all the reported dead. Instead, its investigators are gathering evidence to prosecute war criminals for four offenses: Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, violations of the laws of war, genocide, and crimes against humanity."
"The tribunal believes that it will, however, be able to produce an accurate death count in the future, although it will not say when," according to Stratfor. However, they noted, "A progress report may be released in late October, according to tribunal spokesman Paul Risley."
Controversy about the actual numbers of ethnic Albanians killed by Serbian troops began on Oct. 11, when the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia reported that the Trepca mines in Kosovo, where 700 murdered ethnic Albanians were reportedly hidden, contained no bodies. "Three days later," the report said, "the U.S. Defense Department released its review of the Kosovo conflict, saying that NATO's war was a reaction to the ethnic cleansing campaign by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic." The Defense Department report called Milosevic's campaign "a brutal means to end the crisis on his terms."
However, the tribunal's findings and the Defense Department's assertion served to raise even more concerns about the actual number of "cleansed" Albanians.
"Four months after the war and the introduction of forensic teams from many countries, precisely how many bodies of murdered ethnic Albanians have been found?" Stratfor questioned. "This is not an exercise in the macabre, but a reasonable question, given the explicit aims of NATO in the war, and the claims the alliance made on the magnitude of Serbian war crimes."
"Indeed, the central justification for war was that only intervention would prevent the slaughter of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population," Stratfor said, echoing policy statements issued by the Clinton administration and NATO.
On March 22, Stratfor reported, "British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the House of Commons, 'We must act to save thousands of innocent men, women and children from humanitarian catastrophe, from death, barbarism and ethnic cleansing by a brutal dictatorship.'" The following day, when the NATO-led air strikes began, President Clinton told reporters, "What we are trying to do is to limit his (Milosevic's) ability to win a military victory and engage in ethnic cleansing and slaughter innocent people and to do everything we can to induce him to take this peace agreement."
In March, State Department spokesman James Rubin told reporters that NATO "did not need to prove that the Serbs were carrying out a policy of genocide because it was clear that crimes against humanity were being committed," said the Stratfor report. In June immediately following the end of the war, Clinton "again invoked the term, saying, 'NATO stopped deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide.'"
Since the war's end, Stratfor said, claims of Albanian dead have "swollen."
Before and during the conflict, though, Yugoslavia repeatedly denied that mass murder was occurring. Instead, Belgrade argued that the Kosovo Liberation Army falsified claims of mass murder in order to justify NATO intervention and the secession of Kosovo from Serbia. But "NATO rejected Belgrade's argument out of hand," said Stratfor.
"The question of the truth or falsehood of the claims of mass murder is much more than a matter of merely historical interest," concluded the report. "It cuts to the heart of the war -- and NATO's current peacekeeping mission in Kosovo."
"Certainly, there was a massive movement of Albanian refugees, but that alone was not the alliance's justification for war," said Stratfor.
In addition to questioning the number of ethnic Albanians allegedly killed by Serb forces, the report calls into dispute the methodology NATO and the U.S. used to determine that some 17,000 people who previously lived in Kosovo are still missing.
"There are undoubtedly many (Kosovar residents) missing," said the report, "but it is unclear whether these people are dead, in Serbian prisons -- official estimates vary widely -- or whether they have taken refuge in other countries."
So far tribunal investigators are a little more than a quarter of the way through investigating some 400 reported mass gravesites.
Jon E. Dougherty is a staff writer for WorldNetDaily.