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.
