November 11, 1999
Early Count Hints at Fewer Kosovo Deaths
By STEVEN ERLANGER with CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
RISTINA, Kosovo -- In
five months of investigation and exhumation of the dead in Kosovo, war
crimes investigators have found
2,108 bodies in grave sites throughout
the province, the chief prosecutor
announced on Wednesday.
While there are several hundred
more reported sites to be examined
in the spring, the number of the dead
found so far seems significantly lower than the estimate of 10,000 ethnic
Albanians killed by the Serbs, issued
by Western officials, or the suggestion by American and allied officials
during the war that up to 100,000
were being killed.
In a report to the United Nations
Security Council in New York, also
released here, the chief prosecutor
for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla
Del Ponte, said that the bodies had
been found in 195 sites before work
stopped for the winter, and that there
were a total of 529 sites reported to
investigators so far.
Mrs. Del Ponte cautioned that the
number of dead was an interim figure, and noted that "we have discovered evidence of tampering with
graves," particularly at well-publicized suspected massacre sites like
Izbica, where investigators found no
bodies after the Serbian forces left
Kosovo, but freshly turned earth.
"There are also a significant number of sites where the precise number of bodies cannot be counted," she
said, adding that in some places bodies had been burned and other steps
taken to hide the evidence.
But a long investigation of the
Trepca mine, where Albanians said
many bodies were brought for incineration, turned up no evidence of any
crime. Similarly, at Ljubenic, near
Pec, a widely publicized grave site
said to hold 350 bodies only held five.
A draft report by the State Department noted that an average of only 17
bodies were found at examined sites,
but says: "We would expect the total
number of Kosovar Albanian deaths
to be over 8,000" once all the graves
are inspected.
Still, senior Western officials here
say that the investigators did look at
the most serious sites first. While it
is unlikely that a firm and final death
toll will ever be known, they suggested that a figure of between 5,000 and
7,000 will be more likely. Some suggested that 5,000 would be more logical, given what has been found to
date, and noting the simple difficulty
of killing large numbers of people
and disposing of them quickly.
But officials also cautioned that
some of the dead are fighters of the
Kosovo Liberation Army or may
have died ordinary deaths.
Mrs. Del Ponte and her aides also
noted that the tribunal's main job
was not to take a census of the dead,
but to prepare legal material to seek
or extend indictments for war
crimes against those most reponsible for the abuses of the Kosovar
Albanians.
"We now have in our possession
invaluable documentation of what
happened to many people in many
places in Kosovo," Mrs. Del Ponte
said. "There is no substitute for this
kind of accurate information because it is evidence that eventually
will stand up in a court of law."
Kelly Moore, the tribunal spokeswoman here, said: "A prosecutor is
not a statistician. The job is to gather
evidence for prosecutions."
Ms. Moore noted that of the indictments on war crimes charges
against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four other top
Yugoslav and Serbian officials, two
charges cover the killings of Albanians, but two also cover their forced
expulsion, deportation and persecution.
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More than 800,000 Albanians were
forced from their homes and out of
Kosovo, while many more thousands
were living rough in the hills inside
the province.
Albanian human rights
groups note that several thousand
Albanians are reported missing, and
it is unclear how many of them may
still be in Serbian jails -- nearly 2,000
according to the International Committee of the Red Cross -- or abroad
or dead but undiscovered.
Blerim Shala, the editor of the
Albanian weekly Zeri and a member
of the Kosovo Transitional Council
here, said that a respected Albanian
human rights group, the Kosovo
Board for the Protection of Human
Rights, estimates that 7,000 Albanians were killed during the war. Another 2,500 were killed in the previous year, beginning March 1998,
when the conflict between the Serbs
and the Kosovo Liberation Army intensified.
Another 3,000 or so are
believed to be missing, Shala
said.
Daan Everts, the director of the
mission in Kosovo for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, said that morally the final
number is not especially relevant,
and noted that those who were killed
and abused were the subject of all
the powers of an organized state.
"We don't know how many people
are still in the ground," he said. "And
whether the number is smaller or
larger doesn't take away from the
massive and organized violation of
human rights by a state."
Graham Blewitt, the tribunal's
deputy chief prosecutor, told reporters at the United Nations that motive
and method were more important
legally than the number of victims in
proving genocide. "It's really not a
numbers game to determine whether
genocide has been committed," he
said.
During the war, however, estimated death figures were very high. On
April 19, the State Department said
that up to 500,000 Kosovar Albanians
were missing and feared dead. On
May 16, Defense Secretary William
S. Cohen said that up to 100,000 Albanian men in Kosovo had vanished
and might have been killed. "We've
now seen about 100,000 military-aged
men missing," Cohen told CBS
News. "They may have been murdered."
On June 17, a British Foreign Office Minister, Geoff Hoon, said: "According to the reports we have gathered, mostly from the refugees, it
appears that around 10,000 people
have been killed in more than 100
massacres." On Aug. 2, Bernard
Kouchner, the United Nations chief
administrator in Kosovo, said 11,000
ethnic Albanians were killed, and
said his figure came from the Tribunal, which denied providing it.
A Spanish forensic team's experience has been typical. According to
the newspaper El Pais, the team was
told to prepare for at least 2,000
autopsies. But it found 187 bodies,
usually buried in individual graves.
The El Pais report has led to some
revise their expectations of the death
toll, which Mrs. Del Ponte's report
sought to clarify on Wednesday.
Wednesday, in Pristina, the NATO-led
peacekeeping troops issued murder
statistics since June 12, when NATO
took control of the province. Of the
379 people killed, 135 were Serbs, a
disproportionate number given that
only about 5 percent of the province's
current population is believed to be
Serbian. Of the rest, 145 were ethnic
Albanians, while 99 are of unknown
or other ethnicity, said Maj. Ole Irgens, a spokesman for the force.
According to a report about to be
released by the International Crisis
Group, the number of killings now in
Kosovo is comparable to the levels
reported before the NATO intervention, when the Serbs were struggling
to defeat the Kosovo Liberation
Army. The figure is roughly 30 people killed a week in a province with a
current estimated population of 1.4
million.
