Yes, there were mass killings
By Noel Malcolm
The Spectator
December 4, 1999
Noel Malcolm, in a riposte to
John Laughland, says there is irrefutable evidence
of massacres in Kosovo
READERS of The Spectator may have been
surprised by John Laughland's two recent articles
(30 October and 20 November) casting doubt on the
existence of mass grave sites in Kosovo, but readers
of Politika, the daily organ of the Milosevic
regime, will have taken them in their stride. On 12
May, in the middle of the Nato bombing campaign, the
Belgrade newspaper published an interview with Mr
Laughland, who had come to the Yugoslav capital as a
guest of the Serbian Academy of Sciences.
The purpose of his visit, the Politika journalist
explained, was 'to bear witness to the sufferings of
our people under Nato aggression'. To show their
'solidarity with our people', Mr Laughland and the
other members of his group had bought 'target'
stickers (sold on street corners, and sported by
some Belgraders as an ironic 'aim here' message to
Nato), and were wearing them proudly on their
lapels. Neither the interviewer nor Mr Laughland
made any mention of the sufferings of the Kosovo
Albanians. We now know that he believes those
sufferings to have been hugely exaggerated. But when
he visited Belgrade he was in no position to judge
whether the number of murdered Albanians was in the
hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands.
Apparently, this just did not seem important to him
at the time.
I read that interview with a strong and rather
personal sense of dismay. I have known John
Laughland for many years; I regard him as an
unusually intelligent and talented person.
Spectator readers with long memories may recall
that he was first launched as a journalist in this
magazine, producing trenchant commentaries on German
and French politics. This took place during my
period as foreign editor: reader, I launched him.
But his non-stop one-man campaign on the issue of
Kosovo (in this and other papers) makes me feel that
something has gone terribly wrong. Both of his
recent articles were riddled with gross
misrepresentations.
'I Was Right About Kosovo', said the headline on
the second article. But what exactly had his central
claim been? It was that, in the words of 'a
Texas-based thinktank', the number of bodies found
so far in Kosovo was only 'in the hundreds', not
thousands. Indeed, a 'senior intelligence source'
had informed him that the figure was just 670. And
yet, barely one week after his article was
published, the chief prosecutor of the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
announced that the current total was 2,108 - in
other words, thousands, not hundreds. And this was
merely an interim report: out of 529 'scenes of
crime', only 195 have been investigated so far.
For an article billed as a reply to his critics,
Laughland's second piece is strangely silent about
the most devastating criticism of all - one made by
the Guardian's Francis Wheen in a rebuttal which
Laughland cites, but does not answer. Laughland had
originally written: 'On 16 May, the US defence
secretary William Cohen said that the Yugoslav army
forces had killed up to 100,000 Albanian men of
military age. This number was declared missing ...
Tony Blair himself implied that the numbers might be
even higher... in the Times on 5 June.' Wheen
pointed out that Cohen had specifically not said
that the 100,000 men had been killed: having
explained that they were unaccounted for, he went on
to say, 'We have had reports that as many as 4,600
have been executed.' As for Mr Blair, his article in
the Times did not offer any figures at all, either
above or below 100,000. Laughland's claim, that the
public in the West was bamboozled into thinking that
100,000 or more Albanians had been murdered, is
false. The only people who have been bamboozled are
the readers of Laughland's articles - and readers of
those by other journalists who have blindly repeated
his claims elsewhere.
In fact the official estimate, used by
international agencies and Western governments since
the summer, is between 10,000 and 12,000. The ICTY
uses a total of 11,334. How were such figures
arrived at? Laughland suggests that a principal
source is the 'wild imaginings' or 'deliberate lies'
of the US government. The true answer is more
prosaic. They were compiled from interviews with
thousands of refugees, who often provided
independent but mutually confirmatory testimony of
the same events.
The ICTY, in particular, has used the evidence of
eye-witnesses who saw either the actual killings or
the corpses: in many cases these witnesses buried
the bodies themselves, having fled from their
villages and then returned after the Serb forces had
gone. It is possible, of course, that some of them
have exaggerated, deliberately or unwittingly, the
number of dead. Laughland has managed to find one
recorded example of a girl who has admitted to
reporting, falsely, the death of her sister. In his
first article he used this to rhetorical effect,
implying that all reports by all Albanians could
therefore be disbelieved. But it is absurd to
suppose that thousands of ordinary villagers have
taken part in such an ingenious project of
mass deception - particularly when their reports, in
many cases, have already been borne out by the
evidence on (and in) the ground.
Does this mean, then, that the ICTY investigators
will eventually find every one of those reported
11,334 bodies? Of course not. In some cases the
death was witnessed, but not the burial. Some bodies
were just left on the surface: these decomposed
quickly in hot weather, and were then dispersed by
scavenging animals. Massacre sites seldom yield all
their victims; in the case of Srebrenica, for
example (the most exhaustively studied massacre in
recent history), the number of dead is known to be
7,300 (plus or minus a few hundred), but the number
of bodies recovered after four years is less than
half of that total. And in any case the purpose of
the ICTY investigation is not to produce a
body-count, but to provide the sort of detailed
evidence - preferably including the identity of the
victim and the place, time and manner of death -
that can be used in a criminal trial. For that
reason, 'partial remains' have been excluded from
the interim total it has issued, even when those
body-parts had clearly belonged to several human
beings.
There is, however, another reason why many of the
bodies will never be found. The Serb forces had
learned an important lesson from the ICTY's
investigations in Bosnia: at one site after another
in Kosovo they made great efforts to destroy,
disguise or remove the evidence of their killings.
The ICTY's report refers to 'sites where there was
obvious evidence of grave tampering, body removal,
disposal of bodies by other means ..... Where only
ashes remain, even when it is clear that many people
were burnt, the ICTY does not assign any number to
the body-count.
The ICTY's investigators have interviewed the
grave-diggers at local cemeteries in Kosovo: they
described frequent visits by the Serb police or
military, who would unload heaps of bodies from
their vehicles and order them to dispose of them.
Those bodies now rest in 'ordinary' graves. At some
of the massacre sites the victims were later buried
by their own neighbours or relatives - also,
naturally enough, in rows of individual graves. But
here Laughland deploys what is surely the most
grotesque part of his argument: he suggests that
these deaths do not count, because the bodies were
not placed in 'mass graves'. The method of burial,
apparently, is sufficient to turn a massacre into a
mere multiplicity of individual deaths.
The ICTY seldom uses the phrase 'mass graves'; it
prefers to say 'mass grave sites'. But, given the
syntactical fluidity of the English language, this
could have an implicit hyphen in either of two
places: mass grave-sites' or 'mass-grave sites'.
Switch it from the former to the latter, and, with a
whisk of Laughland's magic wand, the evidence can
then be dismissed as insignificant or non-existent.
The murder of thousands of people can thus be turned
into, in the words of The Spectator's
headline-writer, 'The Massacres That Never Were'.
In some cases there is direct proof, both of the
original burials and of the subsequent tampering. At
Pusto Selo a villager videoed first the burial of
more than 100 people (in individual graves), then
the arrival three weeks later of Serb officials with
a small truck: they removed some of the bodies and
reburied them elsewhere. The same thing happened at
Izbica, where the burial of 143 people was also
videoed, and the graves were then clearly
photographed by US aerial reconnaissance. But when
French troops arrived in June, they found that every
grave had been opened; there were no bodies (only
scattered 'partial remains'), but there was some
abandoned earth-moving equipment.
In his second article, Laughland produced a list of
places where the US State Department had reported
massacres in May; triumphantly, he announced that
'the ICTY investigators have not discovered one
single body at any of these 16 sites'. Prominent
among them was Izbica. The local Serb commanders may
have doubted whether they could find anyone gullible
enough to suppose that no one was killed at Izbica,
in the face of video footage, aerial photographs and
the testimonies of eyewitnesses. If so, we must
conclude that their doubts were unjustified.
Other items on Laughland's list are simply bogus.
He says that 'not one single body' has been found at
Suva Reka; in fact the interim report, which he
claims to have read, specifies three grave-sites at
Suva Reka, with a total of 103 bodies. He says the
same about Podujevo; the report lists 19 bodies
there. He says the same about 'Kaaniku'; this is
just a misprint for 'Kacaniku' (the definite form of
Kacanik), for which the report lists 76 bodies at
five different sites. (Later in his article he says
that 16 bodies were found at Kacanik, thus
unwittingly contradicting himself, but still not
getting it right.)
At the mining and industrial complex of Trepca,
local Albanians reported that bodies were being
incinerated and dumped in the mines. Laughland
writes that 'tribunal investigators have
categorically denied that there were any human
remains either in the mine shafts or in the
incinerators'. This too is false. The ICTY has made
no such categorical denial, for the simple reason
that it has not investigated the majority of the
shafts - of which there are a great number, both
active and abandoned. One sample investigation was
made, of a few shafts, by a French caving team, but
even these searchers did not descend all the way to
the bottom (which in many cases is below the water
table). The tribunal merely announced that it had
found no human remains so far.
What, in the end, is the point of Mr Laughland's
efforts? It is to suggest that 'the Kosovo conflict'
- both before and during the Nato bombing - was just
a normal 'civil war', characterised by typical
military actions by Serb forces, plus a few crimes
on the side. This is not an adequate way to describe
an operation directed mainly against a civilian
population, which involved, even in 1998, the
looting and mass-burning of houses: roughly 300,000
people fled from their homes during that year.
Certainly there was an increase in the intensity
of the assault on the civilian population after the
Nato bombing began: the German government (whose
views Laughland pretends to take as authoritative)
has described what followed as 'genocide'. The real
question Nato governments have to answer is whether
there is evidence to show that some such
intensification of the Serb anti-civilian campaign
would have happened anyway; this question may be
disputed, but Laughland does not even attempt to
consider it.
What is indisputable is that during the spring of
1999 crimes were committed by Serb forces on a huge
scale: the destruction of more than 60,000 homes,
and of hundreds of mosques and historic buildings;
the theft of property and money from thousands of
refugees; the expulsion of 800,000 people into
neighbouring countries; and the murder of thousands
of civilians, including old people, women and
children. To dismiss or minimise these events,
either on the grounds that some of the bodies have
not yet been found, or because some of them were
buried in separate graves, seems like a bad joke.
There are many thousands of grieving relatives in
Kosovo to whom the humour of it will not be
apparent.
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