(For the magic number of '10,000 number of Albanians killed by Serbs, see 2nd article pasted further down in this post.)
Can't prove genocide, so how to still tar the Serbs? Can't guess? Ask the Hague Tribunals and their sycophants in the media:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.c...jectid=10426003
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Serbia cleared of genocide, but failed to stop killings</b>
Tuesday February 27, 2007
By Alexandra Hudson
Photo caption: Women from Srebrenica react to TV coverage from The International Court of Justice. Photo / Reuters
(In this image: the women have walls plastered with photos of missing/dead people in the background already. So this was not just some random women who have been affected, but obviously women of an organisation chosen in preparation for relaying this story.)
THE HAGUE - The highest UN court cleared the Serbian state today of direct responsibility for genocide in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war, but said it had violated its responsibility to prevent genocide.
Bosnia had asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to rule on whether Serbia committed genocide through the killing, rape and ethnic cleansing that ravaged Bosnia during the war, in one of the court's biggest cases in its 60-year history.
It was the first time a state had been tried for genocide, outlawed in a UN convention in 1948 after the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. A judgment in Bosnia's favor could have allowed it to seek billions of dollars of compensation from Serbia.
ICJ President Judge Rosalyn Higgins said the court concluded that the Srebrenica massacre did constitute genocide, but that other mass killings of Bosnian Muslims did not.
But she said the court ruled that the Serbian state could not be held directly responsible for genocide, so paying reparations to Bosnia would be inappropriate even though Serbia had failed to prevent genocide and punish the perpetrators.
"The court finds by 13 votes to 2 that Serbia has not committed genocide," she said. "The court finds that Serbia has violated the obligation to prevent genocide ... in respect of the genocide that occurred in Srebrenica."
Some 8,000 Muslims from Srebrenica and surrounding villages in eastern Bosnia were killed in July 1995. The bodies of about half of them have been found <b>in more than 80 mass graves nearby</b>.
(<b>What mass graves?</b> See post 4 and further down.)
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic, both accused of genocide over Srebrenica, are still on the run.
Earlier in the ruling, Higgins said the court found it established that Serbia "was making its considerable military and financial support available" to the Bosnian Serbs but that it had not known they had genocidal intent.
Individuals guilty of genocide
Serbia had said a ruling against it would be an unjust and lasting stigma on the state, which overthrew its wartime leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
Milosevic died last year, just months before a verdict in his trial on 66 counts of genocide and war crimes was due.
The UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague has already found individuals guilty of genocide at Srebrenica. Bosnia used evidence from trials there for its case against Serbia.
In Bosnia, now split between a Muslim-Croat federation and a Serb Republic, sentiment is split along ethnic lines, with Muslims hoping the court would brand Serbia an aggressor.
About 50 people demonstrated outside the court on Monday in favor of a genocide verdict.
"A ruling that Serbia committed genocide in Bosnia means everything to me," said 34-year-old Hedija Krdzic who lost her husband, father and grandfather at Srebrenica. "Without such a ruling I fear that one day the massacre will be forgotten."
It is almost 14 years since Bosnia first sued the rump Yugoslav state from which it seceded in 1992, but the case has been repeatedly held up by arguments over jurisdiction.
Bosnia's Muslims and Croats followed Slovenia and Croatia in breaking away from Yugoslavia in April 1992, against the wishes of Bosnian Serbs, who were left as a one-third minority in what had previously been a Yugoslav republic ruled from Belgrade.
This triggered a war in which at least 100,000 people were killed.
Backed by the Yugoslav army, the Serbs captured two-thirds of Bosnia and besieged Sarajevo. Tens of thousands of non-Serbs were killed and hundreds of thousands forced from their homes.
- REUTERS<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
http://www.michaelparenti.org/MediaAtrocities.html
<b>"The Media and their Atrocities"</b> by Parenti (mentioned in material pasted in Post 5)
Pasting a large section here because it is worth reading:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Serbian attacks on KLA strongholds or the forced expulsion of Albanian villagers were described as "genocide. " But experts in surveillance photography and wartime propaganda charged NATO with running a "propaganda campaign" on Kosovo that lacked any supporting evidence. State Department reports of mass graves and of 100, 000 to 500, 000 missing Albanian men "are just ludicrous, " according to these independent critics. 11 Their findings were ignored by the major networks and other national media.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->11. Charles Radin and Louise Palmer, "Experts Voice Doubts on Claims of Genocide: Little Evidence for NATO Assertions, " San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 1999. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Disappearing "Mass Graves"</b>
After NATO forces occupied Kosovo, the stories about mass atrocities continued fortissimo. The Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic Albanians "might be buried in mass graves" around a mountain village in western Kosovo. They "might be" or they might not be. These estimates were based on sources that NATO officials refused to identify. Getting down to specifics, the article mentions "four decomposing bodies" discyovered near a large ash heap. 15
It was repeatedly announced in the first days of the NATO occupation that 10, 000 Albanians had been killed (down from the 100, 000 and even 500, 000 Albanian men supposedly executed during the war). No evidence was ever offered to support the 10, 000 figure, nor even to explain how it was arrived at so swiftly and surely while NATO troops were still moving into place and did not occupy but small portions of the province.
(The random 10,000 is the number the media has settled on at present -Â see for instance posts 11, 13 and 15 which are recent news articles - media still faithfully doing Uncle Sam's bidding unquestioningly and towing the anti-Serb line. They think 10,000 is large enough to scream 'genocide', and small enough not to have to prove that it took place.)
Likewise, repeatedly unsubstantiated references to "mass graves, " each purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of Albanian victims also failed to materialize. Through the summer of 1999, the media hype about mass graves devolved into an occasional unspecified reference. The few sites actually unearthed offered up as many as a dozen bodies or sometimes twice that number, but with no certain evidence regarding causes of death or even the nationality of victims. In some cases there was reason to believe the victims were Serbs. 16
On April 19, 1999, while the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia were going on, the State Department announced that up to 500, 000 Kosovo Albanians were missing and feared dead. On May 16, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine now serving in President Clinton'sDemocratic Administration, stated that 100, 000 military-aged ethnic Albanian men had vanished and might have been killed by the Serbs. 17 Such widely varying but horrendous figures from official sources went unchallenged by the media and by the many liberals who supported NATO's "humanitarian rescue operation. " Among these latter were some supposedly progressive members of Congress who seemed to believe they were witnessing another Nazi Holocaust.
On June 17, just before the end of the war, British Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon said that "in more than 100 massacres" some 10, 000 ethnic Albanians had been killed (down from the 500, 000 and 100, 000 bandied about by U.S. officials). "18 A day or two after the bombings stopped, the Associate Press and other news agency, echoing Hoon, reported that 10, 000 Albanians had been killed by the Serbs. 19 No explanation was given as to how this figure was arrived at, especially since not a single war site had yet been investigated and NATO forces had barely begun to move into Kosovo. On August 2, Bernard Kouchner, the United Nations' chief administrator in Kosovo (and organizer of Doctors Without Borders), asserted that about 11, 000 bodies had been found in common graves throughout Kosovo. He cited as his source the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (ICTY). But the ICTY denied providing any such information. To this day, it is not clear how Kouchner came up with his estimate. 20
As with the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts, the image of mass killings was hyped once again. Repeatedly unsubstantiated references to "mass graves, " each purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of Albanian victims were publicized in daily media reports. In September 1999, Jared Israel did an internet search for newspaper articles, appearing over the previous three months including the words "Kosovo" and "mass grave. " The report came back: "More than 1000 â too many to list. " Limiting his search to articles in the New York Times, he came up with eighty, nearly one a day. Yet when it came down to hard evidence, the mass graves seemed to disappear.
Thus, in mid-June, the FBI sent a team to investigate two of the sites listed in the war-crimes indictment against Slobodan Milosevic, one purportedly containing six victims and the other twenty. The team lugged 107, 000 pounds of equipmentinto Kosovo to handle what was called the "largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history, " but it came up with no reports about mass graves. Not long after, on July 1, the FBI team returned home, oddly with not a word to say about their investigation. 21
Forensic experts from other NATO countries had similar experiences. A Spanish forensic team, for instance, was told to prepare for at least 2, 000 autopsies, but found only 187 bodies, usually buried in individual graves, and showing no signs of massacre or torture. Most seemed to have been killed by mortar shells and firearms. One Spanish forensic expert, Emilio Perez Puhola, acknowledged that his team did not find one mass grave. He dismissed the widely publicized references about mass graves as being part of the "machinery of war propaganda." 22
The Washington Postreported that 350 ethnic Albanians "might be buried in mass graves" around a mountain village in western Kosovo. Or they might not. Such speculations were based on sources that NATO officials refused to identify. Getting down to specifics, the article mentions "four decomposing bodies" discovered near a large ash heap, with no details as to who they might be or how they died. 23
In late August1999, the Los Angeles Timestried to salvage the genocide theme with a story about how the wells of Kosovo might be "mass graves in their own right. " The Times claimed that "many corpses have been dumped into wells in Kosovo ... Serbian forces apparently stuffed... many bodies of ethnic Albanians into wells during their campaign of terror. "24 Apparently? Whenever the story got down to specifics, it dwelled on only one village and only one well â in which one body of a 39-year-old male was found, along with three dead cows and a dog. Neither his nationality nor cause of death was given. Nor was it clear who owned the well. "No other human remains were discovered, " the Timeslamely concluded. As far as I know, neither the Los Angeles Timesnor any other media outlet ran any more stories of wells stuffed with victims.
In one grave site after another, bodies were failing to materialize in any substantial numbers â or any numbers at all. In July 1999, a mass grave in Ljubenic, near Pec (an area of concerted fighting), believed to be holding some 350 corpses, produced only seven after the exhumation. In Djacovica, town officials claimed that one hundred ethnic Albanians had been murdered, but there were no bodies because the Serbs had returned in the middle of the night, dug them up, and carted them away, the officials seemed to believe. In Pusto Selo, villagers claimed that 106 men were captured and killed by Serbs at the end of March, but again no remains were discovered. Villagers once more suggested that Serb forces must have come back and removed them. How they accomplished this without being detected was not explained. In Izbica, refugees reported that 150 ethnic Albanians were executed in March. But their bodies were nowhere to be found. In Kraljan, 82 men were supposedly killed, but investigators found not a single cadaver. 25
The worst incident of mass atrocities ascribed to Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milosevic allegedly occurred at the Trepca mine. As reported by U.S. and NATO officials, the Serbs threw a thousand or more bodies down the shafts or disposed of them in the mine's vats of hydrochloric acid. In October 1999, the ICTY released the findings of Western forensic teams investigating Trepca. Not one body was found in the mine shafts, nor was there any evidence that the vats had ever been used in an attempt to dissolve human remains. 26
By late autumn of 1999, the media hype about mass graves had fizzled noticeably. The many sites unearthed, considered to be the most notorious, offered up a few hundred bodies altogether, not the thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands previously trumpeted, and with no evidence of torture or mass execution. <b>In many cases, there was no certain evidence regarding the nationality of victims.</b> 27 No mass killings means that the Hague War Crimes Tribunal indictment of Milosevic "becomes highly questionable, " notes Richard Gwyn. "Even more questionable is the West's continued punishment of the Serbs." 28
No doubt there were graves in Kosovo that contained two or more persons (which is NATO's definition of a "mass grave"). People were killed by bombs and by the extensive land war that went on between Yugoslav and KLA forces. Some of the dead, as even the New York Times allowed, "are fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army or may have died ordinary deaths" â as would happen in any large population over time. 29 And no doubt there were grudge killings and summary executions as in any war, but not on a scale that would warrant the label of genocide and justify the massive death and destruction and the continuing misery inflicted upon Yugoslavia by the western powers.
We should remember that the propaganda campaign waged by NATO officials and the major media never claimed merely that atrocities (murders and rapes) occurred. Such crimes occur in every war, indeed, in manycommunities during peacetime. What the media propaganda campaign against Yugoslavia charged was that mass atrocities and mass rapes and mass murders had been perpetrated, that is, genocide, as evidenced by mass graves.
<b>In contrast to its public assertions, the German Foreign Office privately denied there was any evidence that genocide or ethnic cleansing was ever a component of Yugoslav policy: "Even in Kosovo, an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable... The actions of the [Yugoslav] security forces [were] not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but against the military opponent and its actual or alleged supporters." 30</b>
Still, Milosevic was indicted as a war criminal, charged with the forced expulsion of Kosovar Albanians, and with summary executions of a hundred or so individuals, again, alleged crimes that occurred after the NATO bombing had started, yet were used as justification for the bombing. The biggest warcriminal of all is NATO and the political leaders who orchestrated the aerial campaign of death and destruction. But here is how the White House and the U.S. media reasoned at the time: Since the aerial attacks do not intend to kill civilians, then presumably there is no liability and no accountability, only an occasional apology for the regrettable mistakes â as if only the intent of an action counted and not its ineluctable effects. In fact, a perpetratorcan be judged guilty of willful murder without explicitly intending the death of a particular victim â as when the death results from an unlawful act that the perpetrator knew would likely cause death. George Kenney, a former State Department official under the Bush Administration, put it well: "Dropping cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas doesn't result in accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror bombing." 31
In sum, through a process of monopoly control and distribution, repetition and image escalation, the media achieve self-confirmation, that is, they find confirmation for the images they fabricate in the images they have already fabricated. <b>Hyperbolic labeling takes the place of evidence: "genocide, " "mass atrocities," "systematic rapes" and even "rape camps" â camps which no one has ever located. Through this process, evidence is not only absent, it becomes irrelevant.</b>
<b>So the U.S. major media (and much of the minor media) are not free and independent, as they claim, they are not the watchdog of democracy but the lapdog of the national security state. They help reverse the roles of victims and victimizers, warmongers and peacekeepers, reactionaries and reformers.</b> The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->16. See for instance, Carlotta Gall, "Belgrade Sees Grave Site as Proof NATO Fails to Protect Serbs, " New York Times, August 27, 1999.
17. Both the State Department and Cohen's figures are reported in the New York Times, November 11, 1999.
18. New York Times, November 11, 1999.
19. Associate Press release, June 18, 1999. Reuters (July 12, 1999) reported that NATO forces had catalogued more than one hundred sites containing the bodies of massacred ethnic Albanians.
20. Stratfor. com, Global Intelligence Update, "Where Are Kosovo's Killing Fields? " Weekly Analysis, October 18, 1999.
21. Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid, "Playing the Numbers Game" (www. aim. org/mm/1999/08/03. htm).
22. London Sunday Times, October 31, 1999.
23. Washington Post, July 10, 1999.
24. Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1999.
25. Stratfor. com, Global Intelligence Update, "Where Are Kosovo's Killing Fields? " Weekly Analysis, October 18, 1999.
26. Richard Gwyn in the Toronto Star, November 3, 1999.
27. See for instance, Carlotta Gall, "Belgrade Sees Grave Site as Proof NATO Fails to Protect Serbs, " New York Times, August 27, 1999.
28. Richard Gwyn in the Toronto Star, November 3, 1999.
29. New York Times, November 11, 1999.
30. Intelligence reports from the German Foreign Office, January 12, 1999 and October 29, 1998 to the German Administrative Courts, translated by Eric Canepa, Brecht Forum, New York, April 20, 1999.
31. Teach-in, Leo Baeck Temple, Los Angeles, May 23, 1999.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Can't prove genocide, so how to still tar the Serbs? Can't guess? Ask the Hague Tribunals and their sycophants in the media:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.c...jectid=10426003
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Serbia cleared of genocide, but failed to stop killings</b>
Tuesday February 27, 2007
By Alexandra Hudson
Photo caption: Women from Srebrenica react to TV coverage from The International Court of Justice. Photo / Reuters
(In this image: the women have walls plastered with photos of missing/dead people in the background already. So this was not just some random women who have been affected, but obviously women of an organisation chosen in preparation for relaying this story.)
THE HAGUE - The highest UN court cleared the Serbian state today of direct responsibility for genocide in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war, but said it had violated its responsibility to prevent genocide.
Bosnia had asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to rule on whether Serbia committed genocide through the killing, rape and ethnic cleansing that ravaged Bosnia during the war, in one of the court's biggest cases in its 60-year history.
It was the first time a state had been tried for genocide, outlawed in a UN convention in 1948 after the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. A judgment in Bosnia's favor could have allowed it to seek billions of dollars of compensation from Serbia.
ICJ President Judge Rosalyn Higgins said the court concluded that the Srebrenica massacre did constitute genocide, but that other mass killings of Bosnian Muslims did not.
But she said the court ruled that the Serbian state could not be held directly responsible for genocide, so paying reparations to Bosnia would be inappropriate even though Serbia had failed to prevent genocide and punish the perpetrators.
"The court finds by 13 votes to 2 that Serbia has not committed genocide," she said. "The court finds that Serbia has violated the obligation to prevent genocide ... in respect of the genocide that occurred in Srebrenica."
Some 8,000 Muslims from Srebrenica and surrounding villages in eastern Bosnia were killed in July 1995. The bodies of about half of them have been found <b>in more than 80 mass graves nearby</b>.
(<b>What mass graves?</b> See post 4 and further down.)
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic, both accused of genocide over Srebrenica, are still on the run.
Earlier in the ruling, Higgins said the court found it established that Serbia "was making its considerable military and financial support available" to the Bosnian Serbs but that it had not known they had genocidal intent.
Individuals guilty of genocide
Serbia had said a ruling against it would be an unjust and lasting stigma on the state, which overthrew its wartime leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
Milosevic died last year, just months before a verdict in his trial on 66 counts of genocide and war crimes was due.
The UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague has already found individuals guilty of genocide at Srebrenica. Bosnia used evidence from trials there for its case against Serbia.
In Bosnia, now split between a Muslim-Croat federation and a Serb Republic, sentiment is split along ethnic lines, with Muslims hoping the court would brand Serbia an aggressor.
About 50 people demonstrated outside the court on Monday in favor of a genocide verdict.
"A ruling that Serbia committed genocide in Bosnia means everything to me," said 34-year-old Hedija Krdzic who lost her husband, father and grandfather at Srebrenica. "Without such a ruling I fear that one day the massacre will be forgotten."
It is almost 14 years since Bosnia first sued the rump Yugoslav state from which it seceded in 1992, but the case has been repeatedly held up by arguments over jurisdiction.
Bosnia's Muslims and Croats followed Slovenia and Croatia in breaking away from Yugoslavia in April 1992, against the wishes of Bosnian Serbs, who were left as a one-third minority in what had previously been a Yugoslav republic ruled from Belgrade.
This triggered a war in which at least 100,000 people were killed.
Backed by the Yugoslav army, the Serbs captured two-thirds of Bosnia and besieged Sarajevo. Tens of thousands of non-Serbs were killed and hundreds of thousands forced from their homes.
- REUTERS<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
http://www.michaelparenti.org/MediaAtrocities.html
<b>"The Media and their Atrocities"</b> by Parenti (mentioned in material pasted in Post 5)
Pasting a large section here because it is worth reading:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Serbian attacks on KLA strongholds or the forced expulsion of Albanian villagers were described as "genocide. " But experts in surveillance photography and wartime propaganda charged NATO with running a "propaganda campaign" on Kosovo that lacked any supporting evidence. State Department reports of mass graves and of 100, 000 to 500, 000 missing Albanian men "are just ludicrous, " according to these independent critics. 11 Their findings were ignored by the major networks and other national media.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->11. Charles Radin and Louise Palmer, "Experts Voice Doubts on Claims of Genocide: Little Evidence for NATO Assertions, " San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 1999. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Disappearing "Mass Graves"</b>
After NATO forces occupied Kosovo, the stories about mass atrocities continued fortissimo. The Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic Albanians "might be buried in mass graves" around a mountain village in western Kosovo. They "might be" or they might not be. These estimates were based on sources that NATO officials refused to identify. Getting down to specifics, the article mentions "four decomposing bodies" discyovered near a large ash heap. 15
It was repeatedly announced in the first days of the NATO occupation that 10, 000 Albanians had been killed (down from the 100, 000 and even 500, 000 Albanian men supposedly executed during the war). No evidence was ever offered to support the 10, 000 figure, nor even to explain how it was arrived at so swiftly and surely while NATO troops were still moving into place and did not occupy but small portions of the province.
(The random 10,000 is the number the media has settled on at present -Â see for instance posts 11, 13 and 15 which are recent news articles - media still faithfully doing Uncle Sam's bidding unquestioningly and towing the anti-Serb line. They think 10,000 is large enough to scream 'genocide', and small enough not to have to prove that it took place.)
Likewise, repeatedly unsubstantiated references to "mass graves, " each purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of Albanian victims also failed to materialize. Through the summer of 1999, the media hype about mass graves devolved into an occasional unspecified reference. The few sites actually unearthed offered up as many as a dozen bodies or sometimes twice that number, but with no certain evidence regarding causes of death or even the nationality of victims. In some cases there was reason to believe the victims were Serbs. 16
On April 19, 1999, while the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia were going on, the State Department announced that up to 500, 000 Kosovo Albanians were missing and feared dead. On May 16, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine now serving in President Clinton'sDemocratic Administration, stated that 100, 000 military-aged ethnic Albanian men had vanished and might have been killed by the Serbs. 17 Such widely varying but horrendous figures from official sources went unchallenged by the media and by the many liberals who supported NATO's "humanitarian rescue operation. " Among these latter were some supposedly progressive members of Congress who seemed to believe they were witnessing another Nazi Holocaust.
On June 17, just before the end of the war, British Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon said that "in more than 100 massacres" some 10, 000 ethnic Albanians had been killed (down from the 500, 000 and 100, 000 bandied about by U.S. officials). "18 A day or two after the bombings stopped, the Associate Press and other news agency, echoing Hoon, reported that 10, 000 Albanians had been killed by the Serbs. 19 No explanation was given as to how this figure was arrived at, especially since not a single war site had yet been investigated and NATO forces had barely begun to move into Kosovo. On August 2, Bernard Kouchner, the United Nations' chief administrator in Kosovo (and organizer of Doctors Without Borders), asserted that about 11, 000 bodies had been found in common graves throughout Kosovo. He cited as his source the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (ICTY). But the ICTY denied providing any such information. To this day, it is not clear how Kouchner came up with his estimate. 20
As with the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts, the image of mass killings was hyped once again. Repeatedly unsubstantiated references to "mass graves, " each purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of Albanian victims were publicized in daily media reports. In September 1999, Jared Israel did an internet search for newspaper articles, appearing over the previous three months including the words "Kosovo" and "mass grave. " The report came back: "More than 1000 â too many to list. " Limiting his search to articles in the New York Times, he came up with eighty, nearly one a day. Yet when it came down to hard evidence, the mass graves seemed to disappear.
Thus, in mid-June, the FBI sent a team to investigate two of the sites listed in the war-crimes indictment against Slobodan Milosevic, one purportedly containing six victims and the other twenty. The team lugged 107, 000 pounds of equipmentinto Kosovo to handle what was called the "largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history, " but it came up with no reports about mass graves. Not long after, on July 1, the FBI team returned home, oddly with not a word to say about their investigation. 21
Forensic experts from other NATO countries had similar experiences. A Spanish forensic team, for instance, was told to prepare for at least 2, 000 autopsies, but found only 187 bodies, usually buried in individual graves, and showing no signs of massacre or torture. Most seemed to have been killed by mortar shells and firearms. One Spanish forensic expert, Emilio Perez Puhola, acknowledged that his team did not find one mass grave. He dismissed the widely publicized references about mass graves as being part of the "machinery of war propaganda." 22
The Washington Postreported that 350 ethnic Albanians "might be buried in mass graves" around a mountain village in western Kosovo. Or they might not. Such speculations were based on sources that NATO officials refused to identify. Getting down to specifics, the article mentions "four decomposing bodies" discovered near a large ash heap, with no details as to who they might be or how they died. 23
In late August1999, the Los Angeles Timestried to salvage the genocide theme with a story about how the wells of Kosovo might be "mass graves in their own right. " The Times claimed that "many corpses have been dumped into wells in Kosovo ... Serbian forces apparently stuffed... many bodies of ethnic Albanians into wells during their campaign of terror. "24 Apparently? Whenever the story got down to specifics, it dwelled on only one village and only one well â in which one body of a 39-year-old male was found, along with three dead cows and a dog. Neither his nationality nor cause of death was given. Nor was it clear who owned the well. "No other human remains were discovered, " the Timeslamely concluded. As far as I know, neither the Los Angeles Timesnor any other media outlet ran any more stories of wells stuffed with victims.
In one grave site after another, bodies were failing to materialize in any substantial numbers â or any numbers at all. In July 1999, a mass grave in Ljubenic, near Pec (an area of concerted fighting), believed to be holding some 350 corpses, produced only seven after the exhumation. In Djacovica, town officials claimed that one hundred ethnic Albanians had been murdered, but there were no bodies because the Serbs had returned in the middle of the night, dug them up, and carted them away, the officials seemed to believe. In Pusto Selo, villagers claimed that 106 men were captured and killed by Serbs at the end of March, but again no remains were discovered. Villagers once more suggested that Serb forces must have come back and removed them. How they accomplished this without being detected was not explained. In Izbica, refugees reported that 150 ethnic Albanians were executed in March. But their bodies were nowhere to be found. In Kraljan, 82 men were supposedly killed, but investigators found not a single cadaver. 25
The worst incident of mass atrocities ascribed to Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milosevic allegedly occurred at the Trepca mine. As reported by U.S. and NATO officials, the Serbs threw a thousand or more bodies down the shafts or disposed of them in the mine's vats of hydrochloric acid. In October 1999, the ICTY released the findings of Western forensic teams investigating Trepca. Not one body was found in the mine shafts, nor was there any evidence that the vats had ever been used in an attempt to dissolve human remains. 26
By late autumn of 1999, the media hype about mass graves had fizzled noticeably. The many sites unearthed, considered to be the most notorious, offered up a few hundred bodies altogether, not the thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands previously trumpeted, and with no evidence of torture or mass execution. <b>In many cases, there was no certain evidence regarding the nationality of victims.</b> 27 No mass killings means that the Hague War Crimes Tribunal indictment of Milosevic "becomes highly questionable, " notes Richard Gwyn. "Even more questionable is the West's continued punishment of the Serbs." 28
No doubt there were graves in Kosovo that contained two or more persons (which is NATO's definition of a "mass grave"). People were killed by bombs and by the extensive land war that went on between Yugoslav and KLA forces. Some of the dead, as even the New York Times allowed, "are fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army or may have died ordinary deaths" â as would happen in any large population over time. 29 And no doubt there were grudge killings and summary executions as in any war, but not on a scale that would warrant the label of genocide and justify the massive death and destruction and the continuing misery inflicted upon Yugoslavia by the western powers.
We should remember that the propaganda campaign waged by NATO officials and the major media never claimed merely that atrocities (murders and rapes) occurred. Such crimes occur in every war, indeed, in manycommunities during peacetime. What the media propaganda campaign against Yugoslavia charged was that mass atrocities and mass rapes and mass murders had been perpetrated, that is, genocide, as evidenced by mass graves.
<b>In contrast to its public assertions, the German Foreign Office privately denied there was any evidence that genocide or ethnic cleansing was ever a component of Yugoslav policy: "Even in Kosovo, an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable... The actions of the [Yugoslav] security forces [were] not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but against the military opponent and its actual or alleged supporters." 30</b>
Still, Milosevic was indicted as a war criminal, charged with the forced expulsion of Kosovar Albanians, and with summary executions of a hundred or so individuals, again, alleged crimes that occurred after the NATO bombing had started, yet were used as justification for the bombing. The biggest warcriminal of all is NATO and the political leaders who orchestrated the aerial campaign of death and destruction. But here is how the White House and the U.S. media reasoned at the time: Since the aerial attacks do not intend to kill civilians, then presumably there is no liability and no accountability, only an occasional apology for the regrettable mistakes â as if only the intent of an action counted and not its ineluctable effects. In fact, a perpetratorcan be judged guilty of willful murder without explicitly intending the death of a particular victim â as when the death results from an unlawful act that the perpetrator knew would likely cause death. George Kenney, a former State Department official under the Bush Administration, put it well: "Dropping cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas doesn't result in accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror bombing." 31
In sum, through a process of monopoly control and distribution, repetition and image escalation, the media achieve self-confirmation, that is, they find confirmation for the images they fabricate in the images they have already fabricated. <b>Hyperbolic labeling takes the place of evidence: "genocide, " "mass atrocities," "systematic rapes" and even "rape camps" â camps which no one has ever located. Through this process, evidence is not only absent, it becomes irrelevant.</b>
<b>So the U.S. major media (and much of the minor media) are not free and independent, as they claim, they are not the watchdog of democracy but the lapdog of the national security state. They help reverse the roles of victims and victimizers, warmongers and peacekeepers, reactionaries and reformers.</b> The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->16. See for instance, Carlotta Gall, "Belgrade Sees Grave Site as Proof NATO Fails to Protect Serbs, " New York Times, August 27, 1999.
17. Both the State Department and Cohen's figures are reported in the New York Times, November 11, 1999.
18. New York Times, November 11, 1999.
19. Associate Press release, June 18, 1999. Reuters (July 12, 1999) reported that NATO forces had catalogued more than one hundred sites containing the bodies of massacred ethnic Albanians.
20. Stratfor. com, Global Intelligence Update, "Where Are Kosovo's Killing Fields? " Weekly Analysis, October 18, 1999.
21. Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid, "Playing the Numbers Game" (www. aim. org/mm/1999/08/03. htm).
22. London Sunday Times, October 31, 1999.
23. Washington Post, July 10, 1999.
24. Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1999.
25. Stratfor. com, Global Intelligence Update, "Where Are Kosovo's Killing Fields? " Weekly Analysis, October 18, 1999.
26. Richard Gwyn in the Toronto Star, November 3, 1999.
27. See for instance, Carlotta Gall, "Belgrade Sees Grave Site as Proof NATO Fails to Protect Serbs, " New York Times, August 27, 1999.
28. Richard Gwyn in the Toronto Star, November 3, 1999.
29. New York Times, November 11, 1999.
30. Intelligence reports from the German Foreign Office, January 12, 1999 and October 29, 1998 to the German Administrative Courts, translated by Eric Canepa, Brecht Forum, New York, April 20, 1999.
31. Teach-in, Leo Baeck Temple, Los Angeles, May 23, 1999.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->