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A commentary on US/NATO Perception Management from the World Socialist Web
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Seth Sandronsky
WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkan Crisis
Further doubt cast on US claims of genocide in Kosovo
By Martin McLaughlin
18 May 1999
There are growing questions about the claims by US and NATO
officials, accepted uncritically in the media for more than a month, that
Yugoslav forces have carried out genocide against the Albanian
population of Kosovo.
These claims have been intensified in the wake of recent bombing
atrocities such as the destruction of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and
the killing of as many as 100 Albanian Kosovars by NATO bombs in the village
of Korisa.
In an effort to excuse their own crimes, US and British officials in
particular have repeatedly compared the actions of Serbian forces to the
Nazi Holocaust.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a speech in Aachen, German May
13, called the bombing campaign “a just war against the most evil form of
genocide since my father's generation defeated the Nazis."
Hillary Clinton, during a visit to Kosovar Albanian refugees in
Macedonia, said their suffering reminded her of Schindler's List and
Sophie's Choice, both of which concern the Nazi mass murder of the
Jews.
US Secretary of Defense William Cohen, speaking on a television
interview program Sunday, dismissed Yugoslav criticism of the bombing
of Korisa, in which 100 Kosovar Albanians were killed, declaring: “For
the Serbs to lament publicly about the deaths of these refugees is almost
tantamount to Adolf Eichmann complaining about allied forces bombing the
crematoriums.”
And finally President Clinton himself, in a speech May 13 to an audience of
veterans in Washington DC. Clinton admitted that the whole premise of the
NATO propaganda campaign against the Milosevic regime was false, that
“ethnic cleansing is not the same as the ethnic extermination of the
Holocaust.” But then he reiterated the claim that “There are thousands of
people that have been killed, systematically, by the Serb forces. There are
a hundred thousand people who are still missing."
None of these sweeping assertions was accompanied by any evidence,
such as aerial photographs and other documentation which could be
provided by the massive electronic and satellite surveillance which the US
intelligence services maintain over Kosovo.
Instead, the US-NATO claims were undermined by a dispatch published
May 17 from an eyewitness on the ground, Canadian journalist Paul
Watson, the correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in Kosovo.
While the Clinton administration claims that 100,000 Albanian men have
disappeared and are likely dead, murdered by the Yugoslav military and
Serbian nationalists, Watson found many young Albanian men, displaced
but otherwise unmolested, at the village of Svetjle in northern Kosovo.
Svetjle is one of the Kosovo Albanian villages that, according to NATO, has
been depopulated by Serb forces who committed genocide. While NATO
Secretary-General Javier Solana said that Serbian killings of Albanians had
been so widespread that “you don't see males in their 30s to 60s,” Watson
had no difficulty seeing them.
When he arrived at Svetjle for a second visit in a week, “hundreds of
young men are everywhere, strolling along the dirt roads or lying on grass
on a spring day.
“So many fighting-age men in a region where the Kosovo Liberation
Army fought some of its fiercest battles against Serbian forces are a
challenge to the black-and-white versions of what is happening here.
"By their own accounts, the men are not living in a concentration camp, nor
being forced to labor for the police or army, nor serving as human shields
for Serbs.
“Instead, they are waiting with their families for permission to follow
thousands who have risked going back home to nearby villages because they do
not want to give up and leave Kosovo.”
Watson visited the village without a police or military escort or any
official Serbian monitor, and he spoke to Albanian refugees who
themselves said they had not had any conflicts with the police since they
were allowed to return to the area around their village.
“For the month that we've been here, the police have come only to sell
cigarettes,” one Albanian said, “but there hasn't been any harassment.”
While the American media continues to give publicity to increasingly
unbelievable estimates that more than 90 percent of the Kosovo Albanian
population has been driven from their homes, Watson describes a population
that went into hiding during the first two weeks of the NATO bombing, but is
now emerging..
He writes: “Thousands of other ethnic Albanians oming out of hiding
in forests and in the mountains, hungry and frightened and either going back
home or waiting for police permission to do so.
“While Serbian police seize the identity documents of Kosovo Albanians
crossing the border into Albania or Macedonia, government officials in
Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital, issue new identity cards to ethnic
Albanians still here.”
Watson interviewed an Albanian political activist, Fatmir Seholi of the
Kosovo Democratic Initiative, who denied the allegations of genocide against
Albanians which have been the principal pretext for the NATO bombing.
“As an Albanian, I am convinced that the Serbian government and
security forces are not committing any kind of genocide,” he said.
“In a war, even innocent people die,” he explained. “In every war, there are
those who want to profit. Here there is a minority of people who wanted to
steal, but that's not genocide. These are only crimes.”
Seholi is a political opponent of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army,
which killed his father in 1997 and publicly justified it on the grounds of
cooperation with the Yugoslav authorities. But it is significant that Watson
himself, who has been in Kosovo throughout the war, gives the same
description of the attacks by Serb nationalists on the Albanian population,
and their eventual end.
“After waves of looting, arson, killings and other attacks turned many of
Kosovo's cities into virtual ghost towns, the government took steps to
restore order, and ethnic Albanians began to move back, often under
police protection,” he writes.
“Of an estimated 100,000 people living in Pristina, roughly 80,000 are
ethnic Albanians and a quarter of these are displaced people from the
Podujevo area living with relatives...”
Watson's report is thus in stark contrast with the statements of Clinton,
Blair & Co., alleging systematic, ongoing mass murder by the Yugoslav
government. It follows a similar series of reports published earlier this
month in the New York Times.
These reports suggest that the claims of genocide in Kosovo, which have
provided the essential pretext for the NATO bombing, are a deliberate and
enormous hoax. This attempt to delude and stampede public opinion will be
exposed with devastating political consequences for its authors once it
becomes possible for outside observers to make a more systematic assessment
of the conditions in Kosovo.
The Clinton administration is already making preparations to counter such
exposures. The White House announced that it has hired a public
relations coordinator for the Kosovo refugee campaign, veteran political
operative Leslie Dach, to work on a 30-day contract. One White House
official told the press, "There's a feeling that the next month is critical
in terms of American public opinion."
A more sinister precaution is the statement issued by NATO that it
cannot guarantee the security of Red Cross and UN aid workers who
are returning to Kosovo this week after being evacuated when the
bombing campaign began. Admitting that there had already been
“perhaps hundreds of innocent casualties” from the bombing, a NATO
spokesmen suggested that Red Cross and UN workers, too, could
become collateral damage.
Here is expressed both the real indifference of the imperialists to the
suffering of the Albanian population which remains in Kosovo, and their
concern that UN and Red Cross workers may report conditions far
different from those claimed in NATO propaganda and parroted, for the
most part, in the American media.
See Also:
After Korisa bomb atrocity
The evolution of a NATO lie
[17 May 1999]
An interview with Professor Robert Hayden
NATO's claim of 100,000 murdered in Kosovo--a
rebuttal
[17 May 1999]
What really has happened in Kosovo
[14 May 1999]
War in the Balkans
[WSWS Full Coverage]
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