Eye-witness evidence is often unreliable, concludes The Times in this mealy-mouthed editorial

London, November 2, 1999

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Editorial

Kosovo's Corpse Count

How many bodies make a genocide?

THE forensic experts who have been in Kosovo since Nato's bombing campaign ended in June, unearthing grisly evidence of mass murder that Nato's wartime reports indicated, are reaching a surprising conclusion.

The number of ethnic Albanians murdered or executed during the springtime hostilities may be lower than at first suspected -- perhaps in the hundreds, not tens of thousands. The good-hearted might treat this as cause for rejoicing. Instead it has been taken up as a stick with which to beat Nato. Critics suggest that Nato officials deliberately made up the accusation that the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, planned the destruction of Kosovo Albanians. The accusation of genocide was sometimes used as moral justification for intervention. If it is not now backed by vast numbers of mass graves, critics allege that those who backed Nato were the victims of a con trick.

The picture that Nato officials painted during the war of events inside Kosovo was, legitimately, as dark as available information permitted. The US Defence Secretary, William Cohen, said that up to 100,000 Albanians had been killed by the Yugoslav military. Geoff Hoon, then Minister of State at the Foreign Office, said that 10,000 had been killed. President Clinton said tens of thousands had been killed on President Milosevic's orders. The UN told experts from 15 countries who were later sent into the province to expect 44,000 deaths.

Yet the very disparity between these estimates was, even at the time, an indication that no one could realistically evaluate what was going on on the ground. During an air campaign in which much of Kosovo's Albanian majority fled both Serbs and bombs, either to take shelter in refugee camps abroad or to mill helplessly about inside their homeland -- seeking a way out not barred by Serbs with guns -- the closest approximation to the truth was the stories of refugees. Traumatised refugees may describe their escape, or fears for relatives in danger, with more emotional than factual truth. Misunderstandings must be expected. It was precisely because war engenders confusion and conspiracy theories that experts were ordered in to establish amore clinical truth.

Those experts have since lowered the death figures several times, According to Emilio Perez Pujol, head of a Spanish team which went home in disgust last month after finding just 187 bodies, there may be even fewer victims than the 11,000 of the latest Nato estimate. Several sites publicised by Nato as possible mass graves turn out to be empty. Stratfor, an analytical group examining data from Kosovo, suggests that the final toll might be as low as a few hundred.

This less bloodstained picture undoubtedly discredits the individuals who rushed to bandy exaggerated accusations of "genocide"; reality cannot keep up with their hyperbole. But it does nothing to invalidate Nato's rationale for fighting. Intervention was necessary to stop Serb forces committing mass atrocities; Mr Milosevic had resisted all non-military pressure. Serb forces were moving the Albanian population out of the province. The actual number of civilians killed to scare the rest off is irrelevant; the prevention of mass murder and ethnic cleansing, on whatever scale, remains a war aim of which Nato can be proud.