Dan,
Your links hit the issue right on the head.
Title: "Kosovo - locations of mass graves reported or found"
There were numerous reports of mass graves with thousands of bodies. I read some articles from jurnalists hunting for these graves after the war, investigating these reports and they came up empty.
The motivation to lie on the part of Kosovo Albanians was clear: to get the US involved, and once they US stumbled into the whole situation, it was in the interest of the Clinton administration to repeat these unconfirmed reports or lies to justify the invasion. If you recall, it was only after the planes were in the air and bombing that Jamie Rubin with his wife Christiana Amampour of CNN started to build up support, or justification for invasion of a sovereign, non-hostile country.
There were one or 2 villages with difficult to pronounce names, where tens of people were murdered by individuals who did not follow orders.
There were 100s of stories on TV about this one or 2 villages, whose names nobody can remember, which created impression that there were 100s of villages where this happened.
One thing that is important to realize that the main target of KLA terrorists were not really Serbs, but the moderate Kosovo Albanians, who prefered to live in a relative safety, provided by the government of Serbia to the reighn of terror that KLA promissed (and delivered). Afterall, with bin Laden being their sponsor, what would you expect.
I am sure the whole episode must have given bin Laden the best entertainment of his life, since he manipulated Madalein Albright and Clinton to fight the jihad for him.
Joe
PS: just re-read the article. Here is my summary:
village of Kacanik where evidence of mass murders was uncovered on Monday.
Can they count? What is the definition of "mass"
"We found what looks like the remains of 20 burnt bodies and it was horrible,"
The only number from a credible source - a Dutch soldier
In Ribari Vogel, locals told how Serb forces had slaughtered...
One woman said ...
The next day the Serbs reportedly moved where locals said they massacred another 20
And residents of Koronica in western Kosovo reported finding an estimated 150 buried bodies - victims of a massacre of village men by Serb forces.
There are 35 fresh graves in the churchyard at Kacanik, said to contain the bodies ...
Reports said local people had been seen removing bodies from holes...
the villagers were apparently taking advantage of the Serb withdrawal
If the sites at Kacanik are confirmed as graves, it would be the first discovery of killings on such a scale since peacekeeping forces entered Kosovo.
One villager said the victims, including children, were killed two months ago when Serbian soldiers threw grenades into a crowd and then shot all those left alive.
But a local member of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) said the grave contained victims of a Serbian ethnic cleansing
He (KLA soldier) said that those who could run fled up the valley, but the elderly and infirm who could not were shot down by rifle and machine-gun fire from the surrounding hills.
The KLA says it cannot confirm that the graves contain the bodies of the victims of the alleged massacre, but a local doctor who was visiting the cemetery said he too believed that the elderly and infirm of the village had been killed in a massacre.
The doctor added that there had been other massacres
Unfortunately, none of this ever checked out. It was just tactics to get the US involved. With typical short term memory of most people, just about everybody forgot about the whole thing, and the reports from journalists who couldn't find them was buried deep in the newspapers
Joe |
