Guardian reporter investigates mass atrocity charges.
Reprinted from reagan.com
Editor's Note: Since NATO started bombing
Yugoslavia, we have heard many accusations that
there were "mass murders" and "mass rapes"
being committed against the Albanians by the
Serbs. If you listen carefully to those reports,
whether pronounced by the chief spokesman for
NATO, Jamie Shea, or for the President of the
United States, James Rubin and Joe Lockhart or
one or another news anchor, what you hear are
accusations that are not verifiable under the
present circumstances. Jamie Shea is particularly
insistent on repeating the "mass murder" or "mass
graves" or "mass rape" stories - which he appears
to get from the KLA headquarters in London.
In this strange "humanitarian, e-mail" war, I
receive many messages - from all sides of the
issue. Two readers, Krste and Jelena, sent me the
article below, written by a determined British
reporter, Audrey Gillan, who searched really hard
for some kind of back up proof of the atrocity
stories. She not only talked to many Albanian
refugees, but to Benedicte Giaever, the
co-ordinator for OSCE's field office in Skopje and
Ben Ward, a researcher for Human Rights Watch .
In other words, Gillan actually went back to the
basics of good journalism and tried to verify the
facts of a story which the lazy newscasters merely
repeat without checking. I have been accused of
"glossing over" the tragedy of the Albanian
refugees because I don't post on the website the
stories I hear over and over from government
sources and the news sources that repeat the
government sources. Why? Because I have not
seen any proof that the stories are based on fact.
Audrey Gillan was able to do the research that I
would have liked to have done. Oddly, her findings
verify my suspicions - that most of what we are
hearing to "justify" the bombings and to push for
a ground force invasion of Yugoslavia may be
traced to the KLA propaganda machine which
appears to have manipulated several key
American decision makers, including William
Holbrooke, with a clever campaign of lies and
disinformation.
London Review of Books, Volume 21,
Number 11, Cover date 27 May 1999
WHAT'S THE STORY?
(The Guardian's Audrey Gillan tries to find the
evidence for mass atrocities in Kosovo)
Ferteze Nimari had lost two of her brothers and
her husband was forced to bury all the dead in
one grave. Later, packed into a stiflingbus with
sixty fellow Kosovars, the couple held onto each
other as he clutched a strap suspended from the
ceiling. The bus stopped in the Stankovac I
refugee camp in Macedonia and they told their
story. 'The tank came to our village of Sllovi. The
Serb neighbours said not to worry - it was just
there to observe us. But by lunchtime the next
day a teenage girl lay dead in the street. Then
another 15 people were killed. They told us to run
into the woods and they started shooting us.'
I asked them so many questions about what they
had seen. 'What happened when your brothers
were shot?' 'How many people did you bury?'
'How do you feel now?' When they said the Serbs
had forced an old woman into a tent and burned
her alive I looked at them doubtfully and asked
how they knew she had been alive. Someone
from her family had seen it happen, they said.
The Nimaris had arrived at what they thought was
a safe haven, but I pursued them, and I did so
unsparingly. I got on the bus when the driver
opened the doors for air. They had stood for
hours on that malodorous bus. I felt sorry for
them: but not so sorry that I stopped the
questions. They had yet to step down to the
misery of the camp the British press has taken to
calling 'Brazda'. All they had was a bottle of water
passed to them through an open window - and my
questions. Ferteze, eight months pregnant,
caught me glancing at the watch on her wrist
when Remzi, her husband, said all the women in
the village had been robbed of their jewelry.
Earlier that day, Ron Redmond, the
baseball-capped spokesman for the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, stood at
the Blace border crossing from Kosovo into
Macedonia and said there were new reports of
mass rapes and killings from three villages in the
Lipljan area: Sllovi, Hallac Evogel and Ribari
Evogel. He spoke to the press of bodies being
desecrated, eyes being shot out. The way he
talked it sounded as if there had been at least a
hundred murders and dozens of rapes. When I
pressed him on the rapes, asking him to be more
precise, he reduced it a bit and said he had heard
that five or six teenage girls had been raped and
murdered. He had not spoken to any witnesses.
'We have no way of verifying these reports of
rape,' he conceded. 'These are among the first
that we have heard of at this border.'
Other UNHCR officials later told stories of women
being tied to the walls of their houses and
burned, 24 bodies buried in Kosovo Polje. Another
report, again from Sllovi, put the dead at a
hundred. Mr. and Mrs. Nimari were adamant that
it was 16. Truth can be scarce at the Blace border
and in the camps dotted around Macedonia, but
you are not allowed to say that during a war like
this, where it may be that bad things are being
done on both sides, just as you are not allowed to
doubt atrocity. It's as if NATO and its entourage
were trying to make up for the witlessness of the
past: trying to show that whatever we do, we
won't be turning a blind eye. But the
simple-minded reporter in me wants to ask a
question: is there any real evidence for what is
being said?
In Macedonia, listening to the stories and the
UNHCR accounts, you would find it hard to tell
what was hearsay and what was fact. When you
looked at the people clinging onto the carrier bags
that now held the remnants of their lives, it
seemed evident that terrible things had happened
to them, that people had been forced to flee their
homes and drag themselves to a non-life in
another country. Each person arriving at the
camps had experienced some kind of trauma, and
most are still living it. Many have seen death and
other horrors. It is just that there is little to
suggest that they have seen it in the ways, and
on the scale, that people want to say they have.
Most of those who have seen killing have seen
one or two shot and the bodies of others.
Eye-witnesses to multiple atrocities are very rare
and the simple - and not at all simple - truth is
that it can often be hard to establish the veracity
of the information. One afternoon, the people in
charge said there were refugees arriving who
talked of sixty or more being killed in one village,
fifty in another, but I could not find one
eye-witness who actually saw these things
happening.
Now, they may have happened. But what we have
is a situation where Western journalists accept
details without question. Almost every day, the
world's media, jostling for stories in Macedonia,
strain to find figures that may well not exist. In
the absence of any testimony, many just report
what some agency or other has told them. I stood
by as a reporter from BBC World reeled off what
Ron Redmond had said, using the words
'hundreds', 'rape' and 'murder' in the same
breath. By way of qualification (a fairly
meaningless one in the circumstances), he added
that the stories had yet to be substantiated. Why,
then, had he reported them so keenly in the first
place?
I found myself wanting to discover the evidence. I
was also impatient to find a 'good' story - i.e. a
mass atrocity. As each new bus trundled over the
border, I told my interpreter to shout through the
windows asking if anyone was from the three
villages Redmond had mentioned. Did they know
anyone, had they seen anything? We went along
twenty buses before we found Mr. and Mrs.
Nimari. A transit camp had been set up in the no
man's land between the river and the frontier
road at Blace. This was where the tens of
thousands were trapped in fetid misery before
Macedonian officials dispersed them one night to
the newly-built camps. Now the place is used to
give a night's rest to some of the great many who
wait patiently at this border for entry to a country
that doesn't want them and to which they really
don't want to go. Every 20 minutes, the
Macedonian police let around two hundred people
clamber down a dirt path to be processed before
being admitted into the camp. As they stood in
line, I asked whether anyone was from those
villages and whether they'd seen anything they
wanted to talk about. No one was and no one did.
Or at least they didn't want to tell us about it.
It seemed that the Nimaris were the only people
from Sllovi. I was moved by their fear and passion
to believe everything they said. Remzi told me
he'd buried the dead in a grave in the woods at
Lugi i Demes. It will take the verifiers from the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia in The Hague to put our agitated,
agitating minds at rest.
The officers from ICTY, the verifiers from the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in
Europe and researchers from Human Rights
Watch are compiling reports of war crimes, which
will be used at a later date for any trial at The
Hague. Speaking to these people, I found them to
be wary of using the hyperbole favored by
reporters and by the UNHCR. They say they have
yet to see evidence of atrocities on the scale that
they witnessed while working in Bosnia. When I
went to see Benedicte Giaever, the coordinator
for OSCE's field office in Skopje, I saw that she
was angered by the behavior of the media. I
squirmed when she said she had heard of a
female journalist getting onto a bus to question
some refugees. She said almost every journalist
who came to see her asked one thing: could she
give them a rape victim to interview. She spoke
of one woman being 'hunted down' by journalists
and having to have her tent moved to shelter her
from their intrusions: she had had a breakdown.
I wanted at the same time to test the validity of
the truths being offered us and to behave
decently in the face of what could not be known
for sure, and I knew it wasn't possible to do both.
Yet I could see that much of this rough treatment
of female refugees was a direct consequence of
Robin Cook telling the world that there was
evidence of rape camps inside Kosovo. 'Young
women are being separated from the refugee
columns,' he said, 'and forced to undergo
systematic rape in an army camp. We have
evidence from many refugees who have managed
to escape that others were taken to rape camps.'
I know of several tabloid reporters who were
dispatched to Macedonia and Albania with the sole
purpose of finding a rape victim. Talking to each
other in the bar of Skopje's Hotel Continental we
rehearsed the question which has now become
notorious: 'Is there anyone here who's been
raped and speaks English?' We were aware of the
implications of some of our more despicable
behavior. We knew that one woman, raped by
Serbian soldiers then forced to leave her country,
was traumatized all over again by a journalist
looking for a good story.
The things you come to know as a journalist do
not march in single file. Facts are often renegade.
But among the rape victims arriving in Macedonia
nobody spoke of anything like the camps the
British Foreign Secretary referred to. Benedicte
Giaever told me there had been rape, but not
systematic and not on a grand scale. The same
was true of the killing. 'We don't have big
numbers,' she said. 'What we have are consistent
small numbers - two here, five there, ten here,
seven there.' Unlike the media and the UNHCR,
the OSCE works in a slow, methodical way,
waiting a few days till the refugees have settled
in before they begin to ask questions. 'These
people have just arrived and I would say they are
still under a lot of stress and tension,' Giaever
says. 'In that situation, 5 people can easily turn
into 75. It's not that they want to lie but often
they are confused. It's not to say it didn't happen.
But a story could have moved around from village
to village and everyone from that village tells it
as if it happened to them.' Another senior OSCE
source spoke even more clearly than any of us
were inclined to do. He told me he suspected that
the Kosovo Liberation Army had been persuading
people to talk in bigger numbers, to crank up the
horror so that Nato might be persuaded to send
ground troops in faster. Robin Cook's rape camp
was the same thing, he said: an attempt to get
the British public behind the bombing. And wasn't
all this a lesson in how propaganda works in
modern war?
When I came back to London, I went to see the
KLA's spokesman and recruiting officer in Golders
Green. DR Pleurat Sejdiu, sitting beside the KLA
flag and busts of the Albanian national hero
Skenderbeg, said there were indeed rape camps,
and that the evidence of mass atrocities was to be
found among the refugees in Albania, not in
Macedonia. He is in daily contact with the KLA
front-line command by satellite phone and has
been told of rape camps in Gjakova, Rahovec,
Suhareka, Prizren and Skenderaj. 'We know there
are concentration camps and women are kept and
raped there,' he said. 'I don't think we will get the
evidence until we go in with the ground troops.
There are a lot of stories confirming it. There are
mass executions and mass graves are appearing
now. We have reports from our special units
moving around Kosovo. And the pertinent
question is: where are the young men who have
been taken from the refugee columns? I think
everything will be proved when NATO troops go
in.'
In Skopje I had been to see Ben Ward, a
researcher for Human Rights Watch, in the flat he
is renting (he had found the Hotel Continental too
expensive and the behavior of the reporters too
disconcerting): he pored over maps of Kosovo and
pointed to villages where he knows incidents have
taken place. His information comes from
eye-witnesses and is corroborated by the
testimony of others. He has noted a very definite
scorched-earth policy. But while his latest report
details killings and the mutilation of corpses in
the villages of Bajnica and Cakaj, he doesn't think
there is evidence of mass executions. 'It is very
rare for people not to know someone who knows
about people being killed. But there doesn't
appear to be anything to support allegations of
mass killings,' he said. 'It is generally
paramilitaries who are responsible. It doesn't
seem organized. There appear to be individual
acts of sadism rather than anything else. There
seems not to be any policy or instruction, but that
isn't to say that people have not been given the
latitude to kill. However, I don't think at this
stage we have anything that adds up to the
systematic killing of civilians.' Ward believes that
those who stayed longer in Kosovo have been
subjected to more violence, that many have been
terrorized because they have stayed so long.
Many have fled terror but some of those Ward
spoke to said they were fleeing the NATO bombs.
'The Serbs didn't touch us until NATO attacked,' a
Kosovar told him.
One morning I made a two-year-old girl
hysterical. I had asked her parents to show me
the wound the child suffered when the bullet that
killed her grandmother entered her shoulder. I
was getting desperate for some kind of truth to
hold onto. They pulled up Marigona Azemi's dress
and her pink T-shirt and pointed to a worn
bandage. She squealed and said it was the 'licia'
who shot her, unable to get her small tongue
round the Albanian word milicia. Like the majority
of those killed or wounded or abused by the
Serbs, Marigona was attacked by paramilitaries, a
vicious, marauding band. Seven people in her
village of Lovc - including her grandmother
Nexhmije - were killed. Some villagers claimed
that a local teacher and his cousin were skinned
alive before they were burned, others said they
were burned alive. No one actually saw this but
the rest of what they had to say tallied when they
told their stories independently. The Azemi family
had been trying to escape on its tractor when the
paramilitaries opened fire: what they did was
sadistic and it was a horrendous tale, but it
couldn't be turned into a story of mass atrocity.
Some people tell me that evil is evil; that there's
no point in quantifying it. Does that mean I am to
accept Robin Cook's unchecked facts because they
align with my hunches?
I feel bad for having made Marigona cry in order
to prove to myself that there was truth in her
story. (For days, I went to her - pathetically -
with dolls and hair bobbles and sweets and orange
juice.) But that is not all I feel. Watching the
television images and listening to the newscasters
thunder about further reports of Serb massacres
and of genocide, I feel uneasy about saying that
they have very little to go on. Yet almost every
newspaper journalist I spoke to privately in
Macedonia felt the same way. The story being
seen at home is different from the one that
appeared to be happening on the ground.
Maybe the truth here is not one thing: but I don't
want to be an accomplice to a lie. I don't want to
bellow for my life or for theirs, yet there's
something not right in this easy way with detail.
It is a surreal place, Macedonia, and it was this
aspect to which a friend drew my attention when I
got home. Nobody much wants to return to Jean
Cocteau, but there was something soothing in the
words my friend quoted. 'History is a combination
of reality and lies,' he said. 'The reality of history
becomes a lie. The reality of the fable becomes
the truth.'
Audrey Gillan is a reporter on the Guardian, for
whom she went to Macedonia. |
