The propaganda war
Audrey Gillan tries to find the
evidence for mass atrocities in
Kosovo
Special report: Kosovo
Monday August 21, 2000
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 stifling bus 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
jewellery.
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
Organisation 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 favoured
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 co-ordinator for OSCE's field office in
Skopje, I saw that she was angered by
the behaviour 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 despatched 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 behaviour.
We knew that one woman, raped by
Serbian soldiers then forced to leave her
country, was traumatised 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 frontline
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 |
