December 1999

Revisionist 'death counts' in Kosova

Editor's Note: The following report by Bob Myers of Workers Aid for Kosova is adapted from a piece which will appear in the English Marxist-Humanist journal HOBGOBLIN.

In August I traveled to Mitrovica, the Kosova miners' town. I found my old friend, Shashivar Begu, a member of the miners' union committee. Two years earlier he stayed at my house in Manchester as he toured Britain speaking to trade unionists about the eight-year lock-out of miners in Kosova. Now he greeted me with the traditional kiss and a smile but his whole face spoke of anguish. Another miner quietly told me that Shashivar's brother had gone missing when the whole town was ethnically cleansed in March. The family hoped he would turn up, as many people were doing, but the day before his body had been found in a nearby mass grave.

In the last few weeks this and other wasted lives have been "resurrected" as part of an argument about how many people died in Kosova. All kinds of people have seized on reports that the number of Albanians murdered by the Serbian regime is far less than the 100,000 which was being put about by NATO leaders during the bombing.

The International War Crimes Tribunal on ex-Yugoslavia has so far exhumed 2,100 Albanians after examination of one-third of the 529 mass graves so far discovered. Over 11,000 people have been reported missing by Albanian families but they may not all be dead. There are reports of hundreds or even thousands of Albanians having been taken to prisons in Serbia by retreating troops. Since NATO troops entered Kosova in June, 379 people have been murdered, about half of them Serbs and Roma and the other half Albanian. Roughly 164,000 non-Albanians have left Kosova since March.

No one disputes the 2,100 bodies exhumed by the war crimes investigators. They argue over how and why they died. How many more bodies will be found in the unopened graves? How many bodies will never be found because fire and time removed all traces?

Many from the "Left" are now excitedly waving around the Albanian death toll as "proof" that they were right to denounce NATO's bombing. Clinton and Blair, they say, justified it on the basis that up to 100,000 had been killed. Therefore the bombing was a fraud, just an act of imperialism inventing "horrors" to hide its brutal intent.

Of course, NATO uses reports of suffering to justify its actions, just as it ignores them when it chooses. Amnesty International reports that 4,000 Albanians were murdered, mostly by Serbian police, in Kosova between 1989 and the end of 1998. NATO certainly wasn't shouting out about this. The West now demands that Milosevic be put on trial. They weren't saying this last year. On the contrary, in 1995 the U.S. and British governments hailed the Serbian leader as a great "peacemaker" and "statesman" as he signed the Dayton agreement. Albanians were being killed then and the bodies of up to 8,000 were in pits around Srebrenica. It's the same in Iraq, East Timor and many other places. Despotism and mass murder are ignored when it suits and "vile human rights abuses" discovered also when it suits, but what about the truth beyond this cynicism?

What is the intent of those from the "Left" who have triumphantly held up the "low" death toll? To understand the truth? To bring out the criminality of NATO? In truth they are revealing the almost inhuman morality that is today passed off as "internationalism" and "socialism." Their only interest in the 2,100 dead is that it contradicts NATO's claims. The 2,100 are no longer people who lived, had families, whose only crime was to resist Serbia's efforts to deny them a human existence.

The murders of Albanians do not compete with the murders of Serbs or Roma, they are not mutually exclusive sets of figures. To admit the one is not to deny the other. It is only if the totality of injustice and inhumanity is acknowledged and comprehended that any sense can be made of the Kosova crisis and, even more importantly, a way forward for humanity be found in the nightmare of violence.

-Bob Myers

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