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MOSCOW -- The recently anounced results of long-term investigations conducted by a team of experts from 14 countries - that slightly more than 2,000 bodies have been exhumed in Serbia's Kosovo and Metohija province, and not hundreds of thousands, as the advocates of the air strikes on Yugoslavia had claimed early this year, and that bodies of ethnic Albanians are less numerous - have caused great attention among the Russian public.
Local media pointed out that manifold exaggerations of the number of victims among ethnic Albanians, which served as a pretext to NATO to launch its three-month brutal aggression against Yugoslavia, have shown that those who had given their suppoprt to this action had been victims of a great deception.
The focal part of this week's central news broadcast Vremja of Russia's TV station ORT entitled "Here and Now" was devoted to accusations by British MPs that Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and other western leaders had presented false, highly exaggerated reports about the number of ethnic Albanian victims in Kosovo and Metohija and alleged ethnic cleansing of local ethnic Albanians, of which NATO had made use for its unjustified air campaign against Yugoslavia.
During the broadcast, British MP and inter-party Committee for Peace in the Balkans President Alice Mann commented live that there was no longer any doubt that the public had been deceived about the number of victims in Kosovo. She said the figures had been increased several times in order to justify the air strikes.
Mann pointed out that a Spanish expert team which visited Kosovo and Metohija had not found a single mass grave, while English experts had previously announced that large numbers of victims had been determined on the basis of aerial photographs.
An authorized commission which came to Kosovo and Metohija did not find anything remotely similar, she said. Mann also spoke about her recent visit to Serbia, where she said she had seen the terrible devastation caused by NATO.