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| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
One shocking truth about the Balkans is that no one tells the truth. Not even, apparently, our own government.
After four months of digging up mass graves in Kosovo, U.N. war-crimes investigators announced last week that they had found only 2,108 bodies instead of the 100,000 "missing men" Washington advertised during last spring's NATO air war.
There are still several hundred suspected burial sites to check. Some graves look disturbed, as if bodies were removed. The final body count may double.
And no matter what the numbers game, these murdered babies and old people didn't deserve to die. Many were simply too poor to buy their lives from Serb paramilitaries.
But the full equation of suffering needs to be examined. When it is, NATO comes off badly.
The alliance has not disputed Yugoslav figures that more than 1,500 civilians were killed accidentally by NATO bombs. Since NATO moved into Kosovo in June, about 400 Serbs, Roma gypsies and pro-Serb Albanians have been murdered in reprisals by victorious Albanian guerrillas. Another 400 have been kidnapped and are presumed dead.
If you're counting, that's 2,300 victims that we know about whose deaths were caused by NATO or came while NATO walked the beat.
Which is not even to trot out the tired (but true) argument that NATO helped spur the Serbs' murderous frenzy when it started bombing in March. At that point, no more than an estimated 2,000 - including scores of Serb police and civilians - had died in the guerrilla war in Kosovo.
While we're doing numbers, how about the ones the U.S. Army sprung last week: Two out of 10 divisions unfit to fight in a war that may threaten American security, because of all the soldiers and equipment tied up in Kosovo and Bosnia.
It is the most sobering indication to date of the cost to U.S. interests of our misguided Balkans involvement.
The numbers game has been used throughout the wars in the former Yugoslavia to manipulate Western opinion.
During the Bosnian war, European parliamentarians announced that they had confirmed, apparently through a handful of interviews with victims and a cursory review of other reports, that 20,000 Bosnian women had been raped by Serbs in huge "rape camps."
No "commandant" for any of these camps has ever been identified or charged at the Hague. The number was simply incredible - yet it was repeated the world over.
Likewise for the death count in Bosnia's three-year war, usually put at 250,000. After the war ended in 1995, a Canadian working for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe contacted municipalities all over Bosnia to try to get lists of their dead, to be used in correcting the election rolls.
Few had any lists or even names to give him. The overall numbers never have been confirmed. Military analysts are dubious that a war in which only tens of thousands were injured could have produced that many dead.
The corkers that still come out of Balkan mouths can be quite unnerving, although we may take some comfort in knowing that most Yugoslavs are so accustomed to the lies, they don't take them seriously, unlike our own government.
Recently, a Yugoslav spokesman said the United States was trying to bring Yugoslavia down by flooding the country with counterfeit dinars.
The Albanian rebel army warned that Serbian secret police were sneaking into Kosovo just to beat up Albanian school kids. It also said U.S. soldiers bound the hands of a hospital manager and tossed him into their tank before roughing up patients and firing tear gas in an attempt to get the hospital to rehire Serbs.
Which makes it all the more amazing that U.S. officials seemed so gullible about the 100,000 "missing men" advertised by Albanian refugees during the war.
Administration officials now say they never meant it to appear that all of those men were dead - only that we didn't know where they were. Which was true. Sort of.
It was also true that Washington was working overtime to stiffen Western resolve to continue the bombing - bombing that had the very unhumanitarian aim of preserving NATO's credibility, not finding those missing men.
Of course we "won" the war and got the right to send NATO troops into Kosovo, thereby flattening the readiness rating for the Army's 1st Infantry Division.
At least we haven't heard recently that really bald lie, that the troops will be home by next Christmas.