[Kcc-news] Kosovo's horror can't be denied; Kosovo doctor on trial in Serbia

[Mentor Cana]

1. Kosovo's horror can't be denied
2. Kosovo doctor on trial in Serbia

---

Kosovo's horror can't be denied

http://www.thestar.com/thestar/editorial/opinion/991112NEW02_OP-BARTHOS12.html

THE SERBS dragged Afrim Imeraj, 2
years old, from his home in Kosovo
and butchered him on the spot.

They hanged Argjend Demijaha, 5,
from a tree.

They shot Rita Vejsa, 2, and her
brother Arlind, 5. And Diona Caka, 2.
And Rina Haxhiavdija, 4.

Most of these Kosovar Albanian
children didn't end up in a mass grave.

But so what?

Their hasty murders, not their hasty burials, are why Canada
went to war on March 24, and why Slobodan Milosevic, the
Yugoslav president, is wanted as a war criminal.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, a
United Nations court, has charged him with crimes against
humanity and war crimes for his role in killing five of these
children, and more than 300 other people.

Some ink has been spilled in the press recently on the difficulty
that U.N. investigators are having locating the ``mass'' graves
that many expected to find once the Kosovo war was over.

Much has been made - particularly by those who believe
Canada had no business making war on Serbia - of the fact that
suspected mass grave sites at the Trepca mines or in Ljubenic
have failed to disgorge the bodies that were thought, wrongly,
to have been disposed of there.

The Americans, some critics say, cynically duped Canada and
the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into
believing the Milosevic regime was worse than it turned out to
be.

No mass graves means that there was no Serb genocide against
Kosovars and thus no justification for the war, the argument
goes.

Tell that to Afrim, Argjend, Rita, Arlind, Diona and Rina.

All of Kosovo is a crime scene, just as Chechnya is being
turned into a crime scene today. Much of it is a burial ground,
pocked by hundreds of ``small'' mass graves, many with 5 or 10
bodies, but some with 100 or more.

Does the want of a few truly horrific common graves make such
a difference?

For the number crunchers out there, here are the only statistics
that matter, from a report to the Security Council on
Wednesday by the U.N.'s chief prosecutor in Yugoslavia, Carla
Del Ponte:

To date, the U.N. has probed 195 grave sites where 4,266 bodies
had been reported buried. The investigators dug out 2,108 full
corpses, half the number they expected to find. That's about 10
per grave. Partial corpses, and there were many, weren't
counted.

In all, the Kosovars have reported a total of 11,334 deaths.
There are 324 sites left to investigate, and more are being
discovered.

If the U.N. teams continue to locate bodies at roughly the rate
they have been, they'll have identified 6,000 or so when their
work is done, not counting incomplete bodies.

So where are the rest?

Burned. Buried in unmarked graves. Dissolved in acid.
Ploughed deep into fields. The Serbs have some experience
getting rid of corpses.

``There were also a significant number of sites where the
precise number of bodies cannot be counted,'' Del Ponte told
the Security Council.

``In these places steps were taken to hide the evidence. Many
bodies have been burned. The figures themselves may
therefore not tell the whole story and we would not expect the
forensic evidence in isolation to produce a definitive total.''

This does not sound like pimping for NATO. It sounds like a
tough-minded Swiss prosecutor, calling it as she sees it.

Her job is not to compile a census of death. It is to bring the
killers to justice.

Whether 11,000 Kosovars were murdered, or 6,000, or 2,108, the
Milosevic government did its best to ``cleanse'' Kosovo of 2
million Albanian Muslims last March by launching a
premeditated and furious campaign of terror, murder, rape,
arson and plunder that devastated the region and drove 1.4
million from their homes.

The Milosevic regime already had killed 2,500 in the year before,
and tens of thousands in Bosnia before that. Its capacity for
crimes against humanity was notorious.

That NATO was braced for a much higher death toll and
stiffened its spine accordingly, was understandable. That it may
have been only partly right, is excusable.

That NATO should be accused of painting the Milosevic
regime in too-dark colours, is risible.

U.S. Defence Secretary William Cohen in particular has caught
flak for his comment on May 16 that ``100,000 military-aged men
missing ... may have been murdered.'' But it's a bum rap. They
were missing. They might have been murdered. Many may have
been. And Cohen went on to specify that at that point there
were just 4,600 reports of killings.

But for most of the war NATO stuck to a relatively conservative
guesstimate of 10,000 dead that still looks credible in the light of
Del Ponte's findings.

Like any war, the Kosovo conflict must be re-evaluated once
passions cool. There is much to criticize NATO for, not the
least of which was its reluctance to deploy ground troops.

Did some NATO politicians go overboard in calling Kosovo a
genocide, another Holocaust? Undoubtedly. Six million Jews
were murdered by the Nazis, not 6,000.

But Kosovo was undeniably a crime against humanity.

And that gave the United States, Canada and their allies every
right to intervene, though without the U.N.'s approval because
two Security Council members, Russia and China, blocked that
avenue for their own cynical reasons.

NATO drew the line at allowing Milosevic to wage war
unopposed against Kosovo's civilian population, and turning
yet another chunk of Europe into a no-go zone for any tribe but
his own.

Canadians couldn't stomach that, and rightly so.

If Kosovo is bereft of ``mass'' graves today, it is in part because
we said No to monstrous criminality.

Gordon Barthos' column appears on Fridays. His e-mail
address is gbartho at thestar.ca

---

http://news2.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_515000/515364.stm

Thursday, November 11, 1999 Published at 08:19 GMT
World: Europe

Kosovo doctor on trial in Serbia

Albanian women and children received medical care from Dr Brovina

An ethnic Albanian doctor goes on trial on Thursday in Serbia, accused
of assisting the Kosovo Liberation Army.
     The US has joined Serbian human rights activists and independent
lawyers in voicing fears that Flora Brovina, aged 50, will not get a
fair trial.
     Dr Brovina, a paediatrician and poet, provided medical treatment to
Albanian women and children who remained in the Kosovo capital,
Pristina, during the war.
     Serbian authorities say she gave food, clothing and medical
supplies to the Kosovo Liberation Army, and planned terrorist acts
against the state.
     Dr Brovina was one of thousands of people arrested in Kosovo after
the start of Nato's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on 24 March.
     She and hundreds of others were transferred to jails inside Serbia
two days before the Nato-led peacekeeping force entered the province.

Heavy pressure

US State Department spokesman James Rubin said: "As far as we can tell,
the only thing she has done is to provide paediatric and medical
services to women and children in Pristina during the conflict.
     "We want to express our concern over the apparent abuse of the
legal system in this case and others, and condemn Serbia's actions as a
continued demonstration of Serbia's disregard for international norms of
behaviour."
     Serbian human rights activists and independent lawyers say that
Yugoslav judges are under heavy pressure from the government, and that
Kosovo Albanians are often denied due process.
     Dr Brovina is being defended by a Serb lawyer, because the
authorities did not send the indictment to her Albanian attorney.
     The BBC correspondent in Belgrade, Jacky Rowland, says some 2,000
Kosovo Albanians are being held in Serbian jails, according to official
figures.
     But Kosovo-based human rights groups believe the true figure may be
much higher, she says.They claim an additional 5,000 are missing.
     James Rubin said Washington was especially concerned about dozens
of women and children among the thousands of people still being held in
Serbian prisons - particularly by a report of a four-month-old baby born
in prison.
     He added that prisoners who have been released complained of
beatings and shortages of food and medical care.
     Dr Brovina's son has said his mother has become partially paralysed
because of her treatment in prison.