When we talk war crimes in Kosovo, one event stands out, the Racak Massacre, which took place on January 15, 1999. It was discussed at length in the media, in human rights reports, and in presidential statements. There had been previously massacres of similar scale, such as the killing in Klecka and in Glodjane of 22 and respectively 34 opponents of the KLA. Very few people heard of such killings because they did not benefit from the attention of President Clinton, Prime Minister Blair, or Secretary of State Albright. From our perusal of the archives of the newspaper of record, The New York Times, it would appear that western politicians do not comment on the killing of non-Albanians: there was not a word about Klecka or Glodjane from any person of importance in the west and not one first-page article or detailed discussion, in any American daily paper.
A check of the archives of The New York Times gives us 5 stories about Glodjane, 4 about Klecka, and 46 about Racak. Some of the Racak stories were lengthy and detailed investigations. The five articles about Glodjane were the following:
1. One long article that appeared on November 22, 1998,
entitled From Brooklyn to Kosovo, with Love and Ak-47's in which mention
is made of a Serb attack on Glodjane.
2. An April 2, 1999 article which included the following paragraph
The Kosovo Liberation Army... conducted paramilitary tribunals and was believed to be responsible for the abduction of civilians and police officers, he [Jiri Dienstbier of the United Nations Human Rights Commission] said. In two locations, Klecka and Glodjane, there were more than 40 bodies that Serb authorities said were Serb civilians who had been kidnapped and killed by the K.L.A. soldiers.
3. A December 19, 1998 piece that says that "Serbian
police killed two suspected rebels and arrested 34 in a crackdown in Glodjane,
near Pec."
4. An October 4, 1998 article which mentions that "early last month, the
Serbian authorities discovered 34 bodies in a canal at Glodjane in central
Kosovo and said they were mostly Serbian civilians killed by the Kosovo
Liberation Army. International diplomatic monitors reported that the claims by
the Serbian authorities seemed credible."
5. An article, which appeared on October 12, 1998, in which an Eastern Orthodox
priest is quoted as saying:
"God is on the side of the suffering people, the people who were killed in Gornje Obrinje and in Glodjane," he [the Rev. Sava Janjic] said, referring to a site where Albanians were massacred by Serbs and a site where 34 Serbs were massacred by Albanians. "And that's my side too."
The four articles on Klecka were the following:
1. The already mentioned April 2, 1999 article.
2. The following brief article in the August 30, 1998 issue:
The Serbian Interior Ministry said today that a mass grave has been found in the southern province of Kosovo containing the bodies of 22 Serbs killed by ethnic Albanian separatists last month. Several dozen ethnic Albanian rebels were killed during the Serbian police operation that led to the discovery of the site, according to a ministry communique carried by the Tanyug news agency. The ministry said the separatists had confessed to shooting 22 Serbs and burning their bodies there. It described the grave as a virtual crematorium. The ministry said the site was uncovered on Thursday near Klecka, 20 miles south of Pristina, during a Serbian police operation in which two rebels were captured. The two, Lup Mazreku and Bekim Mazreku, told the police that 22 Serbs had been killed in the area in July, the ministry said.
3. The following article which appeared on August 31, 1998:
Ethnic Albanian rebels denied today that they had killed any Serbian civilians in southwest Kosovo province.
The Serbian authorities reported on Saturday that they had found the bodies of 22 Serb civilians burned in a mass grave after they had been killed by rebels in Klecka, 20 miles south of here.
A rebel spokesman, Bardul Mahmuti, told the Albanian-language Koha Ditore that his guerrilla group "has not killed a single civilian." He dismissed the report as propaganda aimed at distracting attention from crimes committed against ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo.
4. An October 4, 1988 article on the finding of the remains of four disappeared Yugoslav opponents of the KLA near Klina , which included the following paragraph about Klecka:
There was more doubt, the monitors said, about another site discovered at Klecka in Kosovo in late August where the Serbian authorities said 22 Serbs had been burned by the separatists in a lime kiln. The monitors said they were not sure the kiln could reach the high temperatures required to burn the bodies.
Why would the monitors show such contempt for the intelligence of the public? How could they think that we do not remember that cremation in India takes place in the open? Clearly no high temperature kiln is needed, all you need is enough wood.
From The New York Times we see that the killing of 56 opponents of the KLA deserved 240 words for the prosecution and 140 for the defense. Compare the frivolous nature of the doubts raised about Klecka with the overlooking of astounding discrepancies in the official NATO/OSCE version of the Racak story. No mention is made of the evidence that would lead any fair and reasonable person to believe that the Racak massacre was based on the moving of battle dead into one location to make it appear like an execution. Compare the scanty attention paid by U.S. media to terror against the Serbs with the page one attention to the Racak killings. The only possible conclusion is that some war crimes are serious, while others are not so serious.
Compare the choice of words used in describing very similar events. The Serbs may go on a "killing spree" at any time, while the KLA has "paramilitary tribunals": thus the disappeared Serbs and Romany are by implication criminals found guilty by a frontier-type justice system, primitive but just, while disappeared Albanians are simply murder victims. OSCE's view as quoted in the October 4, 1998 issue of the NYT that "the claims by the Serbian authorities seemed credible", must be balanced with doubt over the Klecka events. Why? We know that a couple of hundred Serbs, Romany, and dissident Albanians have been disappeared. So why should it be surprising that the Serbs would find 37 and then 22 sets of human remains? The motive for not accepting Klecka as a massacre site is that the western propaganda machine immediately realized the shock value of the word crematorium. We do not want "our boys" to be associated to a method of body disposal that was used by the Nazis. The other factor is that Klecka, according to the opposition weekly Vreme of Belgrade, was a military base more than a village; it also had a prison. When a prison is found empty and a nearby crematorium is found full, embarrassing connections are made. The crematorium would be directly tied to the KLA if acknowledged at all, thus the story must be challenged, denied, or preferably ignored. The international monitors had made the mistake of raising precise but frivolous doubts, while the Human Rights Watch 1999 report very wisely offers us undefined and thus much more persuasive arguments for doubt: "The manner in which the allegations [in Klecka] were made, however, raised serious questions".
The other essential factor in the creation of an approved reality for western public opinion, is the elimination of the historical background of the conflict: the genocide to which Serbs, Jews, and Romany were subjected in Kosovo during WWII, the Yugoslav decision to let bygones be bygones, and the terror against Kosovar minorities which started once again in the 1960's. Until the 1980's the persecution of the Serbs was approved for discussion in the U.S. media, and reporters could afford to be neutral and report in an even-handed manner. However, since 1991, when the reverse canonization of Yugoslavia became official, its enemies have been automatically beatified. The few reporters who are aware of the history of the area, will admit that it does not pay to send "inappropriate" reports: they will not get published.
Let me repeat once again: I do not deny Serb atrocities, I just say that they took place after the NATO countries brought war to the land. There is no doubt that before the war Serb cops got as nasty as NY or LA cops often get. Did the Serbs ever engage in the U.S. correctional system practice of isolating political prisoners from each other, mixing together members of opposing social or ethnic groups in order to cause more or less deadly fights, physically and psychologically humiliating prisoners, or arranging for disobedient prisoners to be assaulted or raped by other convicts? I do not know whether the Serbs did that, but I do admit that before the war, Serb anti-terrorist units would get as nasty with their prisoners as Israeli anti-terrorist units are commonly recognized to get with their own prisoners. A reasonable policy would have been for NATO to order police departments and correctional institutions in the U.S. get more civilized. After we had reformed, NATO should have gone after our allies, and made them see the light. When that was accomplished it would have been time to go out and try to convert the heathens. Charity starts at home, they say. Instead we decided to start with the Serb heathens. We wanted them to be as polite and law-abiding as British bobbies. The Serbs did not comply, and in a fit of rage we destroyed their country, including the land of our Albanian Kosovar allies. At that point, under attack by the world's mightiest alliance, some of the Serbs of Kosovo, after thirty years of living under Albanian terror, began reprisals, and did engage in murderous ethnic cleansing . Yet, it is outrageous to pretend that we did not expect it. It was NATO policy to destroy command and control in Yugoslavia. Thus attacks against Albanians by local Serb militias were bound to happen, were expected to happen, and were hoped for, if not actually planned: they were essential to give legitimacy to NATO's war.
Most armies massacre prisoners. During and after WWII, the Soviet Union, the United States, and France--but not Great Britain-- massacred their prisoners by the millions, through denial of food and shelter. The US and France waited for the German surrender before closing their POW camps in Germany to the Red Cross and turning them into death camps-- while the Soviets and the Germans mutually massacred each other's prisoners from the very start (See Other Losses, by James Bacque). It need not be mentioned that only those who lost the war were charged with war crimes. France carried out large scale massacres in Vietnam and Algeria, just as the United States did in Vietnam. One hundred men of Company A in the hamlet of Mylai massacred in excess of five hundred women, children, and babies. They made the mistake of taking color pictures that show the mothers with babes in arms before and after the special treatment. The pictures were dutifully filed at regimental headquarters, copies were brought stateside, and some day got into the wrong hands. The event had been observed, from a helicopter, by higher-ups, but the decision was made to have a 21 year-old lieutenant take the fall. He got life, and was pardoned after three or four years of restriction to quarters.
If they had killed the inhabitants of Mylai with napalm, shelling, or bombing, everything would have been hunky-dory, this after all was a free-fire zone, in which they had the right to kill anything that moved. Instead they used small arms. Mistake! The moral of the story is that if you decide to wipe out a village you do not use small caliber guns: someone might talk and there is a small chance that you might get in trouble. You use bombs or rockets, which are clean, efficient, and moral. You get no blood on your boots and should any non-combatants have been, by any chance, in that car, that bus, that train, that refugee convoy, that house, that village, or that city you hit, you deeply regret it. Atrocities are part of war, with the exception of the wars waged by the good and decent folks of wealthy countries, who do their killing from the air.
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