The New York Times

Monday, June 21, 1999

The Horrors of Kosovo

During the NATO bombing of Kosovo, when Serbia controlled reporters' access to the region, journalists could document atrocities only by interviewing the ethnic Albanians who had fled to refugee camps.

News reports of their accounts usually carried the words "could not be independently confirmed." They can be now. Journalists have fanned out through Kosovo, and the confirmation is horrifying.

Ethnic Albanians offer reporters crumpled lists of the dead and lead them to burned mosques, the remains of bodies and fresh graves dug by friends and family to bury the victims.

There were no battles on these killing fields. The victims were civilians -- largely men of fighting age, but also young children, women, old people and especially those who ran out of Deutsche marks for the marauding Serbian paramilitaries or special police. The British Government now says that at least 10,000 ethnic Albanian civilians were killed in hundreds of massacres.

An American official called this number "conservative in the extreme."

The most urgent task for NATO is to prevent more killings.

A significant number of ethnic Albanians arrested for political activity in Kosovo before the war have been transferred to prisons outside the province, where they are in peril. Their safe return should be a high priority.

The dimension of the horrors should strengthen the West's resolve to allow only a token scattering of Serbian security forces into Kosovo, and to keep Russian peacekeepers from acting as Serb surrogates.

It is now impossible to contemplate softening the extended self-rule that the peace deal promises Kosovo, even after NATO leaves.

The scale of brutality will complicate reconstruction.

Thousands of families lost not only all their possessions, but also their breadwinners. Survivors, especially children, need psychological help. NATO forces will also have to pay special attention to demilitarizing the Albanian guerrillas quickly and protecting Serbian civilians who remain, as revenge will continue to be a strong temptation.

Trials of Serbian officials, paramilitary and police commanders, and particularly brutal troops are crucial -- for the sake of justice and historical accuracy, and also to head off revenge killings. Preparations for such trials went badly in Bosnia. NATO forces there did not make helping investigators a priority. Many of the crimes were old. Investigators were stymied by Serbian and Bosnian Serb authorities, who controlled the important sites.

The war-crimes tribunal should have an easier time in Kosovo. NATO has moved quickly to secure crime sites.

Providing logistical help for investigators and land-mine clearance are also high on the peacekeepers' list.

The atrocities are fresh and Serbian forces will not be around to get in the way, though they were able to dig up some graves and destroy some evidence.

Still, the investigation must move as fast as possible to prevent evidence tampering. NATO should be ready to arrest people when there is convincing evidence they committed serious atrocities -- rather than let them escape from Kosovo -- even before they are formally indicted. Governments should be generous in lending staff to the tribunal and giving money. Washington has pledged $9 million, an important start.

It would be useful for the tribunal to encourage independent journalists from Serbia and Russia to report on the new and powerful evidence of atrocities.

Virtually all Russia's coverage of crimes against Albanian Kosovars came on its independent NTV, and that was very limited. Serbia's tiny independent media were shut down and persecuted during the war, and their harassment has only continued.

The West should help these groups resume broadcasting out of neighboring Montenegro.

Even these brave journalists, however, have shown little interest in what their fellow Serbs were doing to Albanian Kosovars during the war.

What is perhaps most sobering about the scale of the atrocities is that even as their countrymen were killing many thousands of innocents, the vast majority of Serbs chose not to notice, or not to care.