The New York Times

Friday, December 10, 1999

State Dept. Now Estimates Serbian Drive Killed 10,000

By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON -- The State Department estimated Thursday that 10,000 Kosovar Albanians were killed this year in the Serbian campaign to force out the Albanian population, a figure nearly five times larger than the number of bodies unearthed from mass graves.

In a report on the toll from the so-called ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, the department also said that 1.5 million Albanians had been expelled from their houses and that more than 2,000 Albanians were in custody in Serbian detention camps.

The estimate of deaths is broadly in line with those provided by newspaper accounts and in recent months by human rights groups and the United Nations, as well as by NATO, which directed the air strikes that led to a pullout of Serbian forces from Kosovo in June.

Some Balkan experts and others sympathetic to the Serbs have described the estimates as exaggerated, noting that investigators of war crimes had exhumed 2,100 bodies. Whatever the final toll, it seems sure to be far lower than some estimates offered during the conflict.

State Department officials defended their estimate Thursday by noting that Serbian forces were known to have burned or otherwise destroyed the bodies of many Albanian victims and that many grave sites would not be investigated until spring, when the ground thaws. Investigators said they believed that they would uncover thousands of additional bodies.

"The efforts by Serbian forces to destroy evidence of their crimes in Kosovo in 1999 came as no surprise to us," the chief war crimes investigator in the department, David J. Scheffer, said. Scheffer criticized those he calls "revisionists," who have suggested that the toll was much lower.

"In many cases," he said at a news conference where the report was released, "the victims' bodies were burned near where they died. In other cases, the burning, destruction or reburial occurred on a wholesale scale, with bodies being shipped by truck. All this tells us that we will never know the full extent of Kosovar Albanian victims of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo."

The report said the estimate of 10,000 deaths was based on recent reports from war crimes investigators, interviews with refugees and evidence from intelligence agencies.

Last month, prosecutors for the international war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague said that 2,108 bodies had been found at 195 sites in Kosovo before work stopped for the winter.

The State Department report noted that International Committee for the Red Cross had provided the figure of the 2,000 Albanians in detention camps. Many detained Albanians are widely believed to be former prisoners in Serbian-run jails in Kosovo.

The report offered a catalog of other atrocities carried out by Serbs against the majority Albanian population in Kosovo, including what it described as the systematic rape of Albanian women by Serbian troops, paramilitaries and police.

"Death represents only one facet of Serbian actions in Kosovo," the report said, adding that rape was probably much more common than has been reported "because of the stigma attached to the survivors in traditional Kosovar Albanian society."

In the aftermath of Serbia's military pullout from Kosovo, the report found, 200 to 400 Kosovo Serbs had been killed, apparently in retaliation, and thousands of Serbian houses had been looted, burned or destroyed. The report cited the Serbian Orthodox Church as reporting that more than 40 churches and monasteries had been destroyed or damaged.

On his triumphant visit to Kosovo last month, President Clinton implored the majority Albanians to forgive the Serbs who remained and to end revenge attacks. The remarks were received with little enthusiasm by many Albanian leaders, who said it would be difficult for Serbs to remain in Kosovo.

Last week, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported that revenge-inspired violence against Kosovar Serbs had grown worse since the NATO troops arrived. The report made clear that the attacks often occurred under the nose of the troops, a contention that NATO has denied.