The
Real Story of
a
massacre in Kosovo
On
18 August 2003, BBC1 broadcast a programme in its Real Story series. This one was an account of a massacre of
Kosovo Albanians in Podujevo and of the return of four survivors from Britain
to Serbia to give evidence
at the trial of a member of a Serb paramilitary unit accused of the massacre.
14 members of
the Bogujevci and
Duriqi Albanian families, 7 women and 7 children were killed in the
massacre. 5 other children were left
for dead, but survived and came to Manchester for medical treatment, and were
eventually granted asylum in Britain.
The men of the families were not present when the massacre happened.
In the programme, the events leading
up to the massacre, and others in which thousands of Kosovo Albanians were
killed, were described as follows:
“Saranda [one of the survivors] was
born in the town of Podujevo in Kosovo.
It’s just a few miles from the border with neighbouring Serbia. Her family are Kosovo Albanians, and had
lived there happily for generations.
“All this changed in 1999 when
Serbian forces entered Kosovo. They
killed an estimated eight and a half thousand Kosovo Albanians in a campaign of
ethnic cleansing. Virtually the entire
population fled in terror.”
This was followed by an unidentified
person saying:
“We now estimate that the number of people who have
fled from their homes in Kosovo has gone over the half million mark”
The programme did not give the
precise date on which the massacre in Podujevo took place, but the accompanying
story
on the BBC website gives it as 28 March 1999.
Readers may recall that, 4 days earlier on 24 March 1999, the NATO
bombing campaign against Yugoslavia began.
The NATO bombing triggered the killing by Serb forces of Albanian
civilians at Podujevo and other places in Kosovo.
Whether eight and a half thousand were
killed is open to question, but there is no doubt that substantial numbers were
killed – and there’s equally no doubt that the NATO bombing campaign triggered
the killings. Without it, the Bogujevci and Duriqi families wouldn’t
have been massacred in Podujevo on 28 March 1999, and the BBC wouldn’t have had
a story to tell.
Yet neither the Real Story programme, nor the accompanying
story on the BBC website, mentions the NATO bombing campaign at all.
It is difficult to believe that
this was not deliberate. The programme
showed, but did not identify, NATO spokesman, Jamie Shea, giving a NATO
estimate of the numbers who had fled their homes (see above). But the programme failed to mention that at
the time NATO was raining bombs down on Yugoslavia including Kosovo. NATO did get a mention later in the
programme, ironically as Good Samaritans, who rescued the survivors of the
Podujevo massacre from a Pristina hospital and arranged for them to go to a
Manchester hospital for treatment.
Apart from omitting to mention the NATO bombing campaign,
the description of events prior to the massacres shows a remarkable lack of
knowledge of the basic political geography of Yugoslavia in 1999. Kosovo was then (and formally still is) a
part of Serbia, which together with Montenegro then made up Yugoslavia, now
renamed Serbia & Montenegro.
However, the author of the script was clearly under the
mistaken impression that Kosovo was a separate political entity from Serbia in
1999, and that it was invaded by Serb forces in 1999. In reality, Serb forces didn’t have to “enter Kosovo” in 1999 – they
were there all along because Kosovo was part of Serbia. And in the year or so before the NATO
intervention, a fierce battle was going on in Kosovo between them and the
Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
The KLA and its fight for independence from Yugoslavia wasn’t mentioned
in the programme either.
From the safety of 15,000 feet, NATO triggered a
humanitarian catastrophe for Kosovo Albanians on 24 March 1999. Thousands who were alive when the bombing
started were killed. Hundreds of
thousands more, who were in their homes when the bombing started, were expelled
from their homes or fled because they feared for their lives.
Nevertheless, the NATO
intervention in Yugoslavia is regarded as a highly successful humanitarian
intervention, in which displaced Albanians were returned to their homes (and
Yugoslavia was forced to withdraw its forces from Kosovo). It is rarely mentioned that the people who
were returned were mostly in their homes before the bombing started.
Unfortunately, the Albanians who
were alive on 24 March 1999, and who were massacred by Serb forces shortly
after, couldn’t be brought to life again, and neither could the thousands of
other people killed in the war. Nor
have the Serbs, and the other minorities, who fled from their homes in Kosovo
after the Yugoslav withdrawal, been returned to their homes in Kosovo – perhaps
as many as 200,000 of these people who were in their homes on 24 March 1999 are
still not back in their homes, and are unlikely ever to be back.
Humanitarian intervention?
But,
the defenders of the NATO intervention will say, the Serbs led by Slobodan
Milosevic were engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Albanians in
Kosovo. For example, 45 Albanian
civilians were shot in cold blood by Serb forces at Racak on January 1999. And NATO intervened to save the Albanians
from further ethnic cleansing and butchery.
The
truth is that for a few years prior to 1999 the KLA had been waging a guerrilla
campaign for independence for Kosovo.
It greatly intensified its campaign in early 1998, and the spring and
summer of 1998 saw a concerted offensive by Yugoslav forces in response, which
drove the KLA out of much of Kosovo. In
the process, military personnel on both sides were killed, and so were Serb and
Albanian civilians, including Albanian civilians who were deemed by the KLA to
be collaborators.
One
would never guess that from the reporting at the time or since that, prior to
the NATO intervention, the KLA were responsible for roughly the same number of
deaths in Kosovo as Yugoslav forces. We
have that on no less an authority than the then UK Secretary of State for
Defence, George Robertson (who later became NATO Secretary General). Giving evidence
to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee on the day the bombing
started, he said:
“Up
until Racak earlier this year [on 15 January] the KLA were responsible for more
deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities had been.”
The numbers killed on either side
were small compared with what happened after the NATO intervention, probably
around 300 on either side.
What actually happened at Racak
has always been disputed. On 21 January
1999, Le Monde
published an article, entitled Were the
Racak dead really massacred in cold blood?, by French journalist Christophe Chatelot. See here
for an English translation. Chatelot
himself was in Racak on the afternoon of 15 January after the Yugoslav forces
had withdrawn from the village and observed nothing out of the ordinary. It is almost impossible to reconcile his
account with the orthodox view that there was a massacre of Albanian civilians
by Yugoslav forces in Racak on 15 January 1999.
Nevertheless, Racak was seized on
by the West to justify intervention – which triggered a humanitarian
catastrophe for Kosovo Albanians.
Labour & Trade Union Review
September 2003