Text of report by Kosovo Albanian television KohaVision TV on 13 October
[Announcer] United States Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns said in Prishtina [Pristina] today that negotiations on the Kosova [Kosovo] status should start within 30 days. The American diplomat Burns has asked the Albanian side to be unified in order to succeed in negotiations. Speaking of Kosova Serbs, Burns said it is their right to determine their position during negotiations.
[Reporter Shkelzen Coca] The status quo needs to be changed, US Under Secretary of State for Political Issues Nicholas Burns said during a press conference today. He said that the Albanian and Serb sides need to negotiate in order to find a common future without violence. The US diplomat Burns has asked the Kosova Albanian leaders to be united during the negotiations.
[Nicholas Burns in English with superimposed Albanian] We want to see that the Kosova negotiating team is a true team of unity, because only by acting together, through a joint strategy and one voice in relation to Serbia, it will be easier than [the 1999 negotiations] in Rambouillet [in France].
[Reporter] Burns said that Kosova Serbs have the right to decide themselves how they are going to be represented in the negotiations.
[Nicholas Burns] We can not speak of a Kosova team and a Serbia-Montenegro team since to date only the Albanian representatives have created their negotiating team, whereas Serbs need yet to decide whether they will participate in Prishtina, Belgrade or create their own team.
[Reporter] He [Burns] saw the beginning of negotiations on status as historic, while reaffirming that the United States has no vision on what the future Kosova status negotiations would bring, except that it would be a compromise. [Passage omitted: unrelated issue]
Source: KohaVision TV, Pristina, in Albanian 1700 gmt 13 Oct 05
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US and British officials told us that at least 100,000 were murdered in Kosovo. A year later, fewer than 3,000 bodies have been found - False figues from the Kosovo Liberation Army promulgated as fact - Brief Article
New Statesman, Sept 4, 2000 by JOHN Pilger
After more than a year, the silence of those who wrote and broadcast the propaganda for Nato's "humanitarian war" over Kosovo remains unbroken: they who answered the Prime Minister's call to join "a great moral crusade" against a regime that was "set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World War Two".
Something had to be done, they insisted. After all, by March last year, 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing, feared dead, according to the US State Department. In mid-May, the US defence secretary, William Cohen, said: "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing... They may have been murdered." Two weeks later, David Scheffer, the US ambassador at large for war crimes, increased the 100,000 figure to as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59". The British press took their cue. "Flight from genocide," said the Daily Mail. "Echoes of the Holocaust," chorused the Sun and the Mirror.
As the bombing dragged on, the facade began to crack; British television viewers were shown the ruins of trains and refugee convoys attacked by Nato aircraft, and their victims. "We have a public relations meltdown," said someone at Downing Street. On cue, the then Foreign Office minister, Geoffrey Hoon, announced that, "in more than 100 massacres", about 10,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed, adding that "the final toll may be much worse". Although inexplicably reduced from the original claims of 500,000 and 100,000, this was a substantial and utterly unsubstantiated figure.
By mid-June, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began subjecting the province to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate what was called the "largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history". Several weeks later, having found bodies but not a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one -- not one -- mass grave".
At grave site after grave site, the story was similar. Reports in the western media, sourced to local people but often traced back to the Kosovo Liberation Army (as with the figures quoted above), became unbelievable. One explanation was that the Serbs had come in the night and taken the bodies away. "Where," wrote Michael Parenti in his review of the investigation, "was the evidence of mass grave sites having been disinterred? Where were the new grave sites now presumably chock-full of bodies?"
Perhaps the most significant disclosure, confirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal last October, was that the Trepca lead and zinc mines contained no bodies. Trepca was central to the drama of the "genocide" investigation: the corpses of more than 1,000 murdered Albanians were presumed hidden there, many of them disposed of in vats of hydrochloric acid, according to Nato and American officials. According to the Mirror, there was evidence of the "mass dumping of executed corpses" and "Auschwitz-style furnaces". Not a single body was found: no teeth, no remains.
Last November, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its own investigation and dismissed "the mass-grave obsession". Instead of "the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active". The Journal concluded that "Nato stepped up its claims about Serb 'killing fields"' when it "saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by Nato's bombs". This propaganda, said the newspaper, could be traced back to the KLA; many of the most lurid and prominently published atrocity reports attributed to refugees and other sources were untrue. "The war in Kosovo was cruel, bitter, savage," said the paper. "Genocide it wasn't." Such honesty was rare.
Nato bombed, according to George Robertson, the then defence secretary, "to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe" of mass expulsion and killing. In December, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, whose monitors were in Kosovo until just before the bombing, released its report on the war. This received almost no publicity in Britain. It confirmed that most of the crimes against the Albanian population had taken place after the bombing began: that is, they were not a cause but a consequence of the Nato campaign.
Western gravediggers have found a total of 2,788 bodies, and not all of them war crimes victims. On 7 June this year, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) published a list of 3,368 missing persons whose names had been given to it by families from all communities in Kosovo, spanning January 1998 to mid-May this year. The ICRC says that a substantial number could be alive, among refugees scattered throughout Europe.
What is now beyond doubt is that the figures used by London and Washington, and by much of the media, were ludicrous inventions. The killings in Kosovo were despicable and tragic, but to equate them with genocide and the Holocaust is to mock the truth with profanity. With the exception of the Guardian, almost none of this has been reported in Britain. The Red Cross report was virtually ignored in this country. This is understandable; among the journalists who swallowed Nato's and their government's lies were the truly committed and triumphant, who wrote that "when the mass graves are opened, the opponents of this humanitarian war should apologise".
The defenceless population upon whom Nato's bombs rained down night after night, the 400 to 600 who died, blown up in crowded passenger trains and buses, in factories, television stations, libraries, old people's homes, schools and 18 hospitals, many cut to pieces by the RAF's thousands of "unaccounted for" cluster bombs which fragment into shrapnel, require an apology from the propagandists; because, as Nato's planners never tired of saying at their post-bombing seminars, without journalists "on board", they could never have pulled it off.
Robert Fisk, Britain's greatest war reporter, has called them sheep, gulled by professional manipulators. Take the bombing of the Belgrade TV headquarters and the murder of staff such as make-up ladies. Amnesty International, in a rare departure, called this "a deliberate attack on a civilian object, and as such constitutes a war crime". Shortly before the bombing, the Nato mouthpiece Jamie Shea had given a written assurance that the TV building would not be attacked.
With the media on board, Nato could go forth. At one "private preliminary review by Nato experts" of the bombing (reported in the Daily Telegraph), it was agreed that "any future operation by Nato is likelier to involve heavier, more ruthless attacks on civilian targets ..."
Having taken sides in what was a bitter but low-level civil war on the scale of Ireland in the 1970s, and having deliberately blocked a peaceful solution at the phoney Rambouillet "talks", Nato was able to finish off the west's "strategic concept" of destroying Yugoslavia - without recourse to the United Nations or international law. It was all based on a marriage of lies, thanks largely to those journalists who acted as the handmaidens of great and murderous power.
Kosovo is today, more than ever, a terror state, run by Mafia-style criminals with links to the KLA: the people who last year could call Robin Cook directly on their mobile phones.
More than 200,000 Serbs and Roma have since been driven out, with few headlines here. The Americans have built one of their biggest military bases in the world, Camp Bondsteel, which achieves a long-held strategic aim of Washington to straddle the Balkan transit routes. Stand by for their next humanitarian adventure.
COPYRIGHT 2000 New Statesman, Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
Nice try, cypy&paster!
Do you realize how stupid/annoying/irritating/useless you are?!
You don't have to post that crap here. That is not hard to find. There are articles like that everywhere. I mean be honest, you don't believe that crap yourself!
SCUM, PROVE 1 thing wrong from teh article. I dare u if u can i will stop coming to this site, u cant caue its ALL TRUE.
is this SERB propaganda as well???? this is from ur BBC LOVING SCUMBAG BROTHERS (bbc moslty owned by ur filthy arab brotehrs who bombed trade center and trained with the KLA and BinLaden) look at the pictures of thes faces, u look like u are from another planet:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1530781.stm
Kosovo assault 'was not genocide'
The court ruled there was no attempt to destroy the Albanian ethnic group
A United Nations court has ruled that Serbian troops did not carry out genocide against ethnic Albanians during Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of aggression in Kosovo from 1998 to 1999.
The controversial ruling by the UN-supervised Supreme Court in the Kosovan capital, Pristina, has angered Albanians, and some UN officials are reported to be preparing to challenge it.
The decision comes as authorities in Serbia begin the excavation of another mass grave believed to contain the bodies of around 50 Kosovar Albanians.
Four graves have already been investigated, revealing the remains of 340 victims.
UN 'unhappy'
The court, Kosovo's highest legal body, said there had been a "systematic campaign of terror, including murders, rapes, arsons and severe maltreatments".
Slobodan Milosevic has not yet been charged with genocide in Kosovo
Crimes against humanity and war crimes did take place, it said, but "the exactions committed by Milosevic's regime cannot be qualified as criminal acts of genocide, since their purpose was not the destruction of the Albanian ethnic group... but its forceful departure from Kosovo".
However the BBC's Paul Wood in Belgrade says that some UN legal officials are deeply unhappy and have begun a campaign to have the ruling overturned.
The decision was based on the 1948 Geneva convention which defines genocide as the intent "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such".
Milosevic debate
The court, which is comprised of two international judges and one Albanian, was ruling on the case of a Serb, Miroslav Vuckovic, convicted of genocide by a district court in Mitrovica.
Excavations of mass graves have changed public opinion
International officials have raised concerns about the treatment of Serbs by Kosovo's Albanian dominated judiciary.
Mr Vuckovic's conviction has now been overturned and he will face a retrial in Mitrovica.
The decision is likely to reopen the debate on whether Slobodan Milosevic should face genocide charges at The Hague, where he already stands accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The tribunal is currently preparing indictments of genocide against Mr Milosevic in connection with atrocities carried out in Bosnia and Croatia.
Mass grave
Serbian authorities in the western Serbian town of Bajina Basta began on Thursday to excavate a mass grave thought to contain the bodies of Kosovo Albanians.
They are believed to have been transported out of the province in an attempt by Mr Milosevic to cover up atrocities and possible war crimes carried out during his campaign of terror.
Serbian police believe around 800 victims of the conflict in Kosovo have been buried around Serbian territory.
The gruesome revelations of the bodies are credited with changing public opinion in Serbia and increasing acceptance that war crimes were carried out under the Milosevic regime.
This article talks about how Albanians were burried in mass graves inside Serbia. We can't prove you wrong on that one, it happened that's why NATO bombed Belgdad (Heheheh- Belgrade+ Bagdad).
Just FYI...
Support for the "No-Negotiations! Only Self-Determination" movement is growing exponentionally in Kosov@ and abroad.
It was the same movement that broke the "status-quo" between Kosova and Serbia with the student protests of October 1, 1997 that lead to the NATO intervention in 1999.
Lawyers know to be very assenine. Milosevic wasn't trying to destroy all K-Albanians, just clear out Kosova of them. See the difference? Coz I don't.
"US and British officials told us that at least 100,000 were murdered in Kosovo."
Sorry but that was a lie that has come out now. Don't give missleading information.
Check yourselves people at for example Ron Pauls presidential site.
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