Dodgy bodycounts
From Melanie McDonagh Sir: Is it on the basis of their visit to Bel- grade during the Nato campaign that John Laughland and Mark Almond claim such remarkable knowledge of the number of Albanians killed in Kosovo (Letters, 11 December)? Since they were there, accord- ing to their interview with the Belgrade paper Politika, to show solidarity with the Serbian people, it does seem that their views on the ethnic cleansing were established before either of them went to the trouble of ascertaining the facts. Mark Almond sug- gests that the presence of substantial num- bers of young Albanian men in the towns of Kosovo is proof that mass killing did not take place. In a population estimated at 200,000 people, the absence of 10,000 of them might not be immediately obvious.
I, too, have visited Kosovo since June, and what struck me was the slowness with which the International War Crimes Tri- bunal was proceeding with its work. It was treating each grave site as a scene-of-crime investigation, and this thoroughness, though commendable, meant that there were many human remains and graves which were not investigated. However, I can vividly recall interviewing one young man in Klina who bore bullet wounds in his legs and shoulder, which happened, he said, when he was shot with other Albanians who were removed from a convoy by Serbian militia. There were, according to him, up to 100 men in the group, and they were shot in batches of ten; he was covered by other bodies, and left for dead. The corpses of the other men had not been found at the time I was in Kosovo: am I therefore to assume that the young man was lying, that his wounds were self-inflicted, or — to take up one of the more extraordinary sugges- tions of John Laughland — that the graves were tampered with, but not by the Serbs?
Mark Almond knows very well how the Serbian irregulars and army worked in Bosnia, judging by his excellent book Europe's Backyard War, but seems unable to make the connection between that war and the cleansing in Kosovo. The title of his chapter on Kosovo, 'Myth in the service of aggression', is curiously applicable to his own letter.
Melanie McDonagh
Aynhoe Road, London W14
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