salon.com > News Dec. 17, 1999
URL: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/12/17/kosovo

Arianna Huffington is dead wrong
In her unbelievable defense of the Serbs, the syndicated columnist condones
the massacre of innocent civilians by the Serbs.
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By Ian Williams
It is a touching image: Saint Arianna Huffington riding solo to the defense
of the Serbs of Kosovo. Unfortunately, the auto-icon painter uses false
colors. In a recent article she declared, "The Albanian atrocities are not
just going unacknowledged and unlamented -- they're going uninvestigated."
Except, of course, by every newspaper agency and radio or television station
that has reporters in the province. Indeed, two weeks ago the Organization
for Cooperation and Security in Europe supported the International War
Criminal Tribunal's reports of massive Serb killings and dispossessions of
Albanians, which is maybe why Huffington never bothered to wade through it
to get to the second half, which detailed the killings of civilians since
NATO occupied the province.
Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte reported to the U.N. Security Council on November
10 that her investigators had murder reports of 11,334 Albanian victims from
eyewitnesses and had identified 529 gravesites. They had investigated only
195 sites, from which they had exhumed 2,108 bodies out of the 4,256 that
their information had led them to expect there.
She explained that the Serbs had tampered with many grave sites, the digging
equipment leaving odd bits of bodies behind. At other sites, bodies were
blown up en masse or burned, making it impossible to count. For example, at
Izbica, there were clear satellite photographs from April of 142 individual
grave sites, but by the time NATO arrived, those graves had been emptied and
the bodies disposed of. There were visible tracks of heavy trucks and
equipment at the site.
Those who had supported Milsoevic during the war were quick to hail the
failure of investigators to find any bodies at the Trepca mines, for
example. But the prosecutor's spokesman, Paul Risley, asserts that
investigators still have credible eyewitness evidence that 700 bodies were
taken there. Only some shafts in the extensive complex have been
investigated, he says, and many of them go below the water table. If bodies
were burned in the numerous industrial facilities in the area and the ashes
disposed of underwater, they would be almost impossible to find. One dreads
the tasteless spectacle of such a census on the Nazi camps. How do you count
ashes?
Huffington's reference to these events at the time was about the array of
NATO mistakes. "What's next? A Kosovar in pear tree?" she asked while
complaining that NATO forces did not observe the Orthodox Easter as a truce.
The Serb pogromists didn't either, it seems.
Now, she claims, "More and more evidence surfaces that the estimates of
Albanian deaths offered during the war were greatly exaggerated." In fact,
NATO spokesman James Shea had an estimate of 4,600 at the height of the
campaign. At one point Defense Secretary William Cohen referred to 100,000
missing Albanian men who may have been murdered. They were missing, and the
Serbs were demonstrably killing people in their thousands, so was that
really too far a flight of fancy? How many Kosovars hanging from a pear tree
does it take to convince that a great evil was perpetrated?
Of course the revenge killings of civilians are wrong. It is interesting
that public figures like Veton Surroi, the Albanian editor of the
anti-Milosevic newspaper Koha Ditore, on the hit lists of both extremist
Albanians and Serbs, has denounced the killings, just he denounced the Serbs
before.
Which makes him a somewhat more saintly voice than Huffington, or the
Russians who are razing Chechnya while expressing concern about the Serbs in
Kosovo. Should Clinton take the blame for all this? Well, for those
accustomed to blaming the president for having policies to the right of
Huffington's Republican pals, it is difficult to admit that under pressure
from allies, he eventually did the right thing.
It is possible that Milosevic and his nationalist compatriots might have
gotten the message that his neighbors were no longer prepared to tolerate
his recidivist barbarism if Clinton had taken a firmer stand against
Milosevic from the beginning. And yes, the United States should pay up so
the United Nations and NATO can do its job -- and it should also be pushing
for speedy elections and a referendum, which many observers think would have
two results: Undermine the power of the Kosovo Liberation Army and spur a
massive drive for Kosovo's independence.
But Huffington, with her evident unorthodox ability to distinguish between
forgivable and unforgivable killings, is the last person anyone should
consult for advice.
salon.com | Dec. 17, 1999


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