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Hundreds of ethnic Albanians attend a mass
funeral ceremony in the village of Stutica,
Kosovo, Yugoslavia Sunday, Nov. 7, 1999.
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UNITED NATIONS -- Recently, a U.N. report came out on the extending war crimes in Kosovo committed in on ethnic Albanians. The report revealed that U.N. relief workers have exhumed the bodies of 2,108 people killed in the conflict.
Carla del Ponte, the U.N. chief prosecutor briefed the Security Council Wednesday on five months of digging and forensic investigation at 195 gravesites across Kosovo. Ponte went on to say that she wants to complete the search of the remaining 334 common graves next year.
After, Ponte said that the results should give an indication of the magnitude of killings, primarily of ethnic Albanians but also of Serbs, during NATO's 78-day bombing campaign.
The U.N. war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia, which del Ponte heads, has received reports from witnesses and intelligence sources that 11,334 people were buried in 529 common graves in Kosovo.
"Over the past five months, forensic teams from 14 countries examined 195 of the gravesites where 4,266 bodies were reported to have been buried. The teams exhumed just 2,108 bodies," Ponte said.
Del Ponte cautioned that the number of bodies exhumed doesn't necessarily reflect the number of actual victims because there was tampering at some graves, and bodies were burned or dismembered at "a significant number of sites."
Some officials say that the initial exhumations indicated the final death toll might be lower than NATO's estimate that Serbs killed 10,000 ethnic Albanians during the conflict.
At a recent news conference, Graham Blewitt, the deputy chief prosecutor of the UN said that most of those exhumed were ethnic Albanians killed by Serbs, but there were also a small number of graves containing Serb victims.
Del Ponte refused to speculate on final numbers or make any comparisons of the results so far with previous estimates of the number of victims, saying she was waiting for the exhumations to be completed.
Del Ponte stressed that the tribunal's primary task is to gather evidence relevant to criminal charges against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and other leaders and perpetrators of crimes against humanity - not to compile a census of the dead.
At a recent news conference before the Security Council assembly, del Ponte urged the NATO-led forces in Bosnia and Kosovo to be "more proactive" in searching for, and arresting, more than 30 fugitives indicted for war crimes.
She said some are in Serbia, and urged NATO forces "to pay attention on the border" because many were crossing into Republika Srbska, the Serb-controlled entity in Bosnia.
In order to do her job, the chief prosecutor said she needed strong support from the council, especially in getting Yugoslavia and Croatia to surrender those indicted by the tribunal.
Most members gave her strong backing.
But Russia's deputy U.N. ambassador, Gennadi Gatilov, insisted that nobody should be detained without the consent of the state and accused the tribunal of acting politically in indicting Milosevic and focusing on crimes against ethnic Albanians.
"I absolutely refute that assertion. It's not true," del Ponte said, noting that her office was investigating Muslims and members of the Kosovo Liberation Army as well as Serbs.
The tribunal has had difficulty in investigating the cases of Serb victims because its investigators can't go to Serbia, she said. "We hope to get there, and we hope indictments will be issued next year," she said.
Kosovo's Serb population, originally around 200,000, has been fleeing attacks by ethnic Albanians seeking revenge for the earlier Serb crackdown on separatist rebels. The Serb population in Kosovo today is thought to number only in the tens of thousands.
While no recent census figures are available, the ethnic Albanian population was nearly 2 million in Kosovo before many were temporarily pushed out by the Serbs this spring. Most are believed to have returned.
