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Pilger exposed

Monday, 17th December 2007

John Pilger is a standing affront to decent journalism, espousing some pretty vile causes under the guise of exposing the truth. Marko Attila Hoare, an expert on the Balkans, has a compelling account of how he exposed Pilger's lies at a meeting at Kingston University, which you can read here.

Rather than attempt to defend his record, Pilger tried to play the numbers game with me (people like Pilger are under the impression that if the total number of victims in a campaign of mass murder turns out to be lower than some of the earlier estimates, it vindicates the deniers and the apologists). He asked me what I thought the death-toll in the Kosovo conflict was. I replied that it was about ten thousand. He then countered that no, the number of bodies found, including both civilians and combatants and members of all ethnic groups was ‘only’ four thousand, according to members of forensic teams working in Kosovo. This, it should be pointed out, is something of an upward revision for Pilger, who as recently as a year and a half ago was claiming that the total death-toll in Kosovo was ‘only’ 2,788, and that therefore the justification for the NATO operation against Serbia was an ‘invention’.
I reminded Pilger that the Milosevic regime had systematically concealed and destroyed the bodies of its Kosovo Albanian victims; that more mass graves were being discovered as time went by; and that the body count was therefore likely to rise. He did not appear to have a counter-argument; his only response was to tell me ‘you clearly have an agenda’ and ‘you shouldn’t be teaching here’. Which, given that I was teaching at the invitation of, and in conjunction with, senior members of the same faculty and university as those who had invited him to speak, was something of an insult to his hosts. He then tried to shift the discussion away from the topic of the body-count (that he had himself introduced) and to claim that ‘the NATO war was to destroy the state called Yugoslavia’. I told him that was ‘nonsense’, and he decided that this was the time to move on to the next question. After the meeting and in the following days, several Kingston students and staff members approached me to tell me how shocked they had been at his reaction to my question and his inability to address it.
Unknown to either myself or Pilger, a forensic expert who had worked on-site in Kosovo examining the bodies was also present in the audience. After the meeting, she approached him, told him who she was, challenged his version of events and asked him to tell her who the alleged forensic experts he had cited were, because they were probably people she knew personally. Pilger’s response was ‘I have to go now’. Although when I passed him in the entrance to the auditorium, he was talking to someone else and did not appear in any great hurry to leave.
As I noted above, deniers such as Pilger are under the impression that if they can ‘win’ the numbers game - if the death-toll in Kosovo turns out ‘only’ to have been four thousand rather than ten thousand, for example - then they believe it will prove their case that genocide did not occur, the assumption presumably being that four thousand deaths are ‘too small’ to count as genocide.

Do read the whole thing. It's important that Pilger and his ilk are exposed for what they really are: peddlers of fiction and defenders of murderers.

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Lee Jakeman

December 17th, 2007 11:41pm

I took John Pilger to task last year when I wrote this letter to the New Statesman in response to some drivel he'd written: "The quotation that John Pilger attributes to David Ben-Gurion (Columns, 21 August) - "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population" - is actually from Israel Koenig, a former interior ministry official. His words were roundly rejected and condemned within Israel itself. The quotation that Pilger then attributes to Ariel Sharon - "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion . . . that there can be no Zionism, colonisation or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands" - is equally notorious, and was spoken by Yoram Bar Porath. It, too, was roundly condemned within Israel. This is like taking something said by a member of the National Front or the British National Party and attributing it to Margaret Thatcher." Needless to say, Pilger did not reply, so I can only assume that he had no answer when confronted with real facts. To the credit of the New Statesman, my letter was published.

PJD

December 18th, 2007 10:14am

How many bodies were found in the quarry?

JM

December 18th, 2007 12:19pm

Your link to allegedly new bodies "being discovered" went to a news story in which the content said it was only "believed" there would be bodies there. But it turned out there were no bodies were discovered at that site whatsoever. Plus the total count is including all the missing which means the count cannot get higher even if they turn up dead (and some missing have been discovered to be alive and well). And the dead and missing figure covers around 3 years from 1998 until early 2001. That would include the Serbs and Roma kidnapped and killed while Kosovo was under NATO and UN control. There were also Albanians killed by the KLA who were deemed collaborators and Kosovo Albanians killed by NATO bombs (a few hundred: Kosovo convoy bombing, Kosovo encampments Kosovo bus bombing, bombing in neighborhoods, cluster bombs in Pristina, etc.). It was a low level war sparked by the separatist KLA and it intensified during the NATO bombing, then there was an aftermath of Albanians having a free hand to murder non-Albanians. Still it's far smaller than the toll of a few months of the Iraq war.

Branka

December 18th, 2007 3:17pm

By November 1999 there were 670 bodies exhumed in Kosovo see http://www.agitprop.org.au/stopnato/1999110904.php One must remember that NATO was in charge in Kosovo then. Since then up to now NATO and UNMIK have had ample time to give us a definitive number. Why do they keep quite? Could it be that the real number would be terribly embarrasing and show that they destroyed a country on a falsehood. It was the first but hardly the only time.

Andy Wilcoxson

December 19th, 2007 8:46pm

As far as calculating the Kosovo war's death toll is concerned, it doesn't matter if victims' bodies were hidden or destroyed since victims are counted as missing persons when their remains can not be located. In Kosovo the Hague War Crimes Tribunal exhumed a total of 2,788 bodies. In addition to that total the ICRC reported that an additional 3,368 people were still missing from the 1999 war when the Tribunal wrapped-up exhumations in 2000. As we speak, the Humanitarian Law Center is undertaking a process to find the exact number of persons who died or went missing in Kosovo between 1998 and 2000. According the HLC's data 9,702 persons died or went missing in Kosovo between 1998 and 2000. Of that total: 4,903 were Albanians, 2,322 were Serbs, and the rest were from other ethnic groups or else their ethnicity is unknown. Does the death of 4,903 Albanians and 2,322 Serbs point to a campaign of Serbian "mass murder" in Kosovo? I don't think it does. Albanians out number Serbs by a 9 to 1 ratio in Kosovo, but Serbs comprise 24% of the victims. If anything the Serbs suffered a disproportionately large number of killings and abductions in Kosovo. The Kosovo numbers are strikingly similar to the numbers of Palestinians (about 4,000) and Israelis (about 1,000) to die in the latest intifada. I don't think any rational person would accuse Israel of genocide, nor do I think that Serbia should be the target of such an absurd accusation. During the NATO campaign against Serbia we were told by the US State Dept. that "genocide was unfolding" and that 100,000 to 500,000 Kosovo-Albanians were missing and feared dead. The fact that the number of dead and missing Kosovo-Albanians is anywhere from 95% to 99% lower than we were led to believe is significant cause to question the integrity of those who insist that Kosovo was a genocide, rather than a simple war over territory between the Yugoslav Government and KLA secessionists.