Reply #114: Casualties in Yugoslavia...effect on Kosovo

[SaveElmer]

Human Rights Watch, an orgainzation I think most would agree is not in the pocket of NATO or the U.S., issued a critical report of US military estimates of civilian casualties in Kosovo. Their estimate was 500 killed.

http://www.hrw.org/press/2000/02/nato207.htm

About five hundred civilians died in ninety separate incidents as a result of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia last year, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.

The Human Rights Watch estimate of the number of incidents is far higher than what the U.S. Defense Department and other NATO governments have admitted. But the Human Rights Watch figures for civilian deaths is much lower than what the Yugoslav government has claimed.

"Once it made the decision to attack Yugoslavia, NATO should have done more to protect civilians," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, an international monitoring organization based in New York. "All too often, NATO targeting subjected the civilian population to unacceptable risks." Roth urged NATO governments to make a serious evaluation of the war's effects on civilians.

They also issued a report of the effect on the country after the operation

http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/kosovo98/news.htm

Kosovo has undergone profound changes in the seven weeks since the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) entered the province and Yugoslav Army and Serbian police units withdrew. After a decade of repression that culminated in a three-month killing spree by the Yugoslav army and Serbian security forces and the expulsion and displacement of more than half of the ethnic Albanian population, most of Kosovo's Albanians are finally able to live without fear of discrimination or violence by the Serbian state.

Even if you accept Human Rights Watch's figures, and grant the U.S. military was not as precise as they should have been...to suggest that doing nothing as an alternative was acceptable is simply not credible. It is clear there was massive murder, rape, and forced displacement going on and something had to be done. And to suggest that this operation actually contributed to the genocide is likewise not true.